At this point, his behavior is basically like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater: he is giving politicians and corporations an excuse to claim that there is scientific disagreement when, for practical purposes, there isn't.
If he wants to engage in a scientific debate, he can express himself in cautious, technical terms, like scientists with non-mainstream views have always done. But to challenge scientific mainstream opinion on such an important matter using plain language means that he is either seeking controversy or simply a shill.
Death threats are never acceptable, but comparing him to a holocaust denier seems justified to me.
It's too bad that Linus decided to try to treat the GNOME people with patches and code fixes.
That is indeed "too bad", because the ability to supply patches and add code should not drive GUI design decisions. I don't want to use a GUI developed by a kernel hacker.
instead of just helping out with the KDE project where his energy and enthusiasm would have been well recieved
Yeah, if Linus took his opinions and patches elsewhere, that would indeed be best for everybody involved.
It doesn't take any arrogance, all it takes is the ability to say "No" and not feel like you need to justify your answer to every code monkey who thinks it is his job to challenge you rather then implement the functionality you requested of them.
Sadly, Linux for embedded mobile devices risks becoming marginalized by a repeat of the 'desktop wars': several incompatible implementations of some pretty basic services which
And this is different from Symbian, how?
so QTopia devices require QT for the UI (and lock out GTK+ applications) and GTK+ devices do the converse
That's incorrect; GPE is based on X11, and it can run Qt applications. Furthermore, the amount of space the Qt libraries take is not that large.
QTopia (which is probably the most mature right now, but costs $$$)
I think this is pretty much the deciding factor: QTopia is little different in terms of licensing from Symbian or WinCE; we don't need another proprietary phone OS. GPE on Linux is a fully open source and free phone OS.
People like Stallman, Torvalds, or van Rossum are not the nicest or easiest people to get along with. Nor, for that matter, are commercial software leaders like Jobs or Gates. It takes a certain degree of focus and arrogance to lead big software projects and to make the tough decisions that need to be made.
On the other hand, malcontents are often malcontent for good reason--look at the dispute over the Xfree86/X.org split. Sometimes,someone who is an effective leader on one project is making a nuisance of himself on another, like when Torvalds was interfering with the Gnome project.
So, it's OK for open source project leaders to dismiss "malcontents" and focus. On the other hand, those "malcontents" are often going to be right and justified, and they may fork your project and make you irrelevant.
I have several computers with Firefox installed, not suffered issues with bookmark syncing (I barely add more bookmarks -- could be a reason). I'm particularly pleased with how well it syncs passwords and cookies.
Well, I have several thousand bookmarks and I change them frequently. I've ended up with duplications, deletions, and other problems.
I don't synchronize passwords or cookies; that's really a privacy issue to me.
Maybe you should raise your concerns with Google? Provide them feedback.
I have, but there has been no response.
I think the most useful change to Google Browser Sync would be to select synchronization per-folder. I really only want a small set of common bookmarks synchronized.
I've had problems with it not doing the right thing when used from several computers or when used with other extensions that use bookmarks. It also seems to slow down some operations significantly. In the end, I removed it; I think it still needs work.
Maybe the future is something more like "write once, run anywhere".
Yeah, too bad that any attempt at that so far has been an abject failure. This was the big promise of Java, and Java code does not work predictably across platforms, even after Sun essentially abandoned the desktop and focused on the much simpler domain of server-side applications.
Well, technically, you may well be able to leave the UK without one, you'd probably just not be able to re-enter. So, leaving without a passport may not make much sense for most people.
But I suspect that there may be situations where you can get away with it (emergency travel, emigration, etc.).
No, it's because the UK has never agreed to accept the passport control part of the Schengen agreement.
That's not a reason, that's a cause. The reason the UK didn't agree to this is because of the equivocation in UK over personal identification.
The irony of it all is that UK citizens think they are protecting democracy and individual rights by their contrarian stance vis-a-vis the rest of Europe, yet they are doing the opposite. In the 21st century, it's the UK that has trouble with privacy, democracy, and individual rights. The glorious days of opposition to fascist states are long over; even nations seem to become what they hate.
Personally, I'm paranoid and don't like the idea of ID cards or 24/7 surveillance in anybodies hands.
ID cards are a mechanism by which people can reduce the need for centralized databases and surveillance. In fact, without ID cards, you pretty much need centralized databases.
I pray that the Netherlands, Germany and Austria never fall under a regime where this might be a problem. Luckily it has never happened before. Oh... actually... nevermind... (praying even harder)
Continental Europe has learned its lessons from the 30's. Apparently, the US and UK are hell-bent on living through the experience personally.
Let's call a spade a spade: the UK is among the most fascist and right wing states in Europe right now.
OK, so maybe that's because the UK doesn't have a national ID program. For travel in continental Europe, and I think even for continental Europeans coming to the UK, a national ID suffices.
The surveillance state is relevant, as their is the likelihood that it will all be integrated into a single database.
Most European nations have had ID cards and passports for decades. Many nations have required background checks in order to obtain visas. But none of that information was available centrally--the ID, passport, and visa were the proof and result of the checks. In fact, it has been the very existence of the ID system that has made keeping a central database unnecessary because the various IDs themselves function as evidence that the checks were performed.
The problem in the UK is that the UK government is trying to push through a central database along with a national ID system and the passport.
The UK should adopt a national ID system because it is necessary for privacy. It should then also pass privacy legislation that prohibits that data from being centrally collected and made available.
Basically, yes. For the visa waiver program, the US requires biometric identification, as well as background checks, and that both triggered and is driving this effort.
If a person in country A wants to travel to country B, then country B is certainly justified in demanding assurances from country A that that person is not going to cause problems in country B. It is reasonable, therefore, that country A does a detailed background check and documents that background check; that can be either part of the passport application or part of a separate visa process. Furthermore, the nature and depth of that background check is largely determined by the requirements of country B. These requirements pretty universally include sufficient financial resources and an unblemished police record.
So, yes, the UK looks like it's turning into a surveillance state, but that's an internal matter in the UK, unrelated to either national IDs or the issuance of passports. Requiring background checks in order to travel to other countries is justified and unrelated. UK citizenship does not confer the right to travel to other countries, and other countries who consider the UK background checks unnecessary can still choose to admit you without a passport (like the nations of the EU do, for example).
Notice that the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria all are listed as blue/green countries in the Privacy International map, while the UK and the US, both nations with no national ID system, are in the red/black zone.
Overall, national ID cards by themselves don't threaten privacy, inadequate privacy legislation, tolerance of governmental intrusion into privacy, and tolerance of legal abuse of private information threaten privacy.
Curiously, all the fuss raised over national ID card systems usually come from same governments and political groups that then turn around and commit massive invasions of privacy and civil rights. I think they are actually simply using the national ID "debates" to bamboozle and distract people while they quietly realize their real agendas of a total surveillance state.
And they keep using that strategy elsewhere: they keep talking about less intrusive government, privacy rights, and states rights, but then turn around and create legislation that reaches into people's bedrooms and substance use. They keep talking about reducing the size of government, self-reliance, free markets, and fiscal conservatism, but bankrupt the government with bloating the size of the military, create artificial and unjustified monopolies through ill-conceived modifications to the copyright and patent systems, and waste billions on government handouts to their buddies in industry.
The national ID card debates are political strategy by people who don't have your interests at heart. Cut through the crap, participate in the democratic process, and deal with the real issues.
But in a small business with no dedicated IT people, or one who has worked with Windows his whole life, the investment of time and effort to figure out which distro to use and how to use it could very well be unrealistic.
Let me help you there: use Ubuntu with the default install. It will do everything you need. (So will most of the other well-known Linux distros, but you wanted a simple answer and if you want a simple answer, the differences won't matter to you).
These are exactly the businesses that Apple could make real inroads into, if it chose to... the unique aspect of Macs is that they can save time and effort even for people who don't know that much about them.
Configuring and installing a Mac is a lot more work than configuring and installing an Ubuntu system; I know from first hand experience. The Ubuntu system will have everything you need for business use, including the office suite, installed and running out of the box and everything is upgraded automatically and consistently.
OK. How many enterprises customize linux when they deploy it?
All of them. They "customize" it by picking the right distribution for their needs and they "customize" it by picking the hardware that meets their specific needs. For OS X, they get one OS distribution and four different kinds of machines to choose from, all from a single vendor, and that's not enough.
And in any corporate environment, after purchase, there are plenty of customizations related to system and network management that are necessary and that Linux supports far better than OS X. In fact, every place I have ever worked has wiped off vendor pre-installed Windows and replaced it with an in-house version. That's what buyers of business systems have to do.
Its not really a feature if the user/buyer don't care.
Even if we assume, just for the sake of argument, that OS X is "enterprise ready", the fact that Apple hardware comes from a single company makes Macintosh an unacceptable choice. The fact that that company also has a very limited product range makes it even less feasible.
Outing an anonymous blogger can be, but video taping customers coming into your advertising department and then using those videos to identify and out them is never justified. That has nothing to do with bloggers or anonymity or anything else, it is a fundamental breach of trust. I'm sure the company regrets it because any sane person would refuse to do business with a company that behaves that way.
TFA specifically mentions that you need to mark up your code with sieves:
TFA claims it's auto-parallelizing and says:
What Sieve is is a C++ compiler that will take a section of code and parallelize it for you with a minimum hassle. All you really need to do is take the code you want to run across multiple CPUs and put beginning and end tags on the parts you want to run in parallel.
If "sieves" have all the restrictions you mention, then both the claim that it's "auto-parallelizing" and the description in the article are false advertising.
The compiler can use this information to decide what parts of the code can safely be parallelized.
No, that's also misleading. You don't give the compiler information based on which it decides what is safe. Rather, you simply tell the compiler to parallelize a section using language semantics that differ radically from C++ and it blindly does it. We've had such C and C++ extensions for many years. It may be the best possible design tradeoff in C++, but it is not new and it certainly isn't "auto-parallelizing".
Design by Contract, writing pre- and post-conditions on functions, seemed like straightforward common sense to me.
Yes, it is, and that's why everybody does it. It simply isn't called "design by contract" by most people, since it isn't actually design and isn't a contract. You also don't need language support for it. And people generally do this sort of thing in two parts: some conditions are always checked, but most are only checked in test frameworks.
Slashdot Mirror
At this point, his behavior is basically like shouting "fire" in a crowded theater: he is giving politicians and corporations an excuse to claim that there is scientific disagreement when, for practical purposes, there isn't.
If he wants to engage in a scientific debate, he can express himself in cautious, technical terms, like scientists with non-mainstream views have always done. But to challenge scientific mainstream opinion on such an important matter using plain language means that he is either seeking controversy or simply a shill.
Death threats are never acceptable, but comparing him to a holocaust denier seems justified to me.
It's too bad that Linus decided to try to treat the GNOME people with patches and code fixes.
That is indeed "too bad", because the ability to supply patches and add code should not drive GUI design decisions. I don't want to use a GUI developed by a kernel hacker.
instead of just helping out with the KDE project where his energy and enthusiasm would have been well recieved
Yeah, if Linus took his opinions and patches elsewhere, that would indeed be best for everybody involved.
It doesn't take any arrogance, all it takes is the ability to say "No" and not feel like you need to justify your answer to every code monkey who thinks it is his job to challenge you rather then implement the functionality you requested of them.
Thank you for illustrating my point.
Sadly, Linux for embedded mobile devices risks becoming marginalized by a repeat of the 'desktop wars': several incompatible implementations of some pretty basic services which
And this is different from Symbian, how?
so QTopia devices require QT for the UI (and lock out GTK+ applications) and GTK+ devices do the converse
That's incorrect; GPE is based on X11, and it can run Qt applications. Furthermore, the amount of space the Qt libraries take is not that large.
QTopia (which is probably the most mature right now, but costs $$$)
I think this is pretty much the deciding factor: QTopia is little different in terms of licensing from Symbian or WinCE; we don't need another proprietary phone OS. GPE on Linux is a fully open source and free phone OS.
People like Stallman, Torvalds, or van Rossum are not the nicest or easiest people to get along with. Nor, for that matter, are commercial software leaders like Jobs or Gates. It takes a certain degree of focus and arrogance to lead big software projects and to make the tough decisions that need to be made.
On the other hand, malcontents are often malcontent for good reason--look at the dispute over the Xfree86/X.org split. Sometimes,someone who is an effective leader on one project is making a nuisance of himself on another, like when Torvalds was interfering with the Gnome project.
So, it's OK for open source project leaders to dismiss "malcontents" and focus. On the other hand, those "malcontents" are often going to be right and justified, and they may fork your project and make you irrelevant.
Have you verified that the encryption and synchronization protocol are designed correctly?
I hope IBM will be doing some more of that.
I have several computers with Firefox installed, not suffered issues with bookmark syncing (I barely add more bookmarks -- could be a reason). I'm particularly pleased with how well it syncs passwords and cookies.
Well, I have several thousand bookmarks and I change them frequently. I've ended up with duplications, deletions, and other problems.
I don't synchronize passwords or cookies; that's really a privacy issue to me.
Maybe you should raise your concerns with Google? Provide them feedback.
I have, but there has been no response.
I think the most useful change to Google Browser Sync would be to select synchronization per-folder. I really only want a small set of common bookmarks synchronized.
I've had problems with it not doing the right thing when used from several computers or when used with other extensions that use bookmarks. It also seems to slow down some operations significantly. In the end, I removed it; I think it still needs work.
Maybe the future is something more like "write once, run anywhere".
Yeah, too bad that any attempt at that so far has been an abject failure. This was the big promise of Java, and Java code does not work predictably across platforms, even after Sun essentially abandoned the desktop and focused on the much simpler domain of server-side applications.
Well, technically, you may well be able to leave the UK without one, you'd probably just not be able to re-enter. So, leaving without a passport may not make much sense for most people.
But I suspect that there may be situations where you can get away with it (emergency travel, emigration, etc.).
No, it's because the UK has never agreed to accept the passport control part of the Schengen agreement.
That's not a reason, that's a cause. The reason the UK didn't agree to this is because of the equivocation in UK over personal identification.
The irony of it all is that UK citizens think they are protecting democracy and individual rights by their contrarian stance vis-a-vis the rest of Europe, yet they are doing the opposite. In the 21st century, it's the UK that has trouble with privacy, democracy, and individual rights. The glorious days of opposition to fascist states are long over; even nations seem to become what they hate.
Personally, I'm paranoid and don't like the idea of ID cards or 24/7 surveillance in anybodies hands.
ID cards are a mechanism by which people can reduce the need for centralized databases and surveillance. In fact, without ID cards, you pretty much need centralized databases.
I pray that the Netherlands, Germany and Austria never fall under a regime where this might be a problem. Luckily it has never happened before. Oh... actually... nevermind... (praying even harder)
Continental Europe has learned its lessons from the 30's. Apparently, the US and UK are hell-bent on living through the experience personally.
Let's call a spade a spade: the UK is among the most fascist and right wing states in Europe right now.
Sure, technically they "can" switch to other hardware providers, and they're "not supposed" to sole source, but most of them won't.
It doesn't matter whether they are actually buying anywhere else, it matters that they have the option.
We still need passports to go to EU countries.
OK, so maybe that's because the UK doesn't have a national ID program. For travel in continental Europe, and I think even for continental Europeans coming to the UK, a national ID suffices.
The surveillance state is relevant, as their is the likelihood that it will all be integrated into a single database.
Most European nations have had ID cards and passports for decades. Many nations have required background checks in order to obtain visas. But none of that information was available centrally--the ID, passport, and visa were the proof and result of the checks. In fact, it has been the very existence of the ID system that has made keeping a central database unnecessary because the various IDs themselves function as evidence that the checks were performed.
The problem in the UK is that the UK government is trying to push through a central database along with a national ID system and the passport.
The UK should adopt a national ID system because it is necessary for privacy. It should then also pass privacy legislation that prohibits that data from being centrally collected and made available.
Basically, yes. For the visa waiver program, the US requires biometric identification, as well as background checks, and that both triggered and is driving this effort.
If a person in country A wants to travel to country B, then country B is certainly justified in demanding assurances from country A that that person is not going to cause problems in country B. It is reasonable, therefore, that country A does a detailed background check and documents that background check; that can be either part of the passport application or part of a separate visa process. Furthermore, the nature and depth of that background check is largely determined by the requirements of country B. These requirements pretty universally include sufficient financial resources and an unblemished police record.
So, yes, the UK looks like it's turning into a surveillance state, but that's an internal matter in the UK, unrelated to either national IDs or the issuance of passports. Requiring background checks in order to travel to other countries is justified and unrelated. UK citizenship does not confer the right to travel to other countries, and other countries who consider the UK background checks unnecessary can still choose to admit you without a passport (like the nations of the EU do, for example).
Notice that the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria all are listed as blue/green countries in the Privacy International map, while the UK and the US, both nations with no national ID system, are in the red/black zone.
Overall, national ID cards by themselves don't threaten privacy, inadequate privacy legislation, tolerance of governmental intrusion into privacy, and tolerance of legal abuse of private information threaten privacy.
Curiously, all the fuss raised over national ID card systems usually come from same governments and political groups that then turn around and commit massive invasions of privacy and civil rights. I think they are actually simply using the national ID "debates" to bamboozle and distract people while they quietly realize their real agendas of a total surveillance state.
And they keep using that strategy elsewhere: they keep talking about less intrusive government, privacy rights, and states rights, but then turn around and create legislation that reaches into people's bedrooms and substance use. They keep talking about reducing the size of government, self-reliance, free markets, and fiscal conservatism, but bankrupt the government with bloating the size of the military, create artificial and unjustified monopolies through ill-conceived modifications to the copyright and patent systems, and waste billions on government handouts to their buddies in industry.
The national ID card debates are political strategy by people who don't have your interests at heart. Cut through the crap, participate in the democratic process, and deal with the real issues.
But in a small business with no dedicated IT people, or one who has worked with Windows his whole life, the investment of time and effort to figure out which distro to use and how to use it could very well be unrealistic.
Let me help you there: use Ubuntu with the default install. It will do everything you need. (So will most of the other well-known Linux distros, but you wanted a simple answer and if you want a simple answer, the differences won't matter to you).
These are exactly the businesses that Apple could make real inroads into, if it chose to... the unique aspect of Macs is that they can save time and effort even for people who don't know that much about them.
Configuring and installing a Mac is a lot more work than configuring and installing an Ubuntu system; I know from first hand experience. The Ubuntu system will have everything you need for business use, including the office suite, installed and running out of the box and everything is upgraded automatically and consistently.
Is the same for Linux, OS X, Solaris or CICS, at least from the standpoint of a workforce who has used nothing other than Windows.
Linux can emulate the Windows UI so closely that users probably have a harder time moving from XP to Vista than from XP to Linux.
OK. How many enterprises customize linux when they deploy it?
All of them. They "customize" it by picking the right distribution for their needs and they "customize" it by picking the hardware that meets their specific needs. For OS X, they get one OS distribution and four different kinds of machines to choose from, all from a single vendor, and that's not enough.
And in any corporate environment, after purchase, there are plenty of customizations related to system and network management that are necessary and that Linux supports far better than OS X. In fact, every place I have ever worked has wiped off vendor pre-installed Windows and replaced it with an in-house version. That's what buyers of business systems have to do.
Its not really a feature if the user/buyer don't care.
But they do.
Even if we assume, just for the sake of argument, that OS X is "enterprise ready", the fact that Apple hardware comes from a single company makes Macintosh an unacceptable choice. The fact that that company also has a very limited product range makes it even less feasible.
Outing an anonymous blogger can be, but video taping customers coming into your advertising department and then using those videos to identify and out them is never justified. That has nothing to do with bloggers or anonymity or anything else, it is a fundamental breach of trust. I'm sure the company regrets it because any sane person would refuse to do business with a company that behaves that way.
TFA claims it's auto-parallelizing and says:
If "sieves" have all the restrictions you mention, then both the claim that it's "auto-parallelizing" and the description in the article are false advertising.
The compiler can use this information to decide what parts of the code can safely be parallelized.
No, that's also misleading. You don't give the compiler information based on which it decides what is safe. Rather, you simply tell the compiler to parallelize a section using language semantics that differ radically from C++ and it blindly does it. We've had such C and C++ extensions for many years. It may be the best possible design tradeoff in C++, but it is not new and it certainly isn't "auto-parallelizing".
Design by Contract, writing pre- and post-conditions on functions, seemed like straightforward common sense to me.
Yes, it is, and that's why everybody does it. It simply isn't called "design by contract" by most people, since it isn't actually design and isn't a contract. You also don't need language support for it. And people generally do this sort of thing in two parts: some conditions are always checked, but most are only checked in test frameworks.