> Most native North American Indians were not shot or killed, they died of European diseases
Perhaps most died, but not all of them. Some of them are still alive. Individuals die, the race usually survives. At least 10% of it. Even HIV couldn't kill us all, some are already resistant to it.
It means that American companies will fall behind on the market, so they need cut costs -> Less jobs -> More poor -> More crimes -> Less tax dollars -> Less education -> Less people buying stuff from American companies -> Less Jobs -> More poor -> More crimes -> Eventually the USA will fall, like Soviet Union.
Someone predicted the fall of USA some years ago to happen in the year of 2025. But once Bush was elected to be a president, he adjusted his estimation down to 2020. And then Bush was re-elected...
> There are several IDE's for programming on a linux system.
Code::Blocks is quite decent for that purpose and I personally use it. With other things, it offers a visual debugger (you can add brake points to the code and then step the code in the code view line by line and see the values of the variables). This is with the latest svn build at least. Haven't tried the stable version. http://www.codeblocks.org/
> you're just creating another monoculture, and push a free-only view; which is, to my mind, just as bad
Do you know what is the difference between Microsoft monoculture and open source monoculture?
I give you a hint. The other has huge license costs and you have to like what you get. And the other doesn't have license costs and if you don't like something, you can always either fix it yourself, ask anyone else to fix it or pay anyone to fix it for you. Please note the term "anyone". It is very importan word in this case. Imagine that you would live in New York. Let's say that you need to product every day. Let it be milk or bread or what ever. Now imagine these two alternatives: a) There would be only one shop selling those products. No-one else could sell them. b) __Anyone__ could sell those products and there would be a lot of shops selling them. You could even make those products by yourself.
Now, here we have two monocultures, a) and b), Do they still sound just as bad?
I remember seeing studies that showed that users experienced with Microsoft Office and users with no experience, both learn faster how to use OpenOffice, when compared to new version of Microsoft Office. I also have found OpenOffice much more intuitive to use.
So it would be smarter to move to OpenOffice, rather than upgrade Microsoft Office.
I think they also count coupons that offer you a discount to the product as sold. This is what happened with Vista (except discount was 100% if I remember correctly).
> What's more likely is that tales of dragons grew out of another animal
I bulieve that tales grew out from volcanos.
People see a volcano. Mostly when they have seen a moving object, it has been an animal, so at first, they suspect that moving is caused by an animal. They start wondering what kind of an animal could live in a big mountain like and the appearance of a dragon starts to build up.
> Firefox users want a browser that displays webpages. A browser that is fast... > Adding a whole new bookmarks system is nice, but does the user-base need it ?
You obviously are not a programmer who understand xml parsing and knows SQLite very well. Well as I happen to be such a programmer, let me just tell you that I can pretty well guarantee to you that switching to SQLite will make the browser faster. Most like it will also decrease the amount of needed memory.
Reasons for this: - SQLite is very light database. Basicly it is just component that can be used to write and read a file, but searching a certain element(s) in the file is very fast compared to normal read methods. - Reading xml files or similar, as the current bookmakrs.htm file is, is very slow and it requires a lot of memory. This is because you first need to parse the html tree and after that you will get the actual data from the file. It is very good if you have only few items in the file, but if you have thousands bookmarks like some people do, it will get slow.
So basicly they are just removing the bloat and making the browser faster.
> Don't forget that at the moment, Windows is also cheaper to support. T
Dell offers only hardware support. For software issues they ask you to turn to the Linux community, or you can buy support from Canonical. So support is not the issue with the price.
Perhaps Microsoft is just trying to get our attention away from the Vista sale numbers with these "news". If people would see how badly the Vista is really selling, they probably wouldn't buy it, and that would hurt Microsoft a lot more than this patent war hurts when Microsoft loses.
Within 50 years we should have commercial fusion energy already. It's also nuclear energy, but it doesn't require uranium. I know that 50 years is what they said 50 years ago, but there has been a lot of progress since. We already have fusion reactors now, which I think we didn't have 50 years ago.
> the weather is not suitable for bike riding about 250 days per year. Then what do you do?
As a around-the-year-bike-rider I have to disagree with that. Yeah, it snows here, it is freezing cold in the winters and hot as hell in the summers and the city where I live is the second most rainiest in my country, but that hasn't stopped me. It is just a matter of an attitude. If you say that "is not an option" you clearly don't have the attitude and by all means, don't do it. But don't claim that it would be impossible, just because you don't want to do it.
And now back to your question "Then what do you do?": Well that's simple, just drive the bike 115 days a year and the rest of the year use other transportation. Or move closer to your work as I recently did. 115 days is much better than not doing it at all.
> that could specifically target and destroy another virus (ie: aids killing virus)
I agree with the theory, but you probably want to destroy HI-virus. Aids "is a collection of symptoms and infections resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aids
> Genetic research should focus on topics with higher priority for the mankind.
Are you sure this doesn't help? Let's have an example. If we have unkown variables x,y and z and we know that their values are 3,5 and 7, but we don't know which variable has which value. Now, let's assume that we are interesting finding out what is the value for x.
Now, during some unrelated reseach we find out that z = 5. So because of this, we now have less options for the x, which just increased out changes finding out what the x is.
It is the same for the genes, every little peace of information we can gather, will help solving the rest of the remaining mysteries.
> it begins crashing unpredictably, but very rarely. I know that there is a bug, but I have no idea what the trigger is, I have no idea which part of the code contains the bug
You sound like a person who needs a good debugger. Take gdb for example. You can ask your customer to send in the core dump file, which the program produces during the crash, then you load this core dump into gdb and not only will you get the exact location of the crash, you can also check where it was called and what values each variable had.
Allow me to demonstrade how easy this is:
# Enable core dumbs (if not enabled by default) $ ulimit -c unlimited
# Execute program and notice it crash ( this could be done by the customer also, with proper instructions or automation ) $./a.out Floating point exception (core dumped)
# We now have the core dump and a debug version of the program. Start the debugger $ gdb./a.out core
(snip)
Program terminated with signal 8, Arithmetic exception. #0 0x080483eb in main () at b.cpp:5 5 int c = a/b; (gdb) info locals a = 4 b = 0 c = -1209610252 d = -1208343920 (gdb)
And there we have it. The programs crashes in b.cpp, line 5 when assigning a/b into c. info locals reveals that b is zero, which is the cause of the crash.
Oh, and the source code for the b.cpp:
int main() {
int a = 4;
int b = 0;
int c = a/b;// line 5
int d = c;
return 0; }
> Seriously though, why aren't most modern desktop applications portable by design?
I studied programming for about 4 years. Only somewhat relative courses to portability were courses about Java and PHP. After the school I'm quite amazed that there was nothing about wxWidgets, or SDL or any other library that allows programmers to create portable applications easily, and still maintain the look of the native application.
Slashdot Mirror
> Most native North American Indians were not shot or killed, they died of European diseases
Perhaps most died, but not all of them. Some of them are still alive. Individuals die, the race usually survives. At least 10% of it. Even HIV couldn't kill us all, some are already resistant to it.
It means that American companies will fall behind on the market, so they need cut costs -> Less jobs -> More poor -> More crimes -> Less tax dollars -> Less education -> Less people buying stuff from American companies -> Less Jobs -> More poor -> More crimes -> Eventually the USA will fall, like Soviet Union.
Someone predicted the fall of USA some years ago to happen in the year of 2025. But once Bush was elected to be a president, he adjusted his estimation down to 2020. And then Bush was re-elected...
> There are several IDE's for programming on a linux system.
Code::Blocks is quite decent for that purpose and I personally use it. With other things, it offers a visual debugger (you can add brake points to the code and then step the code in the code view line by line and see the values of the variables). This is with the latest svn build at least. Haven't tried the stable version. http://www.codeblocks.org/
> you're just creating another monoculture, and push a free-only view; which is, to my mind, just as bad
Do you know what is the difference between Microsoft monoculture and open source monoculture?
I give you a hint. The other has huge license costs and you have to like what you get. And the other doesn't have license costs and if you don't like something, you can always either fix it yourself, ask anyone else to fix it or pay anyone to fix it for you. Please note the term "anyone". It is very importan word in this case. Imagine that you would live in New York. Let's say that you need to product every day. Let it be milk or bread or what ever. Now imagine these two alternatives:
a) There would be only one shop selling those products. No-one else could sell them.
b) __Anyone__ could sell those products and there would be a lot of shops selling them. You could even make those products by yourself.
Now, here we have two monocultures, a) and b), Do they still sound just as bad?
Why remove the name when you can replace it with some other name, e.g. Steve Jobs.
FTFA: "Measurements showed that the setup could transfer energy with 40% efficiently across the gap."
> In the navy ... hmm I've kind of painted myself into a corner there...
./configure before make.
> Come on now, people, make && make install
> In the navy, in the navy
>
That is just because you forgot to run
You probably have a corrupted profile. Try with a new profile. That usually fixes crashes like that.
I remember seeing studies that showed that users experienced with Microsoft Office and users with no experience, both learn faster how to use OpenOffice, when compared to new version of Microsoft Office. I also have found OpenOffice much more intuitive to use.
So it would be smarter to move to OpenOffice, rather than upgrade Microsoft Office.
"linux more secure than windows" 9210 results
I think we have a winner.
I think all Slashdot readers should read that article. After all it tells you how to write good _comments_.
I think they also count coupons that offer you a discount to the product as sold. This is what happened with Vista (except discount was 100% if I remember correctly).
> What's more likely is that tales of dragons grew out of another animal
I bulieve that tales grew out from volcanos.
People see a volcano. Mostly when they have seen a moving object, it has been an animal, so at first, they suspect that moving is caused by an animal. They start wondering what kind of an animal could live in a big mountain like and the appearance of a dragon starts to build up.
> Firefox users want a browser that displays webpages. A browser that is fast...
> Adding a whole new bookmarks system is nice, but does the user-base need it ?
You obviously are not a programmer who understand xml parsing and knows SQLite very well. Well as I happen to be such a programmer, let me just tell you that I can pretty well guarantee to you that switching to SQLite will make the browser faster. Most like it will also decrease the amount of needed memory.
Reasons for this:
- SQLite is very light database. Basicly it is just component that can be used to write and read a file, but searching a certain element(s) in the file is very fast compared to normal read methods.
- Reading xml files or similar, as the current bookmakrs.htm file is, is very slow and it requires a lot of memory. This is because you first need to parse the html tree and after that you will get the actual data from the file. It is very good if you have only few items in the file, but if you have thousands bookmarks like some people do, it will get slow.
So basicly they are just removing the bloat and making the browser faster.
> Don't forget that at the moment, Windows is also cheaper to support. T
Dell offers only hardware support. For software issues they ask you to turn to the Linux community, or you can buy support from Canonical. So support is not the issue with the price.
> Most windows users know how to load a new driver
No they don't. They call me and ask me to do it for them.
You too?!
Perhaps Microsoft is just trying to get our attention away from the Vista sale numbers with these "news". If people would see how badly the Vista is really selling, they probably wouldn't buy it, and that would hurt Microsoft a lot more than this patent war hurts when Microsoft loses.
Within 50 years we should have commercial fusion energy already. It's also nuclear energy, but it doesn't require uranium. I know that 50 years is what they said 50 years ago, but there has been a lot of progress since. We already have fusion reactors now, which I think we didn't have 50 years ago.
> To be fair and to hold to the principles of science we simply cannot say that with certainty.
s ter
The same goes for unicorns, monsters and of course the famours, greator of all like, the Flying Spaghetti Monster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Mon
That is why the science world doesn't bulieve in anything, where we don't have scientific proofs. They COULD exist, but they don't, untill proven so.
> the weather is not suitable for bike riding about 250 days per year. Then what do you do?
As a around-the-year-bike-rider I have to disagree with that. Yeah, it snows here, it is freezing cold in the winters and hot as hell in the summers and the city where I live is the second most rainiest in my country, but that hasn't stopped me. It is just a matter of an attitude. If you say that "is not an option" you clearly don't have the attitude and by all means, don't do it. But don't claim that it would be impossible, just because you don't want to do it.
And now back to your question "Then what do you do?": Well that's simple, just drive the bike 115 days a year and the rest of the year use other transportation. Or move closer to your work as I recently did. 115 days is much better than not doing it at all.
> that could specifically target and destroy another virus (ie: aids killing virus)
I agree with the theory, but you probably want to destroy HI-virus. Aids "is a collection of symptoms and infections resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aids
> Genetic research should focus on topics with higher priority for the mankind.
Are you sure this doesn't help? Let's have an example. If we have unkown variables x,y and z and we know that their values are 3,5 and 7, but we don't know which variable has which value. Now, let's assume that we are interesting finding out what is the value for x.
Now, during some unrelated reseach we find out that z = 5. So because of this, we now have less options for the x, which just increased out changes finding out what the x is.
It is the same for the genes, every little peace of information we can gather, will help solving the rest of the remaining mysteries.
> it begins crashing unpredictably, but very rarely. I know that there is a bug, but I have no idea what the trigger is, I have no idea which part of the code contains the bug
./a.out
./a.out core
// line 5
You sound like a person who needs a good debugger. Take gdb for example. You can ask your customer to send in the core dump file, which the program produces during the crash, then you load this core dump into gdb and not only will you get the exact location of the crash, you can also check where it was called and what values each variable had.
Allow me to demonstrade how easy this is:
# Enable core dumbs (if not enabled by default)
$ ulimit -c unlimited
# Execute program and notice it crash ( this could be done by the customer also, with proper instructions or automation )
$
Floating point exception (core dumped)
# We now have the core dump and a debug version of the program. Start the debugger
$ gdb
(snip)
Program terminated with signal 8, Arithmetic exception.
#0 0x080483eb in main () at b.cpp:5
5 int c = a/b;
(gdb) info locals
a = 4
b = 0
c = -1209610252
d = -1208343920
(gdb)
And there we have it. The programs crashes in b.cpp, line 5 when assigning a/b into c. info locals reveals that b is zero, which is the cause of the crash.
Oh, and the source code for the b.cpp:
int main()
{
int a = 4;
int b = 0;
int c = a/b;
int d = c;
return 0;
}
> Seriously though, why aren't most modern desktop applications portable by design?
I studied programming for about 4 years. Only somewhat relative courses to portability were courses about Java and PHP. After the school I'm quite amazed that there was nothing about wxWidgets, or SDL or any other library that allows programmers to create portable applications easily, and still maintain the look of the native application.