They are making other items available on the Web, mostly things that would be rarer and harder to find than many of their books. This is, at least, a good start.
Billington's first reason for not putting books up is, "We have so much special format material that nobody has seen that it is more important to get those out." I can understand this. The LoC has a lot of material. I can certainly understand trying to focus on putting the rarer stuff up first.
Books are certainly not going to be removed entirely from our lives. Many people (including myself) far prefer a physical book to reading large chunks of text from a computer screen.
However, as several other people have noted, having books available online is wonderful for research. The ability to search through a book for specific text would be wonderful for people trying to find information on a single topic from a book with a wider scope. (Yes, the index is a useful resource, but only as useful as the indexer made it.) Plus, electronic books are as portable as the reader is. I usually have several short stories to novellas on my palm pilot, so I'm never out of reading material. Reading on that screen is nowhere near as nice as reading from a real book, but my pockets aren't large enough for the average paperback, either.
"Billinton [sic] explained that some of the hostility to the printing press originated because cheap reproduction made books and pamphlets available to more people." MP3s, anyone? (Not an exact correlation, but I think that there are more similarities than Billington sees.)
Finally, however, Billington does seem to stand up against government-mandated censorware in libraries. He says, "there should be no question that the tradition of free public libraries... is the absolute platform of essentiality for our democracy." He goes on to talk about how trying to define what's "bad" is a slippery slope.
So, while I think he's very wrong about the fufure of electronic books in his society, I do think he has a number of good things to say (especially if you make it down to the end of the article).
--Phil (Why does it always seem like many of Slashdot's posters comment on articles without having read them?)
You ave used te devil's letter ('H') in your post. Please refrain from using tis letter in te future. A corrected version of your post follows:
Te callous attitude sown by Americans towards intellectual property is outrageous. Do you onestly believe tat everyting on te web is just free for te taking?
Look at te Mozilla dinosaur icon -- it looks identical to Gojira (aka Godzilla). TIS IS PLAGIARISM. Gojira (aka Godzilla) existed DECADES before te Internet was ever created, let alone te Mozilla project. And don't tell me tis is just a coincidence; te name "Mozilla" is obviously intended to sound like "Godzilla". Copyrigt and trademark law prevents te use of similar names and logos wen tey are likely to confuse consumers. Well, if I was a consumer, I'd be damned confused -- a browser named "Mozilla" wit a dinosaur mascot sure sounds like it's endorsed by Tojo, Inc. Tis is not true.
Wy tis as not been acted on is a mystery to me. Te "Mozilla" dinosaur clearly violates Tojo, Inc's copyrigt on Gojira (aka Godzilla. C'mon, guys, ow about coosing someting a little more original -- like, say, a ferret? ow many ferrets out tere do you see as corporate mascots? u?
Tis post will act as an unofficial petition to te Mozilla developers to select a new mascot tat does not resemble Gojira (aka Godzilla). Simply reply to tis message if you want to add your name to te list.
Also I would like to know how they combat the problem with external air that may concentrate into water on the internals of the laptop.
That shouldn't be a problem, at least not more so than with any laptop today. You won't have water condensing anywhere because no part of the laptop should be cooler than room temperature. The water goes past the CPU, gets heated, and then goes through the case, cooling to room temperature. Nowhere does it cool enough to cause condensation from room air.
His math is correct. Watts are a measurement of energy flow (joules per second). Multiplying watts by a time period gives you a measurement of regular energy again. In the case of the example laptop battery, that measurement is in watt-hours, a unit that's easier to use in the sort of calculations he's doing. The battery has a total energy of 79WHr. If it takes 3.5 hours to drain it, that gives a constant draw of 22.6W. If the solar panel provides 13.8W, that reduces draw on the battery to 8.8W, greatly extending its runtime. (Yes, this assumes optimum conditions. I think we all realize that solar panels don't work in the dark.)
No, you can't run an Inspiron 7500 completely on solar power. You can, however, run the laptop for a much longer period of time than the battery alone will give you. You can also recharge the battery while the laptop sits unused. For someone away from a power source for an extended time, solar cells can provide a means to keep a laptop working.
--Phil (Heck, the thing would be good just for an afternoon coding in the park.)
The program [Gnutella] is at its core a simple way of trading files, including pirated copyrighted material, without requiring participants to connect with any central computer.
But they left out the fact that casette tapes are, at their core, a simple way of trading songs, including pirated copyrighted material, without requiring traders to communicate with any central location. Oh, and VCR tapes are, at their core, a simple way of trading TV shows and movies, including pirated copyrighted material, without requiring people to communicate with any central authority. And let's not forget floppy disks and CDs, which are, at their core, a simple way of trading files and programs, including pirated copyrighted material, without requiring any communication with a central location.
Am I being clear enough?
--Phil (And only recently did I finally see an actual jar of Nutella.)
Funny how most reviews of Linux software talk about whether or not the application crashes, how often and how badly it crashes and so on.
If I may paint Linux people with as broad a brush as you have, it's probably because we are accustomed to our programs not crashing on us. I routinely have dozens of programs running on my system, and I switch among them easily, expecting them all to work. (This just makes me all the angrier when I'm running two or three apps on my Windows machine at work and one dies and takes the whole system down with it.)
I guess Linux isn't the be all & end all of crash protection?
Well, yes and no. The OS obviously can't keep other programs from crashing. It can, however, isolate the running programs from each other so that a chashing app doesn't affect any other part of the system.
I KNOW that the OS isn't responsible for crashing applications - but to here Linux zealots talk you'd think windows IS responsible for every crashed windows app.
Again, yes and no. For one thing, when programs at work crash, I regularly click the "details" button on the crash dialog box. I'd estimate that about half the time, the problem is within one of the system DLLs. Personally, I don't care that the source of the problem was probably data fed to a system function by the program. System libraries SHOULD NOT die as a result of user-supplied data. (Actually all libraries should follow that mantra, but system libraries especially.)
Also, the OS should do a better job of isolating the crash than Windows does. If a Windows program crashes badly, it's likely to have messed up something in the running kernel, too. In many cases, a dying program can bring the entire system down with it. Accustomed as I have gotten to Linux's stability, this is no longer acceptable behaviour for me.
So, no, Windows isn't really responsible for every crashed windows program, but the way it handles crashed apps is singularly awful.
--Phil (Hypocracy? Slashdot is a huge community. We don't all hold the same views.)
The problem lies in the fact that while Windows formats a floppy (or writes a large file to it, for that matter), the rest of the system grinds to a halt. You just have to wait until the system is done with the floppy before you can do other things with the computer. Note that this is my experience with Windows as of Windows 95. 98 may well have fixed the problem.
Are you trolling? Ah, well. I'll answer you anyway.
umm..._Redundant_ Array of Inexpensive Disks each being used to back up the data of the other...how does this help with storage capacity?
The disks don't have to be completely redundant. For that matter, there are raid definitions that don't have any redundancy at all--they just utilize the ability to stripe across multiple disks. (Unfortunately, I can't remember which RAID levels correspond to which features.) The point, however, is that you can aggregate multiple drives for more storage. (That's the point for the home user, at least.)
RAID is damn slow and only something like half the combined storage capacity of the drives is available.
This line makes me think that you're either trolling or genuinely don't understand RAID. You don't have to lose half your storage capacity to a RAID. (Although mirroring does provide maximum redundancy in case of failures.) Most home users will probably use N+1 redundancy at most, where the data is just redundant enough that you can lose a single drive without problems. This costs you only one drive beyond your actual storage capacity. And with plain striping, you don't lose any capacity (and, consequently, don't get any redundancy).
Finally, slow? RAID is certainly not slow. With striping, it can end up being faster than a single drive, especially for multiple parallell data accesses. This is because each drive acts independently from the others in retrieving data (whereas the multiple heads in a single drive do not), allowing multiple different files to be read simultaneously. This is most noticeable in large file servers, and would probably provide little, if any, speedup for the average home user, but it's certainly not slow.
Still, I don't think RAID in its current incarnation will catch on in the desktop market. RAIDing multiple disks requires that all of the disks have the same capacity. (You can often use drives of differing sizes, but they all get treated as if they were only as large as the smallest drive in the group.) You also cannot, to my knowledge, dynamically add disks to a RAID. (That is, you cannot dynamically grow a RAID. Replacing dead disks is certainly possible.)
--Phil (I don't think I used enough parentheses in my post. (And no, I don't know LISP (at all...)))
How about a voting system for one or more directories which does not add files easily but they are there for good. If it is that good a resource it deserves a champion to protect it.
and the web page says that infrequently-requested data will eventually expire and be deleted.
I think that the "champion" idea for keeping data is a good idea. Suppose the freenet server allowed the admin to define a separate, node admin-controlled area. In that area would reside data that the admin wants to be permanently available. Under normal operation, the data would be distributed across all of FreeNet, but if it all expired and someone then asked for it again, the request would make its way back to the permanent repository and get the data from there. This does negate some of the advantages of FreeNet, namely that the admin will know what's on his server and could be contstrued to be liable for it, but it allows a guarantee of permanence for the data. Does this sound reasonable?
--Phil (I'll probably be setting up my FreeNet node when I get my cable modem.)
For example, if you say FUCK YOU THESE HAMBURGERS SUCK at a McDonalds restaurnat they CAN and WILL throw your ass out of there.
Probably true. They cannot, however, (under US law) have, say, a website shut down because the website says their hamburgers suck. More specifically, they would not be able to legally force the website to be shut down, so long as the content was either true or labeled as opinion. (Or at least they shouldn't be able to. I recall some protestors being involved in a very lengthy legal battle over this.)
Anyway, on to my main contention...
If you going a McDonalds restarnat for service (large coke, fries, hamburger) and you start slanging them (or they think you will) by being abusive (even if it really isn't, but it is how THEY see it, not you) by saying things like "don't eat here, the food sucks" McDonalds DOES have the right to say, "please leave sir, we do not tolerate that type of launage here"
(Again, speaking from a US perspective.) If you're being massively offensive or disrupting their normal flow of business, they will likely ask you to leave, and will have a solid legal basis for doing so. If they ask you to leave just because they think you're going to do something along those lines, they would have no legal basis for doing so, and could be taken to court over it. (Rather, they could be taken to court and lose.)
But in this case, they kicked them out BEFORE they did anything 'abusive'. If I got to McDonalds after they have kicked me out a couple times, they will thing "ok, here comes that crazy nut, hey Bob stop him at the door and don't let me come inside, he will start trouble."
Also in this case (as I understand it), there was no indication that Outcast was going to write anything defamatory. To continue the analogy (although it's getting pretty stretched at this point), consider what would happen if McDonalds refused to admit an otherwise "normal"-looking young man because he was wearing a leather jacket (and everyone knows that the only people who wear leather jackets are punks just looking to start trouble).
But that's just between a private company and an individual. For a analogy closer to Outcast's problem, think about a situation where a mom-and-pop burger joint is attempting to lease land near a McDonalds for their own restauraunt. McDonalds, however, is threatening to sue the landowner (not the restaurant owner) unless the restaurant owner can provide a legal document proclaiming that the local restaurant will never mention McDonalds in their advertisement. The issue is not that of the landowner preventing the restaurant from leasing the land, but of one restaurant manimulating the legal system to keep a competitor out of the way.
--Phil (I wonder if I should mention that one of my first jobs was working at a McDonalds?)
can anyone tell me one thing, just one thing that's truly new and unique about this kernel?
Well,
devfs - dynamic creation of device nodes for detected hardware.
khttpd - Whether you like it or not it is a new development.
Regardless, truly "new" stuff doesn't magically appear in commercial programs. New concepts are generally developed by research teams, either funded by corporations or working for academia or the government. By the time an idea makes its way into a mainstream program, it's usually been around for a while in one community or another, and someone can point to previous work and say, "See! It's not *new*!"
Still, on the newness theme, the article also has this to say about Linux:
"Linux is still the only operating system/completely/ compatible with the letter of the IPv4 specification".
Linux was one of the first OSes to provide kernel-level support for automatically running Java programs. (i.e. just./java-program and the kernel knows what to do with it.)
The bit about raw disk access implies that Linux's scheme for raw device access that doesn't require a double for every block device node in/dev is a new thing, too.
You also say
Basically, no matter what it comes down to, there's always a better choice. Want to run consumer software? Windows. Want scalability? Solaris. Want a good server? BSD. Notice Linux anywhere in there?
I want a free, robust system that allows me to get my work (programming, research, school work (I attend college in the evenings)) done. Linux does all of that for me. Windows? Not free and far more unstable, anyway. Solaris? Not free, and the Intel version sucks performance-wise anyway. (And no, I'm not going to go buy a Sparc.) BSD? Free, but without the application base Linux has (although most of my work is done with Emacs, LaTeX, CMU-Lisp, and gcc). --Phil (And yes, I'm using 'free' in the 'libre' sense.)
uo.com reports "he remains a friend of Origin Systems," so it was probably just a desire to do his own stuff. He probably has plans that would be outside the scope of Origin's work.
--Phil (Not that I've even played any of the recent Ultimas...)
Once again, the Palm platform gets capabilities that were available 2-3 years ago on the Newton. (*sigh, brush away tear)
Except for the fact that the Palm does it in a more reasonable palmtop form factor. The Newton was a pretty nice machine, but I never would have bought one, even if I had been able to afford one, because it was simply too large for me. My Palm III fits comfortably in my pocket and I can take it everywhere. A Newton would have sat at home, collecting dust, because I would have had nowhere convenient to transport it.
--Phil (Happy Palm user for over half a year now.)
You asked what sort of license to use on Slashdot? You must be a glutton for punishment...
It looks to me like the GPL will do what you need it to. There's nothing that forces anyone to send modifications back to you, but people do have to make source available for any modified versions they distribute. Most people will voluntarily send changes back to you, anyway. (But how do you diff a some of the file types Delphi uses?) You might also want to consider the LGPL if this is just a Delphi component. I suspect GPLed components would still scare away a lot of businesses. <sigh>
Regardless of the license you pick, please, please try to use an already established one. At the very least, it allows people to have a general understanding of what they can do with your software without having to read Yet Another (Free)|(Open Source) License. You also get the benefit of code sharing with a greater number of projects (not that this is a huge pool for Delphi programs right now). Most free licenses are only really compatible with themselves (the notable exception being BSD-style licensing, but that allows people to make proprietary derivatives of your work, which it doesn't sound like you want).
--Phil (Challenge: let's see if we can have a license discussion without flaming.)
You might be surprised at the varied applications of many "pure" mathematical problems.
The only application I am certain of for OGRs is radio telescope arrangement. When surveying space, the bigger the telescope (although these tend to look more like satellite dishes), the better. However, you can have two smallish dishes a certain distance apart function in tandem just like a single dish with a diameter equal to the separation of the dishes.
With an array of smaller dishes, an ideal arrangement will maximize the number of different distances between dishes (maximizing the frequencies which can be observed). Sound familiar? OGR solutions can be mapped onto radio telescope placements.
I'm sure that there are other applications where the number of differences between a cetain number of points needs to be maximized, but I don't know of any off the top of my head.
--Phil (I remember first being introduced to Golumb Rulers via a link from the (now defunct) Geek Site of the Day.)
Because LaTeX is nowhere near to being in the same class as the programs he's reviewing. LaTeX is really a markup language (well, more than that, but it's not exactly WYSIWYG). It's not exactly newbie friendly, either. (Considering that TeX is a programming language in its own right...)
You'll note that he is reviewing KLyX, which is a WYSIWYM editor that generates LaTeX, giving people access to the (IMHO) beautiful LaTeX and TeX engine while being a little more friendly to newcomers.
--Phil (Personally, I write everything in LaTeX--having flown, I couldn't bear to have to walk anywhere again.)
Not as I understand it. As I recall, a learning curve graphs usefulness (x axis) versus necessary knowledge (y axis). (This does seem a little backward, as the independent variable is generally on the x axis, so I could be wrong, but this is the way everyone uses it.) Thus, a "steep learning curve" represents something the requires a lot of knowledge about the subject to to do anything useful in it.
--Phil (I had a nice little post on the subject a while back, with pretty ASCII charts and everything, but can't find it now.)
Was this the Pokemon pinball game? I've played it on a friend's Game Boy, and quite liked it. The Pokemon bit is in sone of the design, and to overall goal (catch all the Pokemons, I think), but it's quite a nice pinball game in its own right, and the Pokemon stuff doesn't detract from that at all. If you like pinball games (I do), see if you know someone who has the game and try it out. You might be surprised.
--Phil (ObTopic: Color's neat and all, but I have a budget and am quite happy with my B/W Palm III.)
Jon doesn't run Slashdot, and he posts much less frequently than Rob and Hemos. Granted, Jon does have a job--he's a writer--but he ought to be able to spare some time to skim through the responses to his articles and reply to some of the most salient criticisms.
--Phil (Heck, I have a regular job, and can take a few minutes here and there to read and post on Slashdot.)
I don't believe most people on Slashdot hate me. I think it's a wildly exaggerated meme, stemming mostly from some loud and often (but not always) people who don't even have the courage to post under their own names, and for whom flaming is like a contact sport.
Very well, Jon. Let me add myself to the list of people who don't like you, are not loud, and even have the temerity to put a name behind my words. For that matter, what's wrong with disliking you anonymously?
I am not fond of your verbose style. Your grammar often makes me wince, and your topics, while interesting in and of themselves, come out in your articles as bland rehashes of popular opinion. As a smaller issue, you have yet to fix the problem with your apostrophies, despite numerous suggestions of solutions from a variety of Slashdot readers. This is still primarily a technically oriented forum, and we have problems with people wo purport to write about technologically-related issues without appearing to make any effort to fix their own technical problems.
And yes, I know that I can just filter out all stories posted by you. I don't feel that to be an acceptible solution. I tend to do my filtering based on content, not on author. (Although I always seem to be able to pick out your articles from the style of the introduction on the front page.) However, Slashdot currently has a single columnist: You. To the outside, the implication is that you're the only regular columnist because you're the only person Rob and Hemos always agree with. From the Slashdot community, it's frustrating to see your point of view continually reiterated without any other regulars to provide alternate points of view.
I'm not necessarily advocating getting rid of you (although, were that to happen, I would shed no tears), but I would appreciate a less condescending attitude and, if your articles were, as you put it, "shorter, crisper," I wouldn't mind either. What I would really like is another columnist with a different point of view to offset yours.
Upon reading over my post, I seem to be ranting a bit... Sorry, but Jon's dismissal of his critics as cowardly flamers struck a nerve. Anyone who agrees with me about Katz, anonymous or not, feel free to lend your voice to mine. (Objectors to my views are welcome, too. I suspect I'm opening myself up to a lot of criticism here.)
--Phil (I doubt I would have posted this vehemently if I actually liked Katz. Why do negative feelings always seem to generate more emotion?)
So am I the only person in the world who didn't like Good Omens? I love both Terry Pratchett's and Neil Gaiman's individual works, but I didn't think that their styles blended well in Good Omens.
I recall liking the one (no link, because I can't get through at the moment) that would ROT13 and/or reverse chunks of text, and would itself compile and work after having been ROT13ed and/or reversed.
--Phil (Sadly, I'm not twisted enough to submit anything creative enough to win...)
It isn't extensible, regardless of what everyone else says -- for examle GLX was around donkeys' years ago, but no-one's able to 'extend' XF86 with it until now (you can't extend X at run time, you've gotta hope you've got the source to extend it at compile time, and then you've gotta make it work with your X server)
X's 'extensible' doesn't mean 'modular'. (And more's the pity--but that's another rant.) In X, 'extensible' means that the protocol can have extensions added to it. That is, you can add options to make X do things the inventors never conceived. GLX is a prime example. When X was invented, no one could have conceived of doing hardware-accelerated 3D, yet today, I can play GLQuake in X.
--Phil (Although the modularity of XF86 4.0 is long overdue, IMHO.)
Slashdot Mirror
A few thoughts:
They are making other items available on the Web, mostly things that would be rarer and harder to find than many of their books. This is, at least, a good start.
Billington's first reason for not putting books up is, "We have so much special format material that nobody has seen that it is more important to get those out." I can understand this. The LoC has a lot of material. I can certainly understand trying to focus on putting the rarer stuff up first.
Books are certainly not going to be removed entirely from our lives. Many people (including myself) far prefer a physical book to reading large chunks of text from a computer screen.
However, as several other people have noted, having books available online is wonderful for research. The ability to search through a book for specific text would be wonderful for people trying to find information on a single topic from a book with a wider scope. (Yes, the index is a useful resource, but only as useful as the indexer made it.) Plus, electronic books are as portable as the reader is. I usually have several short stories to novellas on my palm pilot, so I'm never out of reading material. Reading on that screen is nowhere near as nice as reading from a real book, but my pockets aren't large enough for the average paperback, either.
"Billinton [sic] explained that some of the hostility to the printing press originated because cheap reproduction made books and pamphlets available to more people." MP3s, anyone? (Not an exact correlation, but I think that there are more similarities than Billington sees.)
Finally, however, Billington does seem to stand up against government-mandated censorware in libraries. He says, "there should be no question that the tradition of free public libraries ... is the absolute platform of essentiality for our democracy." He goes on to talk about how trying to define what's "bad" is a slippery slope.
So, while I think he's very wrong about the fufure of electronic books in his society, I do think he has a number of good things to say (especially if you make it down to the end of the article).
--Phil (Why does it always seem like many of Slashdot's posters comment on articles without having read them?)
You ave used te devil's letter ('H') in your post. Please refrain from using tis letter in te future. A corrected version of your post follows:
--Pil (I figured turnabout was fair play.)
That shouldn't be a problem, at least not more so than with any laptop today. You won't have water condensing anywhere because no part of the laptop should be cooler than room temperature. The water goes past the CPU, gets heated, and then goes through the case, cooling to room temperature. Nowhere does it cool enough to cause condensation from room air.
--Phil (I'd still like a Crusoe laptop, though.)
His math is correct. Watts are a measurement of energy flow (joules per second). Multiplying watts by a time period gives you a measurement of regular energy again. In the case of the example laptop battery, that measurement is in watt-hours, a unit that's easier to use in the sort of calculations he's doing. The battery has a total energy of 79WHr. If it takes 3.5 hours to drain it, that gives a constant draw of 22.6W. If the solar panel provides 13.8W, that reduces draw on the battery to 8.8W, greatly extending its runtime. (Yes, this assumes optimum conditions. I think we all realize that solar panels don't work in the dark.)
No, you can't run an Inspiron 7500 completely on solar power. You can, however, run the laptop for a much longer period of time than the battery alone will give you. You can also recharge the battery while the laptop sits unused. For someone away from a power source for an extended time, solar cells can provide a means to keep a laptop working.
--Phil (Heck, the thing would be good just for an afternoon coding in the park.)
But they left out the fact that casette tapes are, at their core, a simple way of trading songs, including pirated copyrighted material, without requiring traders to communicate with any central location. Oh, and VCR tapes are, at their core, a simple way of trading TV shows and movies, including pirated copyrighted material, without requiring people to communicate with any central authority. And let's not forget floppy disks and CDs, which are, at their core, a simple way of trading files and programs, including pirated copyrighted material, without requiring any communication with a central location.
Am I being clear enough?
--Phil (And only recently did I finally see an actual jar of Nutella.)
If I may paint Linux people with as broad a brush as you have, it's probably because we are accustomed to our programs not crashing on us. I routinely have dozens of programs running on my system, and I switch among them easily, expecting them all to work. (This just makes me all the angrier when I'm running two or three apps on my Windows machine at work and one dies and takes the whole system down with it.)
Well, yes and no. The OS obviously can't keep other programs from crashing. It can, however, isolate the running programs from each other so that a chashing app doesn't affect any other part of the system.
Again, yes and no. For one thing, when programs at work crash, I regularly click the "details" button on the crash dialog box. I'd estimate that about half the time, the problem is within one of the system DLLs. Personally, I don't care that the source of the problem was probably data fed to a system function by the program. System libraries SHOULD NOT die as a result of user-supplied data. (Actually all libraries should follow that mantra, but system libraries especially.)
Also, the OS should do a better job of isolating the crash than Windows does. If a Windows program crashes badly, it's likely to have messed up something in the running kernel, too. In many cases, a dying program can bring the entire system down with it. Accustomed as I have gotten to Linux's stability, this is no longer acceptable behaviour for me.
So, no, Windows isn't really responsible for every crashed windows program, but the way it handles crashed apps is singularly awful.
--Phil (Hypocracy? Slashdot is a huge community. We don't all hold the same views.)
The problem lies in the fact that while Windows formats a floppy (or writes a large file to it, for that matter), the rest of the system grinds to a halt. You just have to wait until the system is done with the floppy before you can do other things with the computer. Note that this is my experience with Windows as of Windows 95. 98 may well have fixed the problem.
--Phil (But I doubt it.)
Are you trolling? Ah, well. I'll answer you anyway.
The disks don't have to be completely redundant. For that matter, there are raid definitions that don't have any redundancy at all--they just utilize the ability to stripe across multiple disks. (Unfortunately, I can't remember which RAID levels correspond to which features.) The point, however, is that you can aggregate multiple drives for more storage. (That's the point for the home user, at least.)
This line makes me think that you're either trolling or genuinely don't understand RAID. You don't have to lose half your storage capacity to a RAID. (Although mirroring does provide maximum redundancy in case of failures.) Most home users will probably use N+1 redundancy at most, where the data is just redundant enough that you can lose a single drive without problems. This costs you only one drive beyond your actual storage capacity. And with plain striping, you don't lose any capacity (and, consequently, don't get any redundancy).
Finally, slow? RAID is certainly not slow. With striping, it can end up being faster than a single drive, especially for multiple parallell data accesses. This is because each drive acts independently from the others in retrieving data (whereas the multiple heads in a single drive do not), allowing multiple different files to be read simultaneously. This is most noticeable in large file servers, and would probably provide little, if any, speedup for the average home user, but it's certainly not slow.
Still, I don't think RAID in its current incarnation will catch on in the desktop market. RAIDing multiple disks requires that all of the disks have the same capacity. (You can often use drives of differing sizes, but they all get treated as if they were only as large as the smallest drive in the group.) You also cannot, to my knowledge, dynamically add disks to a RAID. (That is, you cannot dynamically grow a RAID. Replacing dead disks is certainly possible.)
--Phil (I don't think I used enough parentheses in my post. (And no, I don't know LISP (at all...)))
Someone asked in a question
and the web page says that infrequently-requested data will eventually expire and be deleted.I think that the "champion" idea for keeping data is a good idea. Suppose the freenet server allowed the admin to define a separate, node admin-controlled area. In that area would reside data that the admin wants to be permanently available. Under normal operation, the data would be distributed across all of FreeNet, but if it all expired and someone then asked for it again, the request would make its way back to the permanent repository and get the data from there. This does negate some of the advantages of FreeNet, namely that the admin will know what's on his server and could be contstrued to be liable for it, but it allows a guarantee of permanence for the data. Does this sound reasonable?
--Phil (I'll probably be setting up my FreeNet node when I get my cable modem.)
Probably true. They cannot, however, (under US law) have, say, a website shut down because the website says their hamburgers suck. More specifically, they would not be able to legally force the website to be shut down, so long as the content was either true or labeled as opinion. (Or at least they shouldn't be able to. I recall some protestors being involved in a very lengthy legal battle over this.)
Anyway, on to my main contention...
(Again, speaking from a US perspective.) If you're being massively offensive or disrupting their normal flow of business, they will likely ask you to leave, and will have a solid legal basis for doing so. If they ask you to leave just because they think you're going to do something along those lines, they would have no legal basis for doing so, and could be taken to court over it. (Rather, they could be taken to court and lose.) Also in this case (as I understand it), there was no indication that Outcast was going to write anything defamatory. To continue the analogy (although it's getting pretty stretched at this point), consider what would happen if McDonalds refused to admit an otherwise "normal"-looking young man because he was wearing a leather jacket (and everyone knows that the only people who wear leather jackets are punks just looking to start trouble).But that's just between a private company and an individual. For a analogy closer to Outcast's problem, think about a situation where a mom-and-pop burger joint is attempting to lease land near a McDonalds for their own restauraunt. McDonalds, however, is threatening to sue the landowner (not the restaurant owner) unless the restaurant owner can provide a legal document proclaiming that the local restaurant will never mention McDonalds in their advertisement. The issue is not that of the landowner preventing the restaurant from leasing the land, but of one restaurant manimulating the legal system to keep a competitor out of the way.
--Phil (I wonder if I should mention that one of my first jobs was working at a McDonalds?)
Regardless, truly "new" stuff doesn't magically appear in commercial programs. New concepts are generally developed by research teams, either funded by corporations or working for academia or the government. By the time an idea makes its way into a mainstream program, it's usually been around for a while in one community or another, and someone can point to previous work and say, "See! It's not *new*!"
Still, on the newness theme, the article also has this to say about Linux:
The bit about raw disk access implies that Linux's scheme for raw device access that doesn't require a double for every block device node in /dev is a new thing, too.
You also say
I want a free, robust system that allows me to get my work (programming, research, school work (I attend college in the evenings)) done. Linux does all of that for me. Windows? Not free and far more unstable, anyway. Solaris? Not free, and the Intel version sucks performance-wise anyway. (And no, I'm not going to go buy a Sparc.) BSD? Free, but without the application base Linux has (although most of my work is done with Emacs, LaTeX, CMU-Lisp, and gcc).--Phil (And yes, I'm using 'free' in the 'libre' sense.)
uo.com reports "he remains a friend of Origin Systems," so it was probably just a desire to do his own stuff. He probably has plans that would be outside the scope of Origin's work.
--Phil (Not that I've even played any of the recent Ultimas...)
I think the neatest things from this were links off the Altoid tin page, including the match-head sized web server, and the Altoid tin radio.
--Phil (And who doesn't like Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments?)
I don't normally go in for pointless posts, but I figured I'd make an exception on this story just to show off my .sig.
--Phil (And yes, I know that you don't care.)
Except for the fact that the Palm does it in a more reasonable palmtop form factor. The Newton was a pretty nice machine, but I never would have bought one, even if I had been able to afford one, because it was simply too large for me. My Palm III fits comfortably in my pocket and I can take it everywhere. A Newton would have sat at home, collecting dust, because I would have had nowhere convenient to transport it.
--Phil (Happy Palm user for over half a year now.)
You asked what sort of license to use on Slashdot? You must be a glutton for punishment...
It looks to me like the GPL will do what you need it to. There's nothing that forces anyone to send modifications back to you, but people do have to make source available for any modified versions they distribute. Most people will voluntarily send changes back to you, anyway. (But how do you diff a some of the file types Delphi uses?) You might also want to consider the LGPL if this is just a Delphi component. I suspect GPLed components would still scare away a lot of businesses. <sigh>
Regardless of the license you pick, please, please try to use an already established one. At the very least, it allows people to have a general understanding of what they can do with your software without having to read Yet Another (Free)|(Open Source) License. You also get the benefit of code sharing with a greater number of projects (not that this is a huge pool for Delphi programs right now). Most free licenses are only really compatible with themselves (the notable exception being BSD-style licensing, but that allows people to make proprietary derivatives of your work, which it doesn't sound like you want).
--Phil (Challenge: let's see if we can have a license discussion without flaming.)
You might be surprised at the varied applications of many "pure" mathematical problems.
The only application I am certain of for OGRs is radio telescope arrangement. When surveying space, the bigger the telescope (although these tend to look more like satellite dishes), the better. However, you can have two smallish dishes a certain distance apart function in tandem just like a single dish with a diameter equal to the separation of the dishes.
With an array of smaller dishes, an ideal arrangement will maximize the number of different distances between dishes (maximizing the frequencies which can be observed). Sound familiar? OGR solutions can be mapped onto radio telescope placements.
I'm sure that there are other applications where the number of differences between a cetain number of points needs to be maximized, but I don't know of any off the top of my head.
--Phil (I remember first being introduced to Golumb Rulers via a link from the (now defunct) Geek Site of the Day.)
Because LaTeX is nowhere near to being in the same class as the programs he's reviewing. LaTeX is really a markup language (well, more than that, but it's not exactly WYSIWYG). It's not exactly newbie friendly, either. (Considering that TeX is a programming language in its own right...)
You'll note that he is reviewing KLyX, which is a WYSIWYM editor that generates LaTeX, giving people access to the (IMHO) beautiful LaTeX and TeX engine while being a little more friendly to newcomers.
--Phil (Personally, I write everything in LaTeX--having flown, I couldn't bear to have to walk anywhere again.)
Not as I understand it. As I recall, a learning curve graphs usefulness (x axis) versus necessary knowledge (y axis). (This does seem a little backward, as the independent variable is generally on the x axis, so I could be wrong, but this is the way everyone uses it.) Thus, a "steep learning curve" represents something the requires a lot of knowledge about the subject to to do anything useful in it.
--Phil (I had a nice little post on the subject a while back, with pretty ASCII charts and everything, but can't find it now.)
Wandering even further off topic...
Was this the Pokemon pinball game? I've played it on a friend's Game Boy, and quite liked it. The Pokemon bit is in sone of the design, and to overall goal (catch all the Pokemons, I think), but it's quite a nice pinball game in its own right, and the Pokemon stuff doesn't detract from that at all. If you like pinball games (I do), see if you know someone who has the game and try it out. You might be surprised.
--Phil (ObTopic: Color's neat and all, but I have a budget and am quite happy with my B/W Palm III.)
Jon doesn't run Slashdot, and he posts much less frequently than Rob and Hemos. Granted, Jon does have a job--he's a writer--but he ought to be able to spare some time to skim through the responses to his articles and reply to some of the most salient criticisms.
--Phil (Heck, I have a regular job, and can take a few minutes here and there to read and post on Slashdot.)
Jon Katz writes:
Very well, Jon. Let me add myself to the list of people who don't like you, are not loud, and even have the temerity to put a name behind my words. For that matter, what's wrong with disliking you anonymously?
I am not fond of your verbose style. Your grammar often makes me wince, and your topics, while interesting in and of themselves, come out in your articles as bland rehashes of popular opinion. As a smaller issue, you have yet to fix the problem with your apostrophies, despite numerous suggestions of solutions from a variety of Slashdot readers. This is still primarily a technically oriented forum, and we have problems with people wo purport to write about technologically-related issues without appearing to make any effort to fix their own technical problems.
And yes, I know that I can just filter out all stories posted by you. I don't feel that to be an acceptible solution. I tend to do my filtering based on content, not on author. (Although I always seem to be able to pick out your articles from the style of the introduction on the front page.) However, Slashdot currently has a single columnist: You. To the outside, the implication is that you're the only regular columnist because you're the only person Rob and Hemos always agree with. From the Slashdot community, it's frustrating to see your point of view continually reiterated without any other regulars to provide alternate points of view.
I'm not necessarily advocating getting rid of you (although, were that to happen, I would shed no tears), but I would appreciate a less condescending attitude and, if your articles were, as you put it, "shorter, crisper," I wouldn't mind either. What I would really like is another columnist with a different point of view to offset yours.
Upon reading over my post, I seem to be ranting a bit... Sorry, but Jon's dismissal of his critics as cowardly flamers struck a nerve. Anyone who agrees with me about Katz, anonymous or not, feel free to lend your voice to mine. (Objectors to my views are welcome, too. I suspect I'm opening myself up to a lot of criticism here.)
--Phil (I doubt I would have posted this vehemently if I actually liked Katz. Why do negative feelings always seem to generate more emotion?)
So am I the only person in the world who didn't like Good Omens? I love both Terry Pratchett's and Neil Gaiman's individual works, but I didn't think that their styles blended well in Good Omens.
--Phil (I'll get my coat...)
I recall liking the one (no link, because I can't get through at the moment) that would ROT13 and/or reverse chunks of text, and would itself compile and work after having been ROT13ed and/or reversed.
--Phil (Sadly, I'm not twisted enough to submit anything creative enough to win...)
--Phil (Although the modularity of XF86 4.0 is long overdue, IMHO.)