horli - Slashdot User

Comment Nobody read him actually (Score 2, Insightful) 951

by horli on Tuesday February 10, 2009 @06:13AM (#26795185) Attached to: Darwinism Must Die So Evolution Can Live

The problem with Darwin is that nobody actually read his books but everybody is talking about him. Therefore he is one of the most misunderstood man in history.
It is the same with Slashdot, everybody comments on stories they didn't read. Including me right now :-)

Comment Re:Uninstall what you don't want from Windows too (Score 1) 746

by horli on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @02:25PM (#26549171) Attached to: Is Microsoft Improving Its Image?

I've just installed the
latest Debian on an very old HP Vectra 100 Mhz CPU, 64 MB RAM with 2GB HDD. It is controlling my house heating and runs nice with a modern programming language / editor (IDE) etc. Please advice me how i can do this with Windows XP or VISTA.

Comment Re:Make the Egg so we can get the chicken. (Score 2, Informative) 232

by horli on Friday January 16, 2009 @02:59AM (#26479169) Attached to: PC Sales Slump Over Economic Crisis

Using processes or threads is an implementation detail and there is no difference in the fundamental logical problem of shared state and data.
Sure processes are better isolated, but the problem of time and concurrency stays.
This will always be a problem because it is a fundamental logical one, comming from mother nature.

SICP has an good examples of that problem: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-23.html#%25_sec_3.4

Functional programming may be an answer, but this answer is limited by mother nature.

Comment Re:Make the Egg so we can get the chicken. (Score 5, Informative) 232

by horli on Thursday January 15, 2009 @03:53PM (#26471943) Attached to: PC Sales Slump Over Economic Crisis

Two fundamental points are missing:

4. There are computing-jobs that are inherently not parallel.

5. Parallel programming is hard not because of bad programming languages but because of the logical problems that come with shared state and parallelism.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-23.html#%25_idx_3598

Therefore multicores do not bring a substantial performance benefit. Futhermore because the problems are fundamental logical ones, there is no big hope.

Comment Re:Rail, no thanks (Score 2, Insightful) 897

by horli on Saturday December 27, 2008 @03:00AM (#26239959) Attached to: Can the Auto Industry Retool Itself To Build Rails?

You forget that you have a power outlet and a table at each seat in the train. Therefore I can connect my notebook and work 6-8 hours instead of stupid driving. If I bring in those working hours in the equitation, car and plane has financially lost. While working, those 8 hours are going by that fast, I even don't realize them. Furthermore there is a nice dining car in the train with excellent food. (in Europe) Space and comfort is much more generous in the train than car or plane.

Getting Inked for Tux at OSCON 108

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @08:32PM from the mama-with-a-heart-is-so-last-century dept.

OSCON isn't just a gathering for talks on topics like Creating Location-aware Web 2.0 Applications on an Open Source Geospatial Platform and fightin' words from the stage; it's also an excuse for some interesting social gatherings, like this year's Community Choice awards (organized and sponsored by the corporate overlords at SourceForge, as you might recall, and with Slashdot's own special category), at which, among other festive activities, attendees were offered the chance to get open-source-related tattoos. There are shots of some of these up on the SourceForge Community pages, and — with some overlap — even more in this set at Flickr. (My pasty bicep^h^h^h^h^h shoulder is the one now adorned with a circled head of a happy Tux ala IBM; I was expecting it to hurt more than it actually did.) Anyone with techie tattoos, please disclose below.

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