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That's completely wrong. Range Voting consists of adding up the numbers and then taking the average. As anyone knows, that's linear in the number of candidates and votes. Even if you do it by counting "pseudovotes" (this candidate got that many ones, twos, threes, etc up to nines), the granularity of the ballot is a constant, so it's still linear.

As for Condorcet, counting a ballot takes quadratic (0.5*n^2) time with respect to the number of candidates. If A, B, and C are ranked on a ballot, then you just check if A is more highly ranked than B, A more highly ranked than C, and B more highly ranked than C.
Finding out who the winner is is linear in the best case - that there's a candidate who's preferred to all the others one-on-one and that's the first candidate you checked, and quadratic in the worst case if there's still a candidate who's preferred to all the others. If there is a cycle, the methods vary, but in public elections, that would be exceedingly rare. Though for the case of completion, I'll note that most of the good Condorcet methods (like CSSD which Debian uses) are n^3 in the very worst case. In either case, determining the winner once the votes have been totaled up into the matrix takes logarithmic time in terms of the number of ballots (since all you have to do is compare numbers in the matrix or the averages list).

Another advantage with Range or Condorcet is that you can count the ballots where they're gathered and then only transmit a small amount of data (the pairwise counts for Condorcet, or the numerators and denominators for the average for Range), instead of having to count everything at the central place as in IRV.

That it is compulsory in Australia helps to moderate our politics by ensuring that the almost the whole population turns out to vote, not just ultra-motivated special interest groups (churchies, to pick a purely random example).
Too bad about the how-to-vote cards then, no? Though there's nothing about IRV that demands you have to rank absolutely all the candidates, the implementation you have is flawed.

Granted, new languages are unlikely to offer an order-of-magnitude improvement in programmer efficiency, but specific languages are definitely better for some purposes than others. And, if your metric is "conceptual amount of code", newer languages are doing better than old ones. Look at the language shootout... For the gzip size metric -- which is a reasonable approximation for conceptual amount of code -- Ruby is number one, followed closely by Python, Perl, and Javascript. Now if only they performed better...

(I realize the shootout isn't particularly scientific and that the programs are not big, real-world ones, but I don't know of a more complete survey of language performance.)

Upon hearing of the Novell-M$ "interoperability" deal I promptly switched all my SUSE machines to Debian GNU/Linux, and it works great.

I've made a bug at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=458419, debdiff included!

No. You, sir, are full of crap. When you look at what's actually used and widely recognized in the world of Linux (especially for desktops), you'll plainly see that there are several "mainstream" distros that garner the lion's share of attention and represent the vast majority of the installed base:

In no particular order:

(1) Red Hat Linux

(2) Fedora Linux (community bleeding-edge source for Red Hat)

(2) Mandriva Linux (used to be Mandrake)

(3) Ubuntu Linux (plus variants, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc)

(4) SUSE Linux (owned by Novell these days)

(5) Gentoo Linux

Yes, we also have Debian, Slackware and many others that don't necessarily have huge commercial ties, but they're also the base for many commercial distros. You might be using Linux From Scratch, or one of several dozen other random distros with has an installed base of 100 users, but if that's the case you're pretty far from the average desktop or server Linux user.

My Apache logs tell the story pretty well. As Captial One might say, what's in your logfiles?

Good luck getting official support with tripwire on Debian.

Luck has nothing to do with it. Reading the extensive list of consultants categorised by country on the Debian site has everything to do with it.

Becuase I have bittorrent installed to download Mandrake, I *MUST* have illegal things on my machine?

• debian-40r1-i386-DVD-1.iso [1180675963]
• debian-40r1-i386-DVD-2.iso [402297137]
• debian-40r1-i386-DVD-3.iso [24379392]
• debian-40r1-i386-netinst.iso [0]
• debian-update-4.0r1-i386-DVD-1.iso [3342336]
• openSUSE-10.3-GM-Addon-Lang-i386-iso [917504]
• openSUSE-10.3-GM-Addon-Lang-x86_64-iso [1261568]
• openSUSE-10.3-GM-DVD-i386-iso [180797440]
• openSUSE-10.3-GM-DVD-x86_64-iso [819200]
• StealThisFilm.Part1.mov [428353952]
• strip_souffle_high.wmv [0]

Comparing to PHP is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Try this one on for size.

All the crap Pythonites love to boast about and almost universally faster. I'd be careful using the Shootout as a reference though, as not every language gets the love it needs to get a fair shake in such comparisons. In the Python case, Regex DNA has seen some serious love that picked the best concepts from the other implementations in the pursuit of speed. Its place in the ranking is likely not a matter of libraries, as it uses the same libs as the other one.

Note that duck typing restricts the compiler from assuming a function can only take a specific type of object, requiring access to all members and methods of all objects to do a type check first. I like OCaml's typing system for being quite specific, and concise. A tree can be defined thusly in Ocaml:

type tree = Leaf | Node of tree * tree;

Of course, you're missing operations on it, and Objective Caml naturally provides OO ways of doing things. But I've never heavily researched the subject. As I once read and believe, most every pattern in the GoF is trivially obvious in a functional language. I'm also fairly sure they're much simpler to read and write in a functional language.

I'm sick of people talking about how slow and memory-abusive Python can be. It has changed quite a bit since those negative reviews came out 8 years ago.

Compare it to PHP on the infamous Language Shootout site and you'll see Python is better in every way:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=python&lang2=php

The same site shows that for both speed and memory use, Python is really better than most other languages. It even beats plain C++/gcc and C# on string manipulations/regex thanks to the optimized standard libraries that it ships with. Best of all, compare the code for these benchmarks and tell me which you would rather maintain. The DNA-regex test is >1500 bytes of gzipped C# and about 300 bytes of python (and yes, the python uses less memory).

In short: write less code with duck typing and intuitive OO & syntax and still run quickly and don't use much memory. Python wins for quickly writing general apps and tools (the "glue" in larger suites).

Well, ok, I did.. Had a quick look at the sidux.com Software forum. Didn't see anything I haven't experienced myself, crashes, high CPU loads etc... The usual stuff :)

In fact right now I'm writing this on such an Iceweasel release (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.10) Gecko/20071115 Iceweasel/2.0.0.10 (Debian-2.0.0.10-0etch1)) just now on Debian etch... Yea this fscking thing keeps crashing every day... but it is a gift, and instead of whining I say loudly *thanks*, and that if I get some time available I'd certainly help. And I think they do need some help, look 547 freakin bugs are there and only 7 people track the PTS (maillist to get info about what happens in a package). The maintainer looks like he has many other things to do in Debian as well and I think he is also in the GNUTLS team. Surely they have other things to do as well, they may have jobs or families for example.

Of course I should say that most of the problems in Iceweasel probably come from upstream (Firefox), although without proper analysis it is difficult many times to know for sure whether a problem is in the browser code or in some lib.

Even though I have suffered from the bugs, I don't think it's right to whine about it as if volunteers had an obligation to build my free software. They do what they do for their beliefs or sometimes for fun, we shouldn't whine at these people even if sometimes the produced software is sloppy.

It is M$ that has an obligation to create software that at least partially works, since you pay for it, and yet its own software is much more buggy than free software. It is because they don't write code for the love (they don't even try to combine coding for the love with business, which is perfectly possible, for example they could release open-source and then get business as support/customisation contracts... but no, they keep the code closed as if code is like cattle in corrals).

The way free software works socially is not to have distinctions between developers and users. Such distinctions exist in closed source. In free software, every user should aspire to become a devel at some point and contribute actively. And the mindset "oh look this stuff is full of bugs, they don't do a proper job" means that somewhere in the mind of people who say this exists a small thought that says "I am a consumer, I only consume, and I expect others to feed me good software". In free software we should see ourselves as both producers and consumers, and we should specifically say "ok, this software is crap, but I can help fix it, and even if it's written in a language I don't know I can sit down and learn it".

Well, ok, I did.. Had a quick look at the sidux.com Software forum. Didn't see anything I haven't experienced myself, crashes, high CPU loads etc... The usual stuff :)

In fact right now I'm writing this on such an Iceweasel release (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.10) Gecko/20071115 Iceweasel/2.0.0.10 (Debian-2.0.0.10-0etch1)) just now on Debian etch... Yea this fscking thing keeps crashing every day... but it is a gift, and instead of whining I say loudly *thanks*, and that if I get some time available I'd certainly help. And I think they do need some help, look 547 freakin bugs are there and only 7 people track the PTS (maillist to get info about what happens in a package). The maintainer looks like he has many other things to do in Debian as well and I think he is also in the GNUTLS team. Surely they have other things to do as well, they may have jobs or families for example.

Of course I should say that most of the problems in Iceweasel probably come from upstream (Firefox), although without proper analysis it is difficult many times to know for sure whether a problem is in the browser code or in some lib.

Even though I have suffered from the bugs, I don't think it's right to whine about it as if volunteers had an obligation to build my free software. They do what they do for their beliefs or sometimes for fun, we shouldn't whine at these people even if sometimes the produced software is sloppy.

It is M$ that has an obligation to create software that at least partially works, since you pay for it, and yet its own software is much more buggy than free software. It is because they don't write code for the love (they don't even try to combine coding for the love with business, which is perfectly possible, for example they could release open-source and then get business as support/customisation contracts... but no, they keep the code closed as if code is like cattle in corrals).

The way free software works socially is not to have distinctions between developers and users. Such distinctions exist in closed source. In free software, every user should aspire to become a devel at some point and contribute actively. And the mindset "oh look this stuff is full of bugs, they don't do a proper job" means that somewhere in the mind of people who say this exists a small thought that says "I am a consumer, I only consume, and I expect others to feed me good software". In free software we should see ourselves as both producers and consumers, and we should specifically say "ok, this software is crap, but I can help fix it, and even if it's written in a language I don't know I can sit down and learn it".

Perhaps you should check the definition of free software, or the Debian Free Software Guideline (which is the basis of the Open Source Definition).

Any license that does not grant free redistribution (not free as in beer, free as in freedom---as in that the re-distributor is free to charge money for the service, if someone would pay) is definitely not free, and most likely not open source.

I don't know why people get these wrong impressions that "free software" == "anti-commercial", but nothing could be further from the truth. Free software is just about as Laissez-Faire, free, capitalistic economic system as you can possibly get (free from government-granted monopolies, etc.). Licenses that "play nice" with communities by "graciously" granting non-commercial uses is definitely better than completely proprietary licenses (or a lack of one), but it's only halfway there since any such license still restricts your freedom in ways that are not acceptable.

If you aren't totally convinced still why these "non-commercial only" licenses are wrong, here's a very simple reason why: Those licenses are GPL-incompatible, since GPL does not allow addition of restrictions with small exceptions, and any project or software using those restrictive licenses is excluding a lot of code out there that is already released under GPL.

There should be no unused services turned on by default!

Right, that's what's he's saying... right?

Also, rock solid and secure? Uh, didn't I read an article not too long ago about how the update.microsoft.com site was broken into?

I don't doubt that. Of course shit happens elsewhere as well.

Who wants MS software anyway? Even if it's free, when there are alternatives such as Debian, MS can't compete. Hell, MS software comes by force with most laptops and prebuilt PCs (and usually you can't ask for a no-software machine... it comes by force in the meaning of "you either buy it as it is or don't buy it at all"), MS software is full of annoyances (clipper!) and bugs and is the central target of all crackers worldwide. It's okay to get MS Windows on a laptop and leave it there as dual-boot with a GNU/Linux distro just in case you ever need to run something on real Windows. But wanting to buy something made by MS or even wanting MS software for free is pure psychopathology.

Who the fuck modded this as interesting I wonder. Let me get this straight:

You say, Python is 10 times faster than Ruby at interpretor level. Forget about micro benchmarks, but did you at least see this:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ruby&lang2=python

Python is 2 to 4 times faster on average. But above benchmark is still quite synthetic and may fool you.
Real code, is another story, do you realize that?

" mongrel can be ok.. but then you still have to set up apache in front of it, and its not a simple apache set up as you have to configure all the proxy stuff..."
Oh oh.. I mean you got to be real retard to say something like this. I am not using apache these days, but with 2.2, it was dead simple to configure.
I use nginx these days and you can configure a new machine with nginx in front and mongrels in back within few minutes. You said, for small websites, it pain, blah blah.
Heck, you can go ahead and run just mongrel there for a small website and it will work fine. How about that?

I am not baffled by your comments, which clearly show, but I am just pissed at general internet crowd.
Thank you.

It might get a bit better quite soon: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv&lang2=php

I don't think RoR has scalability issues. People say it does, but scaling isn't the issue, it is raw performance that is lacking. And, it isn't Ruby on Rails fault, it is simply Ruby. the Ruby interpreter is slow (2-5 times slower than perl, php, or python interpreters (its about 50-100 times slower than java or c++, but then so are the rest of the interpreted languages).

That being said, a RoR application will need 2-5 times the power behind it to serve the same number of users that a perl, python, or PHP app can handle.

Sure you can set up a RoR app in a cluster and you can make it scale, just like you can with a perl, php, python, java, or c++ app. You're just going to have to do it much sooner with RoR because of the performance issues of the ruby interpreter.

Obviously this isn't an exhaustive comparision, but over at the language benchmark game http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/, there isn't a single benchmark where ruby is faster than python, perl, or php that I could find.

SELinux? iptables? Using free software that doesn't do stupid things like that in the first place?

I use Debian GNU\Linux both on my personal and my business machines. I download new releases through BitTorrent. I also use BitTorrent for downloading other GNU/Linux distributions like Fedora, always from the official trackers. Then I leave BitTorrent active for months to contribute back to the community by offering part of my ADSL upstream.

If my ISP sabotages my BitTorrent traffic, this means that it also affects my business as I would have to wait more for new GNU/Linux DVDs to download. Imagine setting up a new PC for development and having to wait a lot because a manager thought that BitTorrent can only be used for mp3z etc... Ridiculous. Just because some people use it for something big media companies don't like doesn't mean that everyone including the legitimate users should be made to suffer.

There is a curses command line spreadsheet that even has Braille mode. It is called sc. You can look it up in Debian at,
    http://packages.debian.org/sc

Word processing? The best solution is either LaTeX or something like markdown
    http://www.attacklab.net/showdown-gui.html

Want web browsing with better support than Lynx and a TUI? Try elinks. Elinks does actual formatting for you.

What did I miss? Well, there is plenty of TUI games in Linux ranging from chess to nethack. Heck, you can be a darn good Linux/UNIX admin if you are completely blind and not even be much slower than sighted colleges. I'm not sure that would be the case on a Windows/Mac machine - at least not *now*.

Text user interface is probably best for people that can't see. If you can see a little, then I guess you can use magnifiers and similar. But if you want to get some real work done, then text interface is best as it is easiest for the the user/screen reader/Braille. On a TUI, stuff tends to happen in order (1D) which is easier to follow than trying to visualize a screen (2D).

when will I learn to preview? Heres the benchmark

Sorry, I'm a huge Debian fan (I run Sid on all my systems) but I feel forced to point out that even they do not support releases for 6 years. 6 years ago the current release was Potato, released in August 2000. Neither that, nor Woody released in July 2002, are still supported by Debian. Sarge, released in June 2005, will likely only be supported for another 6 months until April 2008 if the Debian Security FAQ on release lifespan[0] is accurate.

Yes, there are upgrade paths to new versions of Debian, but they also exist from old to new versions of Windows.

[0] http://www.debian.org/security/faq#lifespan

My primary OS is Debian GNU/Linux and it is an antivirus by itself. XP still exists as a dual-boot option but rarely gets booted at all. Why so many companies insist on MS, I really don't know, but I guess they just don't know how to hack a GNU/Linux OS to their own needs.

So let's fork it! Oh, already done

Isn't FOSS great?

Relatively slow compared to what? If you try the language shootout you'll see that it's almost universally faster than python, mono, and many other languages used for "plain GUI apps". Heck, the implementation of ruby in java is faster than the original C! The one place where java consistently lags is the startup time. Of course, this and other perceptions of responsiveness count for a lot.

Relatively slow compared to what? If you try the language shootout you'll see that it's almost universally faster than python, mono, and many other languages used for "plain GUI apps". Heck, the implementation of ruby in java is faster than the original C! The one place where java consistently lags is the startup time. Of course, this and other perceptions of responsiveness count for a lot.

Relatively slow compared to what? If you try the language shootout you'll see that it's almost universally faster than python, mono, and many other languages used for "plain GUI apps". Heck, the implementation of ruby in java is faster than the original C! The one place where java consistently lags is the startup time. Of course, this and other perceptions of responsiveness count for a lot.

Java source code was available but simply licensed in such a way which didn't really go well with some

but when the bs was still spreading you could already easily download binary installers (self extractors) to install Java on Linux.

Here: http://packages.debian.org/lenny/flashplugin-nonfree/amd64/download :)

No, really: 10k machines. RedHat refused to budge on their cost. My CTO, who loved the art of The Deal, got nowhere after months of haggling.

As for time to convert: around 6 months. Could've been quicker, but there wasn't a terrible sense of urgency. We automated a lot of it with FAI & PXE.

Yes, I know, They _want_ to make them free, but there are still some problems in the license:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/11/threads.html

According to people in debian-legal -mailinglist that latest license is not yet free enough. Also, IIRC those fonts can not be included to TeX Live, because license is not yet free enough. Problem is this: Not every kind of modification is allowed. You can remove or add glyphs and modify them, but there are also other things that can be done to fonts, for example modifying kerning.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/11/threads.html

This bug is still the worst I've seen: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=155873

Please file a bug against the 'installation-reports' package.

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch05s03.html.en#problem-report

here is a good workaround: http://www.debian.org/

I can also get it for debian sarge (oldstable) and etch (stable)... despite how long it takes Debian to do anything.

I can also get it for debian sarge (oldstable) and etch (stable)... despite how long it takes Debian to do anything.

http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/fail2ban

This package monitors the logs for failed login to a variety of services and updates the iptables rules to ban that IP. I use 5 failed logins, results in 24hrs of banning.

On debain's default installation of ssh and other services, fail2ban already has appropriate rule sets so it take 5 minutes to install. In addition you can write your own rule sets for other login services and firewalls.

you can get debtorrent for that i believe.

Specific prior art to at least some of these claims would include http://bugs.debian.org/your_search_term . It does not do multiple keywords, only single ones.

http://packages.debian.org/bob

I should have checked debian accepted %20 and + as the same

You can type : http://packages.debian.org/dvd author

http://packages.debian.org/dvd%20author

I should have checked debian accepted %20 and + as the same

You can type : http://packages.debian.org/dvd author

http://packages.debian.org/dvd%20author

You're talking like it's some amazing idea that I'm claiming to have discovered.

It's using HTTP in the WAY it was intended. URI is NOT a file mapping. You look at the UI and decide what to do.

here's some more prior art : http://packages.debian.org/search+for+me

apt-get install debian

http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/

Wait a sec! If Linux and all kinds of apps fit in 50MB, why is Debian 3 freakin' DVDs?!?

Oh, probably for the same reason that a minimal XPe install is 40MB, but Vista is a whole damn DVD.

1. Download vmware-package from debian(i386, amd64) and click on downloaded package to install using Gdebi (or use dpkg -i [downloaded file])
2. Download VMware player 2.0.1 (.tar)
3. Open up a terminal window, and type

   make-vmpkg -k -r sudo VMware-player-2.0.1-55017.i386.tar.gz

4. Install the .deb files generated by the above process (install in this order: vmware-lib, vmware-bin, vmware-kernel-modules, vmware-common, vmware-player).

1. Download vmware-package from debian(i386, amd64) and click on downloaded package to install using Gdebi (or use dpkg -i [downloaded file])
2. Download VMware player 2.0.1 (.tar)
3. Open up a terminal window, and type

   make-vmpkg -k -r sudo VMware-player-2.0.1-55017.i386.tar.gz

4. Install the .deb files generated by the above process (install in this order: vmware-lib, vmware-bin, vmware-kernel-modules, vmware-common, vmware-player).