Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Membership, Quarkiness, Audioggogy
A tornado's worth of spin control. telstar writes "The Code Report is reporting that last week's story from the New York Times concerning the death of Hailstorm was not entirely accurate. A Microsoft spokesperson has stated that Microsoft is shifting from a model in which MSN was the sole operator to a model where the operation of these services is available to multiple operators."
Onan Meets Midas. daoine writes: "Reversing the outcome of an earlier argument, boston.com is reporting that MGM and New Line Cinema have reached an agreement that permits New Line to continue with the Goldmember name. It also stipulates that further satirical names must be approved by MGM."
Does dishes, saves gas, freshens your breath, cleans your pets ... Apparently, Gentoo Linux is contagious. JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an interesting review of Gentoo Linux 1.0 and they call it 'the fastest loading, fastest-operating Linux distribution to date.' Gentoo may be the fastest Linux for a workstation today, but according to the review, it still has some problems, most notably, annoying bugs. However, it still manages to score a glowing 8.2 out of 10 overall."
Reader sckevyn also points to the Gentoo PowerPC page for those equipped different.
First steps always seem small. camusflage writes "Yahoo has a story from ZDNet about TheKompany's recent release of tkcPlayer for the Zaurus, which is being billed as the first portable Ogg Vorbis player. A player for a format not many people are using on a platform even fewer people are using. Admirable, but not likely to be a commercial success."
Honey, your quark is showing. ngrier writes "As a quick follow-up to the story posted here a few days ago regarding the potential quark star, the NASA APOD today is a picture of the aforementioned star."
That's: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020414.html.
Eh, even if you forgot it's tax day, you can at least file for an extension which will buy you some more time. So all is not lost.
MGM pulled the same shenanigans with The Spy Who Shagged Me. Threaten to sue (even though you'd almost certainly lose under parody protection), and force some trailers to be shown before the film.
Yawn, I hope they put all of that in the agreement this time, so we don't have to hear about it in future installments.
Keep in mind that this is not a decision that involved the legal system. The original decision was made by the MPAA, which both studios are members of. Essentially, the industry is policing itself, and both groups agreed to be bound by those decisions.
They could sue each other if they wanted, but they've settled in this way.
I'm now running Gentoo (installed it this weekend). Was running Debian 2.2r5. Gentoo is markedly faster, and definitely more up to date (how long was it gonna take Debian to release KDE3 packages, even in unstable). I'm now running an entirely source based, KDE3 workstation, and it only took about 24 hours to compile everything *laugh*. If you've got time, and are comfortable with a command line, Gentoo seems to be a very nice distro so far. The portage utility is superb, though most of the setup of the machine is done by hand (read: know what you're doing first), it's well worth it. The only beef I had was that it doesn't use the SysV /etc/init.d/rc.d for startup, so VMWare was kinda a pain to get working.
Overall, a very well done distro, but it does have some issues, and you really do need to know your way around to get it going.
A word of advice, make sure /var has lots of space, as portage uses /var/tmp for compiling. I made the mistake of not making a seperate partition for /var, and making / only 300MB. Bombed about halfway through compiling XFree, and I had to start from scratch again. If you must make /var small, use the PORTAGE_TMPDIR variable to specify where you want it to compile in, otherwise you'll run into problems.
Bleeding edge is nice, but I'd still consider Debian my distro of choice for anything other than my home machine which I don't really care about. Too much potential for problems.
Good Luck
What's wrong with:
apt-get --build source <some-package>?
It will act just like 'apt-get install <some-package>' except that now it downloads the source and builds it.
seth
If you did forget, and you've got all your w-2 and such on hand, then just go to www.turbotax.com - here: http://www.quicken.com/taxes/products/#web_product s
It lets you fill out your taxes via an interactive online form that asks all the right questions and then 'E-files' a finished form for a small fee without having to leave your computer or find an all-night post office.
I have nothing to do with Quicken, i just used the service and it's great.
get crackin, geeks!
Membership... as in GoldMEMBER
One of the first steps is configuring the flags your C or C++ compiler will get when it compiles the packages. Adding the -march=i686 flag to every source file compiled makes the compiler use Intel's extended instruction set or more recent CPUs. Most binary distrobutions are compiled for vanilla i386 hardware, and will run on 486s and older Pentiums that don't have MMX/SSE enhancments. Yes, it doesn't make all that much of a difference, but it does allow you to squeeze a little more out of the system, and in some cases leads to smaller binaries. The other factor, as you mentioned, is that unlike RH, MDK and the like, it doesn't install loads of services that eat up your resources that you never use. The very last point, is that aside from LFS, it's probably the only distro I'm aware of where you *don't* have an install program do everything for you, so it's all done Your Way. Yeah compiling takes a loooonnng time, but it's an interesting experience, and I find it to be more stable and faster than a comparable Debian install, of course for many, the 24hr+ compile time to set up a decent X workstation may make it out of the question.
This has been fixed today. It was apparently a problem with the portage database. Re-run "emerge rsync" and your problem should be solved.
sm
I actually saw the video press release go out on NASA TV last week (woohoo, I get to watch NASA TV at work). They did a fade FROM that picture to another one done in the X-ray spectrum (Chandra) where that virtually invisible star turned into a shining beacon of quark.
One simple rule for its versus it's
A note that I think should have gotten into today's Slashback -- the New Scientist is reporting that the IEEE has rescinded its decision to make all paper submitters agree not to violate the DMCA in their articles, amid a storm of protest.
"The plan is to remove the reference to the DCMA," says Bill Hagen, intellectual property rights manager for the IEEE. "It's controversial to say the least. We've been getting a lot of correspondence, comment and opinion and have been forced to reconsider it."
This is even better than preserving the status quo, because in this case the hooplah got the problems of the DMCA out in front of the IEEE membership, which is very large and includes some extremely influential people. Score one for the good guys.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.