Embedded systems dominate the desktop, at least in terms of deployment. There are far more embedded systems in use right now than desktops -- orders of magnitude more, in fact. Now, this is not to say that the statement about Linux dominance is any more correct, since most embedded systems do not actually run Linux. If anything, TRON derivatives dominate that category.
I mean, if a movie to buy was $1 or $2, would you purchase it or DL it? If a music CD was $3, not $20, would you own your own copy?
If I could make copies of those CDs and DVDs without having my own equipment kick and scream, and without having to worry about patent violations, then sure. $1 for a DVD? Absolutely.
However, keep in mind that there are already plenty of people who will spend a lot more than that on a movie. Those people are feeding the MPAA and creating an environment where $1 sounds far too low.
This sounds an awful lot like the current state of affairs in popular desktop Linux distros -- you get your browser from the respositories, where the packages are signed using a key that belongs to the distro.
That would make it the first time in many years that the world "Microsoft might have been right" have appeared in a sentence written by me. I feel a chill. Is the world ending?
When was the last time? The most recent I seem to remember was Bill Gates' assertion that the web was going to be huge.
And of course there's the classic Mythical Man Month (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month) which, of course, no one reads any more.
Funny, it was required reading in my software engineering course. Then again, perhaps it is not the developers who need to be reading it; more likely, it is management.
Unless they have some theoretical method of scaling up their design, this does not really bring us "closer" to useful quantum computing. In fact, TFA casts some doubt on scalability:
In addition, the physicists of the University of Innsbruck have found out that the decay rate of the atoms is not linear, as usually expected, but is proportional to the square of the number of the qubits.
This is hardly the end of nuclear power; what do you think we are going to use instead? We still do not have a distribution infrastructure in place that can make wind power available to the nation, solar is too inefficient, hydroelectric cannot be installed everywhere, and I doubt that you want to see thousands of coal fire plants dotting the landscape. The hard truth is that nuclear power is here to stay, and that instead of talking about its death, we should be talking about its rebirth: newer, passively safe reactors (e.g. pebble beds) that do not have these sorts of apocalyptic failure modes.
Second, I've always heard of Satan being considered an angel or some other sort of divine being, but not a "real" god. Looking at the Hebrew, though, it says Satan is one of b'nei ha-elohim, which is either "sons of the gods" or "sons of God". Someone much more knowledgeable than I would have to comment on that one.
Pretty much correct; it is not entirely clear what the original meaning of the word "elohim" actually was, and so it is hard to say whether it should be read as a plural noun or singular.
As for the polytheistic pantheon, it is a bit strange. The Torah seems to take for granted that the gods of the other nations exist, considering how often the Hebrew God does nasty things to them, but they're always considered inferior beings and not the supreme deity that should be worshiped. It's unfortunate that there was so much common knowledge that the Torah assumed everyone already knew, but that isn't quite so common anymore.
The idea that there is only one God appears to have been injected later in the history of the Torah; it prior to that concept, there seems to have been a mountain god, a water god, a thunder god, etc. For reasons that are lost to history (but perhaps not entirely, as there is some indication that there were political reasons for this in the book of Kings) these various gods were combined into a single God.
As for lost knowledge, the Tanach (Torah + Prophets + Writings -- what Christians call the "old testament") makes numerous references to books that have been lost to history, perhaps as a result of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem (the library there was burned). How the books that are currently represented in the bible survived is a bit mysterious. Stranger still is the existence of books from the era which were included in the western Christian "old testament" but not the tanach, and books that were included in eastern Christian bibles that are not included anywhere else. It must have been a pretty chaotic time.
the bulk of the others are not just illegal; they're super bad for you in any kind of fun quantity
Citation needed. Yes, methamphetamine is a fairly dangerous drug to use, and it does cause brain damage, but where is the evidence that the "bulk" of other drugs are dangerous for you? Can you cite any studies that have found that those drugs are more dangerous than, say, alcohol?
What exactly makes the complaint over the top? The purpose of the free software foundation is to promote free software. A web app is software, and the AGPL has not exactly caught on yet. It seems entirely reasonable and in line with their goals for the FSF to push for Gmail to become free software.
We cannot go around talking about how modern and awesome web apps are, then turn around and claim that the FSF has no business discussing the implications of web apps on software freedom.
So...the Democrats, a pro-corporate capitalist party, and the Republicans, a pro-corporate capitalist party, both engage in these tactics. Perhaps we should revisit the idea of voting for some other party?
What, did the/. editors feel that we do not normally have enough language flamewars, so they put as many flamebait articles on the front page as possible? First the CMU article, then the C++ article, now this.
I would agree with you...if people were willing to not use C++ when another language is a better choice. Unfortunately, all too often people refuse to write code in a language other than the one they were trained to use, and too many people are trained to use C++. It is fairly routine for an early design meeting to go like this:
"Let's use [insert non-C++ language], since it is the best fit for this project."
"Wait a minute! I don't know that language, and I do not have time to learn it! Nobody except for you has ever written a program in that language! Let's just stick with what we know!"
C++ and friends (mainly Java and C#) are routinely chosen out of habit, and the result has been an industry that has been very slow to move on to more modern (and simply better in some cases) methods of programming.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at Euclid's Elements.
Wow, I have been spending way too much time coding. I completely lost track of the date!
Yeah, we're still here.
Embedded systems dominate the desktop, at least in terms of deployment. There are far more embedded systems in use right now than desktops -- orders of magnitude more, in fact. Now, this is not to say that the statement about Linux dominance is any more correct, since most embedded systems do not actually run Linux. If anything, TRON derivatives dominate that category.
Embedded systems do not rely on GUIs. Do you think your refrigerator's microcontroller needs any sort of graphical output?
"We'll ensure that everything which is not important in a library is preserved!"
Let me see if I understand...they are claiming that a strategy which maximizes profit globally is a failure? Are these people serious?
I mean, if a movie to buy was $1 or $2, would you purchase it or DL it? If a music CD was $3, not $20, would you own your own copy?
If I could make copies of those CDs and DVDs without having my own equipment kick and scream, and without having to worry about patent violations, then sure. $1 for a DVD? Absolutely.
However, keep in mind that there are already plenty of people who will spend a lot more than that on a movie. Those people are feeding the MPAA and creating an environment where $1 sounds far too low.
This sounds an awful lot like the current state of affairs in popular desktop Linux distros -- you get your browser from the respositories, where the packages are signed using a key that belongs to the distro.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/life-without-ca Of course, this may be asking too much of most people...
That would make it the first time in many years that the world "Microsoft might have been right" have appeared in a sentence written by me. I feel a chill. Is the world ending?
When was the last time? The most recent I seem to remember was Bill Gates' assertion that the web was going to be huge.
And of course there's the classic Mythical Man Month (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month) which, of course, no one reads any more.
Funny, it was required reading in my software engineering course. Then again, perhaps it is not the developers who need to be reading it; more likely, it is management.
In addition, the physicists of the University of Innsbruck have found out that the decay rate of the atoms is not linear, as usually expected, but is proportional to the square of the number of the qubits.
This is hardly the end of nuclear power; what do you think we are going to use instead? We still do not have a distribution infrastructure in place that can make wind power available to the nation, solar is too inefficient, hydroelectric cannot be installed everywhere, and I doubt that you want to see thousands of coal fire plants dotting the landscape. The hard truth is that nuclear power is here to stay, and that instead of talking about its death, we should be talking about its rebirth: newer, passively safe reactors (e.g. pebble beds) that do not have these sorts of apocalyptic failure modes.
Second, I've always heard of Satan being considered an angel or some other sort of divine being, but not a "real" god. Looking at the Hebrew, though, it says Satan is one of b'nei ha-elohim, which is either "sons of the gods" or "sons of God". Someone much more knowledgeable than I would have to comment on that one.
Pretty much correct; it is not entirely clear what the original meaning of the word "elohim" actually was, and so it is hard to say whether it should be read as a plural noun or singular.
As for the polytheistic pantheon, it is a bit strange. The Torah seems to take for granted that the gods of the other nations exist, considering how often the Hebrew God does nasty things to them, but they're always considered inferior beings and not the supreme deity that should be worshiped. It's unfortunate that there was so much common knowledge that the Torah assumed everyone already knew, but that isn't quite so common anymore.
The idea that there is only one God appears to have been injected later in the history of the Torah; it prior to that concept, there seems to have been a mountain god, a water god, a thunder god, etc. For reasons that are lost to history (but perhaps not entirely, as there is some indication that there were political reasons for this in the book of Kings) these various gods were combined into a single God.
As for lost knowledge, the Tanach (Torah + Prophets + Writings -- what Christians call the "old testament") makes numerous references to books that have been lost to history, perhaps as a result of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem (the library there was burned). How the books that are currently represented in the bible survived is a bit mysterious. Stranger still is the existence of books from the era which were included in the western Christian "old testament" but not the tanach, and books that were included in eastern Christian bibles that are not included anywhere else. It must have been a pretty chaotic time.
the bulk of the others are not just illegal; they're super bad for you in any kind of fun quantity
Citation needed. Yes, methamphetamine is a fairly dangerous drug to use, and it does cause brain damage, but where is the evidence that the "bulk" of other drugs are dangerous for you? Can you cite any studies that have found that those drugs are more dangerous than, say, alcohol?
What exactly makes the complaint over the top? The purpose of the free software foundation is to promote free software. A web app is software, and the AGPL has not exactly caught on yet. It seems entirely reasonable and in line with their goals for the FSF to push for Gmail to become free software.
We cannot go around talking about how modern and awesome web apps are, then turn around and claim that the FSF has no business discussing the implications of web apps on software freedom.
Well, except for Red Hat, which last I checked was neither being bought out nor in any financial trouble.
s/ramen/stimulants and sources of calories/g
Well, that lasted all of 10 seconds:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2057576&cid=35640278
Better idea: switch to Jabber, or at the very least provide a gateway of some sort. Why do we need the Yahoo Messenger protocol?
So...the Democrats, a pro-corporate capitalist party, and the Republicans, a pro-corporate capitalist party, both engage in these tactics. Perhaps we should revisit the idea of voting for some other party?
There are many places where anything other than C++ simply doesn't make sense.
Can you name one that is not as trivial as, "You have a large legacy codebase written in C++ that you are maintaining and extending?"
What, did the /. editors feel that we do not normally have enough language flamewars, so they put as many flamebait articles on the front page as possible? First the CMU article, then the C++ article, now this.
Let's try to stay civil this time.
I would agree with you...if people were willing to not use C++ when another language is a better choice. Unfortunately, all too often people refuse to write code in a language other than the one they were trained to use, and too many people are trained to use C++. It is fairly routine for an early design meeting to go like this:
"Let's use [insert non-C++ language], since it is the best fit for this project."
"Wait a minute! I don't know that language, and I do not have time to learn it! Nobody except for you has ever written a program in that language! Let's just stick with what we know!"
C++ and friends (mainly Java and C#) are routinely chosen out of habit, and the result has been an industry that has been very slow to move on to more modern (and simply better in some cases) methods of programming.