Decades ago, the engineers did in fact consider 128 bit addresses, but in the end they went with 32 specifically because v4 was not considered a "production" version. There's a link on the wikipedia page for ipv6 to a video with vint cerf explaining exactly that.

If this means that they're going to fix Unity's usability, then I'm all for it. Otherwise, meh.

Knock knock!
Who's there?
HIPAA.
HIPAA who?
Sorry, I'm not allowed to say.

Academic purist discovers that one of the most prolific and successful database users in the world is using a system he doesn't approve of. He decides, with no insider knowledge at all, and despite all evidence to the contrary, that they should throw everything away and start over from scratch using a system that he thinks would allow them to see the performance and scalability that they've already achieved.

Presumably he's tired of Facebook being used as a counter-example to everything he's been preaching.

Do you really think they make nothing but weapons? I mean, really?

That's essentially the same question as asking how people could have the moral dysfunction necessary to work for boeing (they make the apache helicopter, you know).

Raytheon makes a pretty large percentage of the aircraft used by general aviation and some commuter airlines, for example.

Come on now. These are adults.

It's worth pointing out that NAU has more of an "at home" feel to it than most colleges you've heard of. It's less of a university, and more of a local school. Call it 13th grade.

In fact, Northern Arizona University has about half the number of students as Mesa Community College.

Gizmo uses SIP, and there's no shortage of SIP clients for Linux that are better maintained and more consistently compatible with Linux's ever-changing audio interface. Don't be silenced, but don't riot either.

Are you seriously going to sit there and argue that open source is a sheer meritocracy with a straight face? Okay. Here are 4 examples:

These aren't examples of discrimination, these are examples of people making comments you find offensive. I don't think anyone argues that OSS is a "sheer meritocracy" -- there's far too much politics and ego-stroking for that to be the case. However, one consideration that is never actually considered is gender.

Have you ever been denied SVN commit access because you're a girl? Has your memory management patch been rejected because you weren't a man? Has anyone refused to explain to you the difference between covariance and contravariance because it's a "boys only" secret?

Be prepared to be offended. OSS has a "hobby" feel to it for most people, and as such there's an informality that makes people feel that they can let go of the business-like social inhibitions that are so often in place to prevent offending the sensibilities of the separate cultures that make up an audience. You get it unfiltered, and you might not like what makes it through.

Yours isn't the only culture that gets lampooned; it's just the only one you care about. If you were a deeply religious person, for example, you may be severely offended by the irreverent treatment of what you hold so dear by the proselyting atheists who make up a disproportionate amount of the community. And there are many other examples.

But if you have real examples of actual discrimination, of opportunities denied because of your gender, then there is a real problem that needs examination. However, if you're just offended, well then hello and welcome to the Internet.

So your world is divided into "people who agree with me" and "mindless zombies".

I think that's a bit of a stretch, don't you?

Miguel's argument: RMS attacked me, but he's also famously attacked many of the most important players in bringing parts of his ultimate dream to reality. Conclusion: RMS's has an unproductive penchant for attacking people in his speaking and writing, including his own allies, if they don't subscribe to all of his philosophies.

Your interpretation: People who don't agree with me are mindless zombies.

A bit of a stretch, you must admit.

> I think .Net is a platform with technical merit
I have yet to see it. Really.

Might I suggest that you have yet to look?

C# and the CIL bring to the table:

• Language independance: Build a class in Python, call it from Ruby. This is available today, not in the theoretical future.
• Functional programming: lambda expressions, etc., conspicuously missing from java
• Declarative programming: Linq -- seems like a silly idea until you've used it a few times, and you see how it can drastically improve performance on the back end, and code quality on the front end.
• Your choice of strongly typed and dynamically typed mechanisms: Build a class using strongly typed semantics in the interest of verifiability, but make use of it in a dynamically typed application in the interest of development speed.
• Speed: C# apps run nearly as fast as complied C; indistinguishable in many important cases.

If mono hadn't been an implementation of a standard proposed by Microsoft, it would have been hailed as god's gift to programmers.

He has no idea what the relationship between C#, CLR, .NET, and Mono is.

So you disagree with RMS: fine. But you're doing yourself a grave disservice by dismissing him as someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. Love him or hate him, he's a sharp guy who knows his stuff.

Stallman is a sharp guy who knows lots of stuff. But that doesn't mean he knows this stuff. RMS has a proud history of running on about things he disagrees with on principle without taking the time to fully understand them.

No one can be expected to understand everything about everything, and restricting someone with views as strong as RMS to only talking about things he fully understands would be an unacceptable handicap.

There most definitely is a logical argument. In a word: patents.

Not really. You're just as likely to run afoul of a MS patent (even one relating to the .NET project) while working with Java or C. While patents are indeed a serious problem, the risk is not any greater using Mono.

MS already tried one legal tack to go after OSS, namely the SCO lawsuit. There's no reason to think they wouldn't try another.

The SCO lawsuit was perpetrated by SCO, not Microsoft. While MS was happy to see it happen, they weren't behind it, and contrary to some /. conjecture, weren't funding it.

Perhaps you're thinking of something else?

May I be the first to say "amen"? I've been very dissatisfied with the 2.6 kernel and its schedulers on the desktop, CFS in particular. CFS seems entirely braindead for desktop use compared to the older schedulers in 2.4 and yes, even 2.2.

Oh yeah, and which other scheduler's, if any, did this guy write?

Actually, he wrote CFS. Or rather, he wrote the original implementation of CFS. Ingo Molnar re-wrote his implementation and announced it as if he had come up with the idea. At least, from Con's perspective that's what happened. That's why he left Linux development, and why he has no intention of trying to get his scheduler into mainline.

This post is the utmost of absurdity. You create a strawman that is an awful piece of code, and then talk about why it sucks -- well, yeah it sucks, you deliberately crafted it to be so.

I realize that no one is going to read this now, but FWIW, here's an actual example from one of the most well-respected python projects in circulation:

def render_to_response(*args, **kwargs):
"""
Returns a HttpResponse whose content is filled with the result of calling
django.template.loader.render_to_string() with the passed arguments.
"""
httpresponse_kwargs = {'mimetype': kwargs.pop('mimetype', None)}
return HttpResponse(loader.render_to_string(*args, **kwargs), **httpresponse_kwargs)

You recognize it? Yep, that's one of the most commonly used functions in the Django project.

Sheriff Joe has been in an ever-escalating power-war with the rest of the government in the various cities, counties, and state of Arizona. In the past few weeks, the plot has slightly thickened as there has recently been some evidence of, and outcry regarding, misconduct on the part of the Sheriff's office in regards to personal use of state funds. I won't bore you with the details, but the reaction of the Sheriff's office hasn't been one that, shall we say, increases public safety.

I can't even imagine why the Sheriff's office would want to seize the records relating to law enforcement within the state, but I'm sure he has a Very Good Reason.