Kinda hard to make some if nothing in our world are truly random.
Almost all processes in a computer are truly random. The number of electron crossing this particular trace per second? It's certainly not constant.
The trick in computers is keeping the RAM and the harddisk from going random too fast, such that a temporary illusion of determinism can be achieved. A crossing cosmic-ray particle will flip every last bit at random -- it'll just take sufficiently many centuries that you can imagine your bits to be stable zeros and ones.
Back in the eighties I generated truly random numbers on my old Atari by looking into the sound-chip with a port and cranking up the noise-generator on that chip. The noise-generator was just a fat resistor with a big amplifier attached to it. Quantum-randomness through thermodynamical means -- right there. Why do programmers today have trouble doing similar tings?
Imagine there's a task. Call it a XYZ task. And someone who has to perform it a lot says something like "this would be so much easier if there was an XYZ gadget that would kinda work like this and work by that principle -- that wouldn't be hard to produce. Why doesn't anybody make such a thing?" And that person looks it up on the web and indeed, such a gadget cannot be bought anywhere.
Situation 1: how things should work:
Person goes and starts manufactuing the XYZ-gadget. It's not like he wants to make a lot of money off it -- heck, it's OK if it merely breaks even. All he wants is an XYZ gadget available to him. But if there's a market, others could now try to make better XYZ gadgets. Modified XYZ gadgets. Designs the original inventor never even thought of. Applications he never even had in mind. Turns out that people in some completely different industry start modifying XYZ gadgets for their own purpose and soon a whole industry of modified XYZ gadgets springs up, with designer colors and actual research performed into the optimum way of making ABC gadgets (which were a clever derivative of the original XYZ gadget and sell much better because they can frobnicate as well as gadgerize). That's innovarion.
Situation 2: how things really work:
Turns out the notion of the XYZ gadget is obvious enough to practicioners in the field that there have been a dozen attempts to make and sell them before. But every time someone tries that, JoeDude steps out of the woodwork. JoeDude had one clever idea back in the seventies and so he got a patent. And he'll be happy to sell you the idea for a million bucks. Of course the world market for XYZ-gadgets is only $500,000 so nobody is willing to shell out that kind of money -- and JoeDude has found that he can actually make decent money by suing would-be manufacturers of XYZ-gadgets into nonexistence unless they settle with him for some sizable amount. The gadget never gets produced. XYZ-practicioners keep on having to frobnicate manually one-by-one. That's no innovation.
In all seriousness though, you're hardly "innovating" in any sense of the word if you're doing things that have been described by someone else in a patent filed so long ago that it's issued.
Spoken like someone who's never had a single creative idea in his life. Who's never actually developed any new technology, made a new gadget, produced some original data.
And since you're just armchair-analyzing, you fantasize that the situation described above is some kind of rare edge-case. It isn't. It is the rule. I, personally, have at least one good marketable idea per week. A system, gadget, product for which I, myself, would gladly pay as much money as I think I could produce the product at. So does everybody around me. Because we're creative people who actually contribute usefully to society.
But in my industry (aerospace) innovation has been patented out of existence. The Boeings and Northrops and Lockheeds of the world are sitting on all the patents for every clever little idea anybody can possibly come up with and they refuse to do anything with them because that would require taking risks, breaking into new markets, developing whole new product categories. The exact kind of risk that a small entrepreneur could take on a small scale -- except that the patent situation has choked any such attempts to death.
And thus there's no innovation. People continue to do the exact same things with the exact same tools because the slightest deviation from what-was-there-before infringes on someone's patent somewhere. We do things in ways that could be streamlined to a degree that is laughable. Someone working in my group for a month should have collected dozens of ideas for products that have a real market just by listening to what we, ourselves, would be willing to pay money for. Products, innovations, that will never see reality. Because someone out there has a patent.
Ideas are cheap. Innovation is not in the dreaming up of ideas. It's in the execution. And it is that execution that is hampered by people who imagine they should be paid to the end of their lives for having had one idea somewhere.
I don't recall needing "examples" to figure out how to use the find in any version of windows.
That's because the find in Windows can't actually do anything useful: "Find all files in this directory and below whose name contains a date in the form mm.dd.yy". You may need an example to make that work in Linux. You won't need an example because you cannot do that in Windows.
"Exclude directories whose name contains the word 'migrated'". Whoa there.
"Rename the files that you find so that they retain their original name but with the 'yy' expanded to 'yyyy'". One complicated line in Linux. You'll have to learn something to do it. Total cost in RTFM -- 30 minutes? An hour? As opposed to traversing hundreds of thousands of files and renaming them by hand one-by-one in Windows?
Of course you don't need an example to work the find in windows any more than you need an "example" riding a tricycle. Which is fine as long as a tricycle is good enough for you. But why should anybody try to make a learjet behave the same as a tricycle?
and don't say use GIMP cause it has a serious handicap of not supporting CMYK.
What exactly does that sentence mean? What would it mean for GIMP to "support CMYK"? Where would that show up?
GIMP can already do CMYK separation for when you want to send your stuff to a printer that is so far behind the time that they can't do it themselves -- which is about the only time a graphics professional should ever have to think about color spaces.
When I futz around with graphics, I care about light, composition, art. I could not possibly care less about the color model that my computer uses internally to represent my pixels. For all I care there's a million little mice licking the crankshaft of a colorogizmo. Does your software force you to think about the endianness of your storage words too? The interleave of your RAM? The MOS transconductance in your processor? If you have to think about such low-level nonsense, then does that really mean GIMP is somehow "handicapped" by NOT forcing you to worry about it?
So in other words, websites and databases (for websites) only (will they police this?).
Even if they police this, it appears I can now start that web-hosting business I always wanted to start: I'll give you 10TB of storage and 1 TB/month throughput for, say, $1/month. If I can sell that to 13 customers then I'm ahead, right? And I'm a legitimate business, right? So they can't cut me off, right?
(Since it has to go through HTML, it'll run through some html-based web-management system like plesk, but at the rates I'm offering, how could you say "no"...)
Patents (copyright, trademarks, etc) are not bad, they give credit where credit is due...
its most (but not all) of the laws surrounding patents and copyrights, that are bad.
Patents are bad because their only effect is funneling resources from the fast, high-powered, creative, dynamic people in the world to the retarded lazy dullards who think thy only ever have to do one single clever thing in their entire life and should get paid for it from here on in perpetuity.
To the creative people amongst us, who create new things, new processes, new ideas, new concepts, new knowledge, new value on a daily basis, Imaginary Property merely gets in the way. It hampers me daily in my attempts to innovate -- and the only benefit is some lazy geezers financing their retirement through milking the one smart thing they did in their lives back in the fifties.
Contrary to the assertions of folks like you, removing the ability to retire the very first time you've done something smart would actually result is a dramatic net increase in overall productivity, because people would have to continue doing smart things to continue getting paid.
When someone digs a ditch for me, he gets paid. Once. That's it. If I had to continue paying him in all eternity for the ditch he dug, he'd never contribute anything anywhere ever again[*]. And the same is true for "patent (copyright etc) holders": You do something good, you deserve to get paid for your work. Once. Now. How much depends on the deal you struck. You do emphatically NOT deserve to somehow "retain rights" to the thing you created and somehow expect to get paid for it for years and years in the future.
If you want to get paid next year, you should have to do some actual work next year. Whether you're digging ditches or developing processor designs. I do it. Many others do it. And it is time we stopped the parasitic maggots who think they're too good for work next year because they already worked once ten years ago.
--
[*]And I wouldn't even be allowed to say "screw this, I'm digging my own ditches from now on" because he'd be holding some kind of "intellectual property rights" on the process of digging of ditches.
Unfortunately, most people in the U.S. don't have the luxury of a choice in internet providers.
I've seen that before and maybe I live in some very specialized area (LA area) but I have oodles and scads of choices here. The hard part was choosing one, not finding a zillion.
(The one I chose is sonic.net, a "regional" supplier that is really located in Santa Rosa -- maybe 8 hours drive from here. So the "regional" moniker is kinda arbitrary, it appears. They're cheap, offer exactly what I need, have never been down in the 2 years I've used them and if they do any kind of traffic shaping I've certainly not noticed it (and yes, I do use Azureus and such)).
When people claim that they have only one or two choices I'm always curious how they determined that. Are you sure you don't have many more choices? Says who? What kind of research did you do? What web-pages did you look at? Who did you ask?
To a degree this kind of comment always kinda sounds like the people who tell me that there's no real choice in OSes because Windows is all they've ever seen. I mean: you may well be right, but as someone who's lived in the US for the last 15 years, how come I've never encountered these scarcity problems?
Remember when we used to pick distros based on features, repositories, patch-time turnaround and "stable/unstable/testing?"
Now it's just based on the nail polish.
Hey - that's exactly my dating history...
Joking aside, may I suggest you have a look at Slackware. It comes with nail polish, but you have to apply it yourself. If you want it. Or you can leave it off. Entirely your choice. Mine doesn't even have X installed, since it's just a sheer number-crunching machine that handles a little web-serving, file-serving, and email-serving on the side. Much less do I have any kind of media-player or desktop or web-browser or any such thing on it.
(I do run Konqueror under Windows, though -- a fine piece of software if ever there was one).
The only indication of future success is past success. All else is wishful thinking.
Serving up the same dish again and again isn't going to change your toddler's reaction to it. Change the dish, offer incentives of some sort, or learn to live with it. "You spit those peas at me so today we have them again" isn't going to get you terribly far.
It doesn't matter why microkernels failed to flood the market. They just didn't, and no amount of "we never got a fair chance" is going to change that.
But yeah, moving stuff out of the kernel is the way forward in terms of security, and that's pretty much the definition of a microkernel architecture.
I'm gonna get tarred and feathered for this but.... this is of course exactly what Vista is doing: "Hey, wouldn't it be better if we stopped letting any odd piece of software talk directly to the hardware in kernel mode? If kernel mode was reserved to... y'now,... the kernel?" So instead they exposed a (perfectly reasonable) API instead. And the only cost is that you need a new device driver for any old hardware. Like that 20-year-old joystick.
Oh, it also makes it a lot harder to get around OS restrictions on illegal content access. No "directly-talking-to-the-CD-drive" any more. Which means in/.-land "built-in DRM". Which it isn't, of course, but could certainly be seen that way.
Is it "better" for stuff to get moved out of the kernel? Well, "better" for whom?
Any improvement you see comes from striking the TV, not the games.
Video games ARE interactive. They DO encourage kids to try things, play with things, explore things.
Since our kid was old enough to manipulate a mouse (that's before age 2), he was allowed to play with things like poissonrouge.com (try it! Tell me how that would lead to a "zoned-out" kid) or things like starfall.com. He was a fluent reader before age 4. He got into second grade last summer (at age 5) and has the highest reading marks in his class. Because of the "interactive entertainment" (i.e. games) on Starfall -- And certainly not something you'd get from "listening to audiobooks" or "tying knots into things".
On the other hand, our TV was last tuned to an actual station back in 2001. It is used to watch a video or two per week. Which is perceived as a treat by all involved, not something that we'd do all the time.
I'd say what kids need is stimulation and activity; and video games can be as mentally active as any other game -- and then some. Quite frankly I consider some of the games at lego.com a lot more enriching to my son than the actual assembly of a lego model. The latter is passive entertainment as it merely follows some prescribed assembly instructions. Fortunately he's into modifying them immediately and creating cool spaceships out of cars and vice versa.
Computers are a new medium -- and a highly interactive medium at that. My child will be immersed in it his whole life. I certainly wouldn't want him to grow up without instinctual mastery of the concepts involved. Six-year-olds who don't know what a mouse is frighten me as much as six-year-olds who don't know what a pen is.
I believe that the private realm of business will become dominant over NASA in the coming years.
You are entitled to your beliefs.
Your beliefs might even turn out to be true.
As of now, however, the only entities who have ever put a person into LEO have been (in order of appearance):
The government of the USSR (Russia, the Russian Federation, whatever they're called this week)
The government of the United States of America
The government of China
The only entity that has ever put a person past LEO has been
The government of the United States of America.
As of right now private enterprise has been a complete and total failure in the space arena.
They dropped the ball decades ago, when the governments of the world had done their part of the deal and had provided the hundreds of billions of $$$ investment in fundamental research to show that it can be done and how to do it. When industry should have picked up the game. And did exactly... nothing.
I don't think it would take much extra lobbying by the various mafiAA organizations to have Linux outlawed under the DMCA. Hey, doesn't even need new legislation -- all is needs is a slight change in interpretation of already existing law: Linux can be used as a circumvention device. Therefore anybody who runs Linux is a criminal. Comes down to the RIAA hoodwinking one single judge into this kind of nonsense and you have a precedent...
The reality is that a demanding course will in fact turn off a lot of students, and that does represent in some way a failure of the university's mission.
Only if you subscribe to the idea that "a university's mission is making as much money as possible" or some variation thereof. Turning away 99% of the population fits a lot of university department's missions when it comes to grad-school admissions, for example.
To use the good professor's example: when I set foot into an airplane, I'd like to think that its designers (software- as much as hardware designers) came from places that turned off and turned away a lot of people and focussed on making sure the right people were coming through instead of focusing on making as many people come through as possible.
So what do you do about the fact that most people are neither prepared nor dispositionally inclined to deal with those demands when they are 18 years old and just entering college, particularly if their family and friends are not that academically inclined and can't help them keep faith and slog through hard and sometimes tedious preparation?
You send those people to a trade school where they can learn code-monkeying the way other people learn plumbing: both of them entirely valuable trades, both of them not without their challenges, but neither of them worthy of the designator "(any kind of) Science" and neither really requiring of the intellectual toolkit universities are supposed to prepare folks with.
The latest time that can be represented in this format, following the POSIX standard, is 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038.
Exactly! Let me emphasize that: This is NOT a "unix problem". This is a POSIX problem. Which means that it affects your cellphone, your media-PC and your favorite ATM just as much as any leftover unix box out there.
p(Except that your cellphone and your media-PC will be obsolete by next Wednesday and aren't used to calculate 30-year mortgages).
and hey, you speak English better than the Indians.
That would be unusual.
I have found the average Bangalore code monkey to be a much better English speaker/writer/communicator than the average American one. Yes, there are exceptions. No, they don't invalidate the rules.
Yes, the docs that come from India tend to sound a little goofy - what with their mangled pronouns and all. But compared to the semi-illiterate gibberish I get from the folks in the midwest (if I get anything from them at all!) it might as well be high prose. At least it usually addresses what needs to be addressed. Or at least it tries. As opposed to stuff that's not even "unclear" because it is just harebrained fad-junk.
Thank you for documenting which "design pattern" you implemented here and how elegant this makes the design, but why is it a hundred times slower then what we need and why didn't you work on improving that? Your Indian colleague wrote twice as much documentation and half of that was analysis of the speed bottlenecks. And he had fewer typos because he knows how to use a spell-checker. Allowing me to read his stuff twice as fast. And he works when I sleep, so his stuff is available when I come to work in the morning, not in the evening when I'd like to go home. And he works for 1/2 your salary...
Once you understand that "time" is itself a relative term, i.e. observer-dependent, it isn't terribly hard to take any one "dt" and put it into the numerator and some other "dT" and put it into the denominator. Obvious choices that pop up in GR textbooks all over the place might include co-moving (i.e. "proper") time vs "time as seen by an outside observer".
Note that even in simple vanilla special relativity people speak of "time slowing down" for fast-moving objects. What they mean is that a pion that is produced at a high velocity seems to survive longer than one that is produced at rest when observed by someone from the outside. For the pions themselves, nothing changes.
Vista is for dumbasses who want to blow money on excess computing power to support glassy menus. The DRM thing is a canard, in my opinion.
Uh? I bought a machine a couple months ago. I desperately need 64-bits since the ridiculous 2TB limit on file system volunes was just choking me (I deal with volumes of data that are much larger). Server-08 isn't out yet, and I'm not about to blow $80k on a brand new server system and install a beta of some OS on it. That limits me to yesterday's news (XP64) whos service life will expire before the computer does -- or I'm going to run Vista. Which is what I'm doing. (No, don't come running to me recommending the absurd clusterfuck that was, is and will always be Samba.).
And what's the big complaint about? I have yet to run into any kind of snag with Vista. Where's the problem? What's everybody whining about? I turned off the glass-nonsense on day 1 and I have yet to find any particular thing that I'd like to do that I can't because of Vista. A few of the UI changes required (re-)learning a few keystrokes, but altogether I see only improvements. XP doesn't even *have* the equivalent of alt-arrow_up. I can click into a different directory in the same tree without having to go up-up-up-left-right all the time.
I'm genuinely satisfied with it. And in Vista's case, I'm very much a "user". Why would I not like it?
I am not a scientist. but I can read. I have read the classics and I see no difference in the people then as now.
The complexity of patterns recognizable by a pattern-recognition process depends on the complexity of that process.
Let that sink in before you respond.
It takes complexity so see complexity. To a simple being, all beings are equal -- through space and time. Simple. A complex being is capable of distinguishing the simple being from the complex being as it is capable of recognizing the complexity in the complex being.
When people were extremely simple, all things had "the spirit". They were all the same. The rock, the stick, the animal. When we became culturally more complex, the rock didn't quite do it any more -- but "all life is still equally sacred offspring of mother gaea". And eve more complex being can see the difference between itself and a stick -- but "the wolf and the bear are still our brothers and sisters".
And when a being develops sufficient complexity, it fill finally find that there's nobody like himself out there any more. Only various shades of similarity.
If evolution were involved I (or another human) would have more mental power, or skills then did Cicero. This is NOT the case.
This merely means that the plebeian of the 3rd millenum cannot measure up to the brilliant greats of the first -- but nobody claimed that you should be able to.
I, for one, have the mental power and the skills of a CIcero. I can comprehen every single thing Archimedes did and I can do things that would have been forever beyond them. If I could meet any one person who lived before 1500, I could teach them a great number of things in their fields of endeavor. And then some more in fields they didn't tinker with.
The reasonably bright college senior today has a better grasp of philosophy than Socrates, a better grasp of mathematics than Pythagoras, a better political understanding than Seneca. Because we're standing not only on their shoulders, but the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of those who stood on their shoulders. We do not have to spend our time re-re-re-inventing whole conceptual areas from scratch because we get what worked in the past handed to us. We don't have to invent numbers and mathematical symbols -- we simply use them as-is. We do not have to invent physical concepts, social classifications, anthropological superstructures.
We take all their work and filter it through history and can come to very quick and efficient conclusions what works and what doesn't. Dozens of tomes theological writing of Newton's -- and what remains of his life's work are four equations an a mechanism he co-discovered with Leibnitz. I can take those four equations and mix them with one that Kepler found after nine years of dead ends in the study of Mars and convey the whole thing to a bright college freshman in two hours.
The stupid today are no brighter than the stupid ever were. But the bright minds of our time outshine anything that has ever happened before.
Calling it "phenotype" does injustice to the fact that it isn't just an expression of genetic information, but carries information itself. Humans are currently three different parallel lines of communication information generationally: genetic, cultural and technological. We're using technology to transmit cultural information, we use culture to propagate technology, we use both to pass on genetic information. We're about to start modifying that genetic information at will (by means of technology - possibly hampered by culture) while we're passing it on.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost all processes in a computer are truly random. The number of electron crossing this particular trace per second? It's certainly not constant.
The trick in computers is keeping the RAM and the harddisk from going random too fast, such that a temporary illusion of determinism can be achieved. A crossing cosmic-ray particle will flip every last bit at random -- it'll just take sufficiently many centuries that you can imagine your bits to be stable zeros and ones.
Back in the eighties I generated truly random numbers on my old Atari by looking into the sound-chip with a port and cranking up the noise-generator on that chip. The noise-generator was just a fat resistor with a big amplifier attached to it. Quantum-randomness through thermodynamical means -- right there. Why do programmers today have trouble doing similar tings?
This reply brought to you by the letters S, C and O.
Imagine there's a task. Call it a XYZ task. And someone who has to perform it a lot says something like "this would be so much easier if there was an XYZ gadget that would kinda work like this and work by that principle -- that wouldn't be hard to produce. Why doesn't anybody make such a thing?" And that person looks it up on the web and indeed, such a gadget cannot be bought anywhere.
Situation 1: how things should work:
Person goes and starts manufactuing the XYZ-gadget. It's not like he wants to make a lot of money off it -- heck, it's OK if it merely breaks even. All he wants is an XYZ gadget available to him. But if there's a market, others could now try to make better XYZ gadgets. Modified XYZ gadgets. Designs the original inventor never even thought of. Applications he never even had in mind. Turns out that people in some completely different industry start modifying XYZ gadgets for their own purpose and soon a whole industry of modified XYZ gadgets springs up, with designer colors and actual research performed into the optimum way of making ABC gadgets (which were a clever derivative of the original XYZ gadget and sell much better because they can frobnicate as well as gadgerize). That's innovarion.
Situation 2: how things really work:
Turns out the notion of the XYZ gadget is obvious enough to practicioners in the field that there have been a dozen attempts to make and sell them before. But every time someone tries that, JoeDude steps out of the woodwork. JoeDude had one clever idea back in the seventies and so he got a patent. And he'll be happy to sell you the idea for a million bucks. Of course the world market for XYZ-gadgets is only $500,000 so nobody is willing to shell out that kind of money -- and JoeDude has found that he can actually make decent money by suing would-be manufacturers of XYZ-gadgets into nonexistence unless they settle with him for some sizable amount. The gadget never gets produced. XYZ-practicioners keep on having to frobnicate manually one-by-one. That's no innovation.
In all seriousness though, you're hardly "innovating" in any sense of the word if you're doing things that have been described by someone else in a patent filed so long ago that it's issued.Spoken like someone who's never had a single creative idea in his life. Who's never actually developed any new technology, made a new gadget, produced some original data.
And since you're just armchair-analyzing, you fantasize that the situation described above is some kind of rare edge-case. It isn't. It is the rule. I, personally, have at least one good marketable idea per week. A system, gadget, product for which I, myself, would gladly pay as much money as I think I could produce the product at. So does everybody around me. Because we're creative people who actually contribute usefully to society.
But in my industry (aerospace) innovation has been patented out of existence. The Boeings and Northrops and Lockheeds of the world are sitting on all the patents for every clever little idea anybody can possibly come up with and they refuse to do anything with them because that would require taking risks, breaking into new markets, developing whole new product categories. The exact kind of risk that a small entrepreneur could take on a small scale -- except that the patent situation has choked any such attempts to death.
And thus there's no innovation. People continue to do the exact same things with the exact same tools because the slightest deviation from what-was-there-before infringes on someone's patent somewhere. We do things in ways that could be streamlined to a degree that is laughable. Someone working in my group for a month should have collected dozens of ideas for products that have a real market just by listening to what we, ourselves, would be willing to pay money for. Products, innovations, that will never see reality. Because someone out there has a patent.
Ideas are cheap. Innovation is not in the dreaming up of ideas. It's in the execution. And it is that execution that is hampered by people who imagine they should be paid to the end of their lives for having had one idea somewhere.
I don't recall needing "examples" to figure out how to use the find in any version of windows.
That's because the find in Windows can't actually do anything useful: "Find all files in this directory and below whose name contains a date in the form mm.dd.yy". You may need an example to make that work in Linux. You won't need an example because you cannot do that in Windows.
"Exclude directories whose name contains the word 'migrated'". Whoa there.
"Rename the files that you find so that they retain their original name but with the 'yy' expanded to 'yyyy'". One complicated line in Linux. You'll have to learn something to do it. Total cost in RTFM -- 30 minutes? An hour? As opposed to traversing hundreds of thousands of files and renaming them by hand one-by-one in Windows?
Of course you don't need an example to work the find in windows any more than you need an "example" riding a tricycle. Which is fine as long as a tricycle is good enough for you. But why should anybody try to make a learjet behave the same as a tricycle?
What exactly does that sentence mean? What would it mean for GIMP to "support CMYK"? Where would that show up?
GIMP can already do CMYK separation for when you want to send your stuff to a printer that is so far behind the time that they can't do it themselves -- which is about the only time a graphics professional should ever have to think about color spaces.
When I futz around with graphics, I care about light, composition, art. I could not possibly care less about the color model that my computer uses internally to represent my pixels. For all I care there's a million little mice licking the crankshaft of a colorogizmo. Does your software force you to think about the endianness of your storage words too? The interleave of your RAM? The MOS transconductance in your processor? If you have to think about such low-level nonsense, then does that really mean GIMP is somehow "handicapped" by NOT forcing you to worry about it?
Even if they police this, it appears I can now start that web-hosting business I always wanted to start: I'll give you 10TB of storage and 1 TB/month throughput for, say, $1/month. If I can sell that to 13 customers then I'm ahead, right? And I'm a legitimate business, right? So they can't cut me off, right?
(Since it has to go through HTML, it'll run through some html-based web-management system like plesk, but at the rates I'm offering, how could you say "no"...)
its most (but not all) of the laws surrounding patents and copyrights, that are bad.
Patents are bad because their only effect is funneling resources from the fast, high-powered, creative, dynamic people in the world to the retarded lazy dullards who think thy only ever have to do one single clever thing in their entire life and should get paid for it from here on in perpetuity.
To the creative people amongst us, who create new things, new processes, new ideas, new concepts, new knowledge, new value on a daily basis, Imaginary Property merely gets in the way. It hampers me daily in my attempts to innovate -- and the only benefit is some lazy geezers financing their retirement through milking the one smart thing they did in their lives back in the fifties.
Contrary to the assertions of folks like you, removing the ability to retire the very first time you've done something smart would actually result is a dramatic net increase in overall productivity, because people would have to continue doing smart things to continue getting paid.
When someone digs a ditch for me, he gets paid. Once. That's it. If I had to continue paying him in all eternity for the ditch he dug, he'd never contribute anything anywhere ever again[*]. And the same is true for "patent (copyright etc) holders": You do something good, you deserve to get paid for your work. Once. Now. How much depends on the deal you struck. You do emphatically NOT deserve to somehow "retain rights" to the thing you created and somehow expect to get paid for it for years and years in the future.
If you want to get paid next year, you should have to do some actual work next year. Whether you're digging ditches or developing processor designs. I do it. Many others do it. And it is time we stopped the parasitic maggots who think they're too good for work next year because they already worked once ten years ago.
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[*]And I wouldn't even be allowed to say "screw this, I'm digging my own ditches from now on" because he'd be holding some kind of "intellectual property rights" on the process of digging of ditches.
I've seen that before and maybe I live in some very specialized area (LA area) but I have oodles and scads of choices here. The hard part was choosing one, not finding a zillion.
(The one I chose is sonic.net, a "regional" supplier that is really located in Santa Rosa -- maybe 8 hours drive from here. So the "regional" moniker is kinda arbitrary, it appears. They're cheap, offer exactly what I need, have never been down in the 2 years I've used them and if they do any kind of traffic shaping I've certainly not noticed it (and yes, I do use Azureus and such)).
When people claim that they have only one or two choices I'm always curious how they determined that. Are you sure you don't have many more choices? Says who? What kind of research did you do? What web-pages did you look at? Who did you ask?
To a degree this kind of comment always kinda sounds like the people who tell me that there's no real choice in OSes because Windows is all they've ever seen. I mean: you may well be right, but as someone who's lived in the US for the last 15 years, how come I've never encountered these scarcity problems?
Remember when we used to pick distros based on features, repositories, patch-time turnaround and "stable/unstable/testing?"
Now it's just based on the nail polish.
Hey - that's exactly my dating history...
Joking aside, may I suggest you have a look at Slackware. It comes with nail polish, but you have to apply it yourself. If you want it. Or you can leave it off. Entirely your choice. Mine doesn't even have X installed, since it's just a sheer number-crunching machine that handles a little web-serving, file-serving, and email-serving on the side. Much less do I have any kind of media-player or desktop or web-browser or any such thing on it.
(I do run Konqueror under Windows, though -- a fine piece of software if ever there was one).
No.
The only indication of future success is past success. All else is wishful thinking.
Serving up the same dish again and again isn't going to change your toddler's reaction to it. Change the dish, offer incentives of some sort, or learn to live with it. "You spit those peas at me so today we have them again" isn't going to get you terribly far.
It doesn't matter why microkernels failed to flood the market. They just didn't, and no amount of "we never got a fair chance" is going to change that.
But yeah, moving stuff out of the kernel is the way forward in terms of security, and that's pretty much the definition of a microkernel architecture.
I'm gonna get tarred and feathered for this but .... this is of course exactly what Vista is doing: "Hey, wouldn't it be better if we stopped letting any odd piece of software talk directly to the hardware in kernel mode? If kernel mode was reserved to ... y'now, ... the kernel?" So instead they exposed a (perfectly reasonable) API instead. And the only cost is that you need a new device driver for any old hardware. Like that 20-year-old joystick.
Oh, it also makes it a lot harder to get around OS restrictions on illegal content access. No "directly-talking-to-the-CD-drive" any more. Which means in /.-land "built-in DRM". Which it isn't, of course, but could certainly be seen that way.
Is it "better" for stuff to get moved out of the kernel? Well, "better" for whom?
Twenty eight percent.
Firefox is as popular in Europe as GW Bush is in the US.
And they both think that gives them some kind of mandate...
Any improvement you see comes from striking the TV, not the games.
Video games ARE interactive. They DO encourage kids to try things, play with things, explore things.
Since our kid was old enough to manipulate a mouse (that's before age 2), he was allowed to play with things like poissonrouge.com (try it! Tell me how that would lead to a "zoned-out" kid) or things like starfall.com. He was a fluent reader before age 4. He got into second grade last summer (at age 5) and has the highest reading marks in his class. Because of the "interactive entertainment" (i.e. games) on Starfall -- And certainly not something you'd get from "listening to audiobooks" or "tying knots into things".
On the other hand, our TV was last tuned to an actual station back in 2001. It is used to watch a video or two per week. Which is perceived as a treat by all involved, not something that we'd do all the time.
I'd say what kids need is stimulation and activity; and video games can be as mentally active as any other game -- and then some. Quite frankly I consider some of the games at lego.com a lot more enriching to my son than the actual assembly of a lego model. The latter is passive entertainment as it merely follows some prescribed assembly instructions. Fortunately he's into modifying them immediately and creating cool spaceships out of cars and vice versa.
Computers are a new medium -- and a highly interactive medium at that. My child will be immersed in it his whole life. I certainly wouldn't want him to grow up without instinctual mastery of the concepts involved. Six-year-olds who don't know what a mouse is frighten me as much as six-year-olds who don't know what a pen is.
You are entitled to your beliefs.
Your beliefs might even turn out to be true.
As of now, however, the only entities who have ever put a person into LEO have been (in order of appearance):
The only entity that has ever put a person past LEO has been
As of right now private enterprise has been a complete and total failure in the space arena.
They dropped the ball decades ago, when the governments of the world had done their part of the deal and had provided the hundreds of billions of $$$ investment in fundamental research to show that it can be done and how to do it. When industry should have picked up the game. And did exactly ... nothing.
I don't think it would take much extra lobbying by the various mafiAA organizations to have Linux outlawed under the DMCA. Hey, doesn't even need new legislation -- all is needs is a slight change in interpretation of already existing law: Linux can be used as a circumvention device. Therefore anybody who runs Linux is a criminal. Comes down to the RIAA hoodwinking one single judge into this kind of nonsense and you have a precedent...
Only if you subscribe to the idea that "a university's mission is making as much money as possible" or some variation thereof. Turning away 99% of the population fits a lot of university department's missions when it comes to grad-school admissions, for example.
To use the good professor's example: when I set foot into an airplane, I'd like to think that its designers (software- as much as hardware designers) came from places that turned off and turned away a lot of people and focussed on making sure the right people were coming through instead of focusing on making as many people come through as possible.
So what do you do about the fact that most people are neither prepared nor dispositionally inclined to deal with those demands when they are 18 years old and just entering college, particularly if their family and friends are not that academically inclined and can't help them keep faith and slog through hard and sometimes tedious preparation?You send those people to a trade school where they can learn code-monkeying the way other people learn plumbing: both of them entirely valuable trades, both of them not without their challenges, but neither of them worthy of the designator "(any kind of) Science" and neither really requiring of the intellectual toolkit universities are supposed to prepare folks with.
Exactly! Let me emphasize that: This is NOT a "unix problem". This is a POSIX problem. Which means that it affects your cellphone, your media-PC and your favorite ATM just as much as any leftover unix box out there. p(Except that your cellphone and your media-PC will be obsolete by next Wednesday and aren't used to calculate 30-year mortgages).
That would be unusual.
I have found the average Bangalore code monkey to be a much better English speaker/writer/communicator than the average American one. Yes, there are exceptions. No, they don't invalidate the rules.
Yes, the docs that come from India tend to sound a little goofy - what with their mangled pronouns and all. But compared to the semi-illiterate gibberish I get from the folks in the midwest (if I get anything from them at all!) it might as well be high prose. At least it usually addresses what needs to be addressed. Or at least it tries. As opposed to stuff that's not even "unclear" because it is just harebrained fad-junk.
Thank you for documenting which "design pattern" you implemented here and how elegant this makes the design, but why is it a hundred times slower then what we need and why didn't you work on improving that? Your Indian colleague wrote twice as much documentation and half of that was analysis of the speed bottlenecks. And he had fewer typos because he knows how to use a spell-checker. Allowing me to read his stuff twice as fast. And he works when I sleep, so his stuff is available when I come to work in the morning, not in the evening when I'd like to go home. And he works for 1/2 your salary...
Huh? Easy jobs are rarely profitable. The easier they are, the more monkeys can do them.
The real profit, as far as I can figure out, lies in those jobs that are so hard that very few even dare try -- and fewer still succeed.
Once you understand that "time" is itself a relative term, i.e. observer-dependent, it isn't terribly hard to take any one "dt" and put it into the numerator and some other "dT" and put it into the denominator. Obvious choices that pop up in GR textbooks all over the place might include co-moving (i.e. "proper") time vs "time as seen by an outside observer".
Note that even in simple vanilla special relativity people speak of "time slowing down" for fast-moving objects. What they mean is that a pion that is produced at a high velocity seems to survive longer than one that is produced at rest when observed by someone from the outside. For the pions themselves, nothing changes.
The earth is NOT flat because one can fly around it.
Now this is not an easy undertaking -- quite a bit of time, money and effort has to be expended to fly around the earth.
But after you've done it, after you've flown around the earth yourself, you do not have to give "equal time" to the notion of a flat earth anymore.
Uh? I bought a machine a couple months ago. I desperately need 64-bits since the ridiculous 2TB limit on file system volunes was just choking me (I deal with volumes of data that are much larger). Server-08 isn't out yet, and I'm not about to blow $80k on a brand new server system and install a beta of some OS on it. That limits me to yesterday's news (XP64) whos service life will expire before the computer does -- or I'm going to run Vista. Which is what I'm doing. (No, don't come running to me recommending the absurd clusterfuck that was, is and will always be Samba.).
And what's the big complaint about? I have yet to run into any kind of snag with Vista. Where's the problem? What's everybody whining about? I turned off the glass-nonsense on day 1 and I have yet to find any particular thing that I'd like to do that I can't because of Vista. A few of the UI changes required (re-)learning a few keystrokes, but altogether I see only improvements. XP doesn't even *have* the equivalent of alt-arrow_up. I can click into a different directory in the same tree without having to go up-up-up-left-right all the time.
I'm genuinely satisfied with it. And in Vista's case, I'm very much a "user". Why would I not like it?
The complexity of patterns recognizable by a pattern-recognition process depends on the complexity of that process.
Let that sink in before you respond.
It takes complexity so see complexity. To a simple being, all beings are equal -- through space and time. Simple. A complex being is capable of distinguishing the simple being from the complex being as it is capable of recognizing the complexity in the complex being.
When people were extremely simple, all things had "the spirit". They were all the same. The rock, the stick, the animal. When we became culturally more complex, the rock didn't quite do it any more -- but "all life is still equally sacred offspring of mother gaea". And eve more complex being can see the difference between itself and a stick -- but "the wolf and the bear are still our brothers and sisters".
And when a being develops sufficient complexity, it fill finally find that there's nobody like himself out there any more. Only various shades of similarity.
This merely means that the plebeian of the 3rd millenum cannot measure up to the brilliant greats of the first -- but nobody claimed that you should be able to.
I, for one, have the mental power and the skills of a CIcero. I can comprehen every single thing Archimedes did and I can do things that would have been forever beyond them. If I could meet any one person who lived before 1500, I could teach them a great number of things in their fields of endeavor. And then some more in fields they didn't tinker with.
The reasonably bright college senior today has a better grasp of philosophy than Socrates, a better grasp of mathematics than Pythagoras, a better political understanding than Seneca. Because we're standing not only on their shoulders, but the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of those who stood on their shoulders. We do not have to spend our time re-re-re-inventing whole conceptual areas from scratch because we get what worked in the past handed to us. We don't have to invent numbers and mathematical symbols -- we simply use them as-is. We do not have to invent physical concepts, social classifications, anthropological superstructures.
We take all their work and filter it through history and can come to very quick and efficient conclusions what works and what doesn't. Dozens of tomes theological writing of Newton's -- and what remains of his life's work are four equations an a mechanism he co-discovered with Leibnitz. I can take those four equations and mix them with one that Kepler found after nine years of dead ends in the study of Mars and convey the whole thing to a bright college freshman in two hours.
The stupid today are no brighter than the stupid ever were. But the bright minds of our time outshine anything that has ever happened before.
Calling it "phenotype" does injustice to the fact that it isn't just an expression of genetic information, but carries information itself. Humans are currently three different parallel lines of communication information generationally: genetic, cultural and technological. We're using technology to transmit cultural information, we use culture to propagate technology, we use both to pass on genetic information. We're about to start modifying that genetic information at will (by means of technology - possibly hampered by culture) while we're passing it on.
Everything bleeds. Into each other.