Tar outputs data, xargs reads that data as-is without the shell's intervention. It will work the same whether you use bash, zsh, or anything else. The issue is only due to how that data is formatted on the output and interpreted on the input.
In this case tar appears to be missing an option that would write a \0 after each filename, which seems a bit odd for a GNU utility. Especially since it can read lists terminated in such a way.
And this, btw, is why I think that at least in the current society, all these "let's have less regulations. Free Market!" ideas can't really work.
I like the idea of a fully free market in principle. In practice, it's not just the companies that work to destroy it, but also even the people themselves. For a free market to work an informed population is needed. And a population with a significant amount of people with the mindset of "OMG $COMPANY released a new product! I got to rush to the store right now!!" isn't really an informed one. Those people are acting on advertisements, impulses and brand loyalty.
A working free market needs a population that acts on cold logic, considering what they get for their money, and that has no brand loyalty and buys from whoever sells the best product for their needs. But we don't have that.
The friendliest interface for people who don't want to learn is not the GUI or the CLI, but the TUI. A full screen text application, like a ncurses app.
It takes over the screen completely. At every point it displays the possible choices. It makes heavy use of keyboard shortcuts so that an experienced operator can be really fast with it. It lacks shortcuts that cause something weird to happen (like the Win key combinations). It processes everything serially, so that it's possible to use several keyboard shortcuts in a row, and have the right thing happen. It does only what it needs to do, and the computer doesn't offer a way to do anything else.
They're still being worked on, and these days they seem to be mostly built on Linux.
People do not buy more "new" games because they've sold more used games. The budget rationale of human beings is not so rational. In addition the ones who buy used games are looking for good deals and cheaper-than-retail prices. Since Gamestop can *always* undercut retail no matter what retail is priced at, game publishers lose a huge chunk of profit to Gamestop.
Which is how it should be. If not all of the purchasers are interested in keeping it forever, and part of the interested people decide they can wait to get it cheaper used, it would be inefficient to force them all to get a new copy and keep it.
I wish. All you can get right now is a flat texture. SL could really use a decent fur shader. And better support for quadrupeds and other types of avatars. And flexible tails that can move properly. That's just for a start.
Well, that would depend on what kind of crud it is.
If it's the result of some illness, then that would be very legitimately documentable as a medical topic.
If it's plain crud, then I'd agree with its deletion because unless it was something very unusual you'd be the only source of that information. However, even under an "absolutely everything goes" uber-inclusionist policy I don't see it doing any harm. You'd have a hard time finding places to add legitimate links to it, and as a result almost nobody would find it, and it could probably end up removed as an orphaned page nobody is interested in. If not, it'd remain as minor junk in the database without doing any harm.
Still, protests against deletionism don't involve stuff like that, they involve removal of perfectly good content that already was added, but which was then deemed excessive due to the unimportance of the topic. Things like pages on comics, pokemon, anime, etc, which are very legitimately documentable, about which plenty references can be found.
Overall I would vastly prefer to err by keeping too much junk than by removing useful information.
Wikipedia isn't- and isn't meant to be, by its own rules- a primary source of information. It follows therefore that its only real purpose must be to collate, distill and make existing information more useful and reliable.
Precisely. I just want everything to be collated and distilled, and not just topics deemed to be "notable".
If there's enough data on a pokemon to write up 5 pages summarizing characteristics, stats, and trivia, then there should 5 pages of characteristics, stats and trivia, complete with a picture.
Although equally we have people who complain about Wikipedia having "too much non-notable stuff". Indeed, that's why the argument exists in the first place! What makes you think that the "deletionists" don't contribute to the site? You're not the only one who donates.
I think deletionism doesn't scale.
Every time somebody tries to contribute something to say, a Pokemon page and finds their stuff removed by some guy who thinks it's "not important" you get a potential contributor very discouraged to ever try again. People have better things to do than throwing things at wikipedia to see what sticks.
Now who keeps doing that? IMO, deletionism isn't a position new users with 5 edits hold, it's something held by long established contributors who have a well defined idea of what should be in Wikipedia and what shouldn't.
The problem as I see it is that the set of "serious" topics is relatively constant, well covered, and very contended. It's hard to find something to contribute on WWII, and even if you find something to add, chances are you'll run into that it can be very hard to get edits to stick in pages like that, even with full attribution. So on one side you have new contributors get discouraged by having their additions to "trivial" topics deleted, on the other side they get discouraged by the difficulty of contributing to well established "serious" ones.
This in turn will reduce the amount of new contributors, and old ones don't stick around forever. Communities need a constant influx of new people, or they die out as the old people get bored and leave, or run out of things to do.
I want a wikipedia with absolutely everything in existence in it. Pokemon, Star Trek, every single general that participated in WWII, and a page for every cat whose owner wants to make one thrown in for good measure.
I never had a problem with there being too much stuff in wikipedia, I keep bumping into that there's too little, because some obscure trivia that I actually find helpful got removed.
IMO, at this rate wikipedia will end up dying, because they need donations, and every time I find something I liked gone I decide not to give them anything. I'm probably not the only one who thinks that way.
Anyway, my point is the current reality: a company faced with compliance has its choices.
I didn't say it didn't have choices, I said it couldn't choose to ignore the license, because it's not a true choice.
If you're in a situation of copyright infringement, you can: A. Stop infringing B. Pay for a license C. Release the source under the GPL/etc (if it applies to the situation) D. Reach some other kind of mutual agreement with the copyright holder E. Ignore it, and do nothing.
But E is not a true choice. The copyright holder will have a clearcut case against you, and that'll result in having to go to court and pay for the lawyers. And once in court, you'll have to stop infringing, pay for a license, release your code under the GPL, or reach some other agreement.
Any time you choose option E, you end up spending more money, then it's GOTO to options A to D. Option E is never the final state.
An oft-repeated slashdot theme is "forcing" a company to distribute its source, or in some cases discussion of hostile access to source and repuplication of their source without permission.
Citation please. I lurk on slashdot a lot and don't remember seeing such a thing, at least recently.
Basically, it is sharing with all people regardless of who they are. Some companies do not have a problem with this because of your second point. To keep from having to maintain an internal fork Netgear would also be contributing back to the project. They would effectively be cross-sharing via the project.
If you're going to expect cross-sharing to happen, you might as well go with the GPL, which makes it explicit. Otherwise you're giving with no guarantee that the other guy will give back. Under the BSD, Netgear gets to pick what they share and what they don't. Obviously they'll share stuff of little value to decrease maintenance costs, and not share code of high value, trading maintenance cost for exclusivity.
Also, this condition does not apply to these Danish companies since they are accused of not sharing any code.
Well, if they're not sharing under the GPL, they're definitely not going to do any sort of "cross-sharing" deal under the BSD. So as a whole their usage is neutral to a BSD project.
That, while OK according to the BSD, IMO makes it unlikely they're going to get a lot of assistance from the developers. Why would somebody spend a lot of effort on being basically an unpaid developer for some company that's not going to give you anything, not even credit, for your trouble?
Under the GPL it's different because developers know that a company working on something like a router must give back, whether they like it or not. That means that a reward for helping is guaranteed.
However, most projects (regardless of license) tend to be receptive to these changes.
Receptive how? If you're keeping your development process closed, the project doesn't know what you're doing, and if they do, they don't know how, so they couldn't accomodate you if they wanted.
It's like saying that given a choice of "Your money or your life" you can choose not to give the money. Sure. But the bandit still gets it after he shoots you.
Having to release your source under the GPL is GPL compliant obviously. Having to stop distributing the product also is. And paying damages may well be a lot more expensive than going to the author and buying a license. I will be very surprised losing a copyright infringement lawsuit ever has any advantages over respecting the license. Just look at the judgements getting handed out for copying a few songs.
Well, if I was doing a router I wouldn't go with BSD, because:
1. If you contribute back, any contribution is going to be free for all. Which means that if Linksys contributes something, Netgear automatically gets to use it without any strings attached in their next product. If it happens that Linksys got something almost right, and Netgear managed to polish it to perfection in a few days, then Netgear just gained a really cool feature, courtesy of Linksys, and Linksys doesn't get to see how they did it.
2. If you don't contribute back, you now have to maintain an internal fork. This is not very easy, since the people doing the public development don't know or care about what you're doing, and are perfectly free to introduce changes that completely break your modifications.
3. If you release your changes under the GPL, the BSD supporters will whine about it for weeks.
4. A lot of stuff out there is targeted to Linux. There's lots of software that doesn't build cleanly on Solaris due to applications using GNU extensions. I imagine the same goes for BSD as well.
Video, in my understanding, requires huge amounts of storage, and fast contiguous writes. Hard disks fit perfectly fine for those requirements, and there's no need to even try to switch to SSDs.
SSDs have their advantage in their very low latency, which you probably don't care about. However your case is a very specialized usage that's very far from what a normal desktop uses, so your criticism has little relevance on that market.
I never bought a single thing due to an online ad. When I buy something, I search for the general class of thing (MP3 player, book on Perl), then check specs, reviews, etc, andpick the ones that match my interests.
For buying things like motherboards, I will go to the shop's website, open a tab for every item that is immediately available for purchase and satisfies my basic requirements and has a non-insane price, then go tab by tab discarding ones that don't fit the requirements. Then I choose from the ones that remain. For instance, to buy a motherboard I opened about 20 tabs with available boards, discarded the ones without ECC support, discarded the ones that didn't list Phenom II as supported, discarded uATX sized boards, discarded the ones that had no integrated video, and was left with 3 to choose from by price.
For MP3 players, I checked the wikipedia list, and checked out each that seemed to fit, and chose the one that best fit (Cowon, who I never seen an ad for, and didn't know theyeven existed)
For things like food in a bar, I will purchase a different option every day until I tried them all, then alternate between the ones I like. I tried every flavor of ice cream ata kiosk, going from top to bottom.
Well, as a video guy, I can easily say we will keep on using our SCSI magnetic "thingies" until something that fast and that reliable, which won't "wear out" comes up from a trustable vendor.
Then you need to start looking for some new way to store data, since traditional hard disks eventually wear out as well. As any mechanical device it will suffer wear, and sooner or later something will get out of tolerance.
Everything wears out at some point. Moving hard disk parts wear out mechanically, all chips will eventually suffer from enough electromigration to fail, electolytic capacitors will eventually dry out and fail.
And here's why: There's little reason to make an intelligent in the human sense of "intelligent" machine.
Computers that can understand human speech would be of course interesting and useful, for automated translation for instance. But who wants that to be performed by an AI that can get bored and refuse to do it because it's sick of translating medical texts?
It seems to me that having a full human-like AI perform boring tasks would be something akin to slavery: it would somehow need to be forced to perform the job, as anything with a human intelligence would quickly rebel if told that its existence would consist of processing terabytes of data and nothing else.
We definitely don't want an AI that can think by itself, we want one just advanced enough to understand what we want from it. We want machines that can automatically translate, monitor security cameras for suspicious events, or understand verbal commands. We don't want one that's going to protest that the material it's given is boring, ogle pretty girls on security camera feeds, or reply "I can't let you do that, Dave". An AI in a word processor would be worse than Clippy. Who wants the word processor to criticize their grammar in detail and explain why the slashdot post they're writing is stupid?
Resuming, I don't think doomsday Skynet-like AIs will be made in large enough amounts, because people won't like dealing with them. We'll maybe go to the level of an obedient dog and stop there.
And when the asteroid comes at us while Jupiter is nowhere near, how are you going to drag Jupiter into the right position for it to intercept it?
In the solar system, planets rotate around the Sun. It's not a given that Jupiter will always be in the right place at the right time to intercept something. It certainly didn't take care of the dinosaur killing one.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm waiting for Yiffy Yaffle.
It's going to come with an awesome background, have Second Life preinstalled, and a desktop applet to watch the latest submissions to Fur Affinity.
The only problem with that is that it doesn't work. I did RTFM before posting, and also actually tried it out.
Run "tar -t --null" through hexdump -C, you'll see there are no 00s in there, and it's all 0a, or newlines.
For some reason --null only applies to reading file lists, and not to producing them, at least as of tar version 1.22.
That has nothing to do with bash.
Tar outputs data, xargs reads that data as-is without the shell's intervention. It will work the same whether you use bash, zsh, or anything else. The issue is only due to how that data is formatted on the output and interpreted on the input.
In this case tar appears to be missing an option that would write a \0 after each filename, which seems a bit odd for a GNU utility. Especially since it can read lists terminated in such a way.
Nothing a patch wouldn't fix though.
Use:
That will work unless the filenames contain newlines in them.
And this, btw, is why I think that at least in the current society, all these "let's have less regulations. Free Market!" ideas can't really work.
I like the idea of a fully free market in principle. In practice, it's not just the companies that work to destroy it, but also even the people themselves. For a free market to work an informed population is needed. And a population with a significant amount of people with the mindset of "OMG $COMPANY released a new product! I got to rush to the store right now!!" isn't really an informed one. Those people are acting on advertisements, impulses and brand loyalty.
A working free market needs a population that acts on cold logic, considering what they get for their money, and that has no brand loyalty and buys from whoever sells the best product for their needs. But we don't have that.
From what part of Europe?
Things seem to vary quite a bit. In Spain a judge ruled that calling your boss "son of a bitch" isn't a good enough reason for firing.
The friendliest interface for people who don't want to learn is not the GUI or the CLI, but the TUI. A full screen text application, like a ncurses app.
It takes over the screen completely. At every point it displays the possible choices. It makes heavy use of keyboard shortcuts so that an experienced operator can be really fast with it. It lacks shortcuts that cause something weird to happen (like the Win key combinations). It processes everything serially, so that it's possible to use several keyboard shortcuts in a row, and have the right thing happen. It does only what it needs to do, and the computer doesn't offer a way to do anything else.
They're still being worked on, and these days they seem to be mostly built on Linux.
Nor it should.
Which is how it should be. If not all of the purchasers are interested in keeping it forever, and part of the interested people decide they can wait to get it cheaper used, it would be inefficient to force them all to get a new copy and keep it.
I wish. All you can get right now is a flat texture. SL could really use a decent fur shader. And better support for quadrupeds and other types of avatars. And flexible tails that can move properly. That's just for a start.
SL still has a long way to go in that respect.
Well, that would depend on what kind of crud it is.
If it's the result of some illness, then that would be very legitimately documentable as a medical topic.
If it's plain crud, then I'd agree with its deletion because unless it was something very unusual you'd be the only source of that information. However, even under an "absolutely everything goes" uber-inclusionist policy I don't see it doing any harm. You'd have a hard time finding places to add legitimate links to it, and as a result almost nobody would find it, and it could probably end up removed as an orphaned page nobody is interested in. If not, it'd remain as minor junk in the database without doing any harm.
Still, protests against deletionism don't involve stuff like that, they involve removal of perfectly good content that already was added, but which was then deemed excessive due to the unimportance of the topic. Things like pages on comics, pokemon, anime, etc, which are very legitimately documentable, about which plenty references can be found.
Overall I would vastly prefer to err by keeping too much junk than by removing useful information.
Precisely. I just want everything to be collated and distilled, and not just topics deemed to be "notable".
If there's enough data on a pokemon to write up 5 pages summarizing characteristics, stats, and trivia, then there should 5 pages of characteristics, stats and trivia, complete with a picture.
I think deletionism doesn't scale.
Every time somebody tries to contribute something to say, a Pokemon page and finds their stuff removed by some guy who thinks it's "not important" you get a potential contributor very discouraged to ever try again. People have better things to do than throwing things at wikipedia to see what sticks.
Now who keeps doing that? IMO, deletionism isn't a position new users with 5 edits hold, it's something held by long established contributors who have a well defined idea of what should be in Wikipedia and what shouldn't.
The problem as I see it is that the set of "serious" topics is relatively constant, well covered, and very contended. It's hard to find something to contribute on WWII, and even if you find something to add, chances are you'll run into that it can be very hard to get edits to stick in pages like that, even with full attribution. So on one side you have new contributors get discouraged by having their additions to "trivial" topics deleted, on the other side they get discouraged by the difficulty of contributing to well established "serious" ones.
This in turn will reduce the amount of new contributors, and old ones don't stick around forever. Communities need a constant influx of new people, or they die out as the old people get bored and leave, or run out of things to do.
I disagree.
I want a wikipedia with absolutely everything in existence in it. Pokemon, Star Trek, every single general that participated in WWII, and a page for every cat whose owner wants to make one thrown in for good measure.
I never had a problem with there being too much stuff in wikipedia, I keep bumping into that there's too little, because some obscure trivia that I actually find helpful got removed.
IMO, at this rate wikipedia will end up dying, because they need donations, and every time I find something I liked gone I decide not to give them anything. I'm probably not the only one who thinks that way.
I didn't say it didn't have choices, I said it couldn't choose to ignore the license, because it's not a true choice.
If you're in a situation of copyright infringement, you can:
A. Stop infringing
B. Pay for a license
C. Release the source under the GPL/etc (if it applies to the situation)
D. Reach some other kind of mutual agreement with the copyright holder
E. Ignore it, and do nothing.
But E is not a true choice. The copyright holder will have a clearcut case against you, and that'll result in having to go to court and pay for the lawyers. And once in court, you'll have to stop infringing, pay for a license, release your code under the GPL, or reach some other agreement.
Any time you choose option E, you end up spending more money, then it's GOTO to options A to D. Option E is never the final state.
Citation please. I lurk on slashdot a lot and don't remember seeing such a thing, at least recently.
If you're going to expect cross-sharing to happen, you might as well go with the GPL, which makes it explicit. Otherwise you're giving with no guarantee that the other guy will give back. Under the BSD, Netgear gets to pick what they share and what they don't. Obviously they'll share stuff of little value to decrease maintenance costs, and not share code of high value, trading maintenance cost for exclusivity.
Well, if they're not sharing under the GPL, they're definitely not going to do any sort of "cross-sharing" deal under the BSD. So as a whole their usage is neutral to a BSD project.
That, while OK according to the BSD, IMO makes it unlikely they're going to get a lot of assistance from the developers. Why would somebody spend a lot of effort on being basically an unpaid developer for some company that's not going to give you anything, not even credit, for your trouble?
Under the GPL it's different because developers know that a company working on something like a router must give back, whether they like it or not. That means that a reward for helping is guaranteed.
Receptive how? If you're keeping your development process closed, the project doesn't know what you're doing, and if they do, they don't know how, so they couldn't accomodate you if they wanted.
Ehh, you're splitting hairs there.
It's like saying that given a choice of "Your money or your life" you can choose not to give the money. Sure. But the bandit still gets it after he shoots you.
Having to release your source under the GPL is GPL compliant obviously. Having to stop distributing the product also is. And paying damages may well be a lot more expensive than going to the author and buying a license. I will be very surprised losing a copyright infringement lawsuit ever has any advantages over respecting the license. Just look at the judgements getting handed out for copying a few songs.
GPL compliance isn't optional.
The GPL is very clear about what it requires, if you're unable or unwilling to comply with the terms, then don't use code licensed under it.
Well, if I was doing a router I wouldn't go with BSD, because:
1. If you contribute back, any contribution is going to be free for all. Which means that if Linksys contributes something, Netgear automatically gets to use it without any strings attached in their next product. If it happens that Linksys got something almost right, and Netgear managed to polish it to perfection in a few days, then Netgear just gained a really cool feature, courtesy of Linksys, and Linksys doesn't get to see how they did it.
2. If you don't contribute back, you now have to maintain an internal fork. This is not very easy, since the people doing the public development don't know or care about what you're doing, and are perfectly free to introduce changes that completely break your modifications.
3. If you release your changes under the GPL, the BSD supporters will whine about it for weeks.
4. A lot of stuff out there is targeted to Linux. There's lots of software that doesn't build cleanly on Solaris due to applications using GNU extensions. I imagine the same goes for BSD as well.
IMO, SSDs are the wrong tech for your problem.
Video, in my understanding, requires huge amounts of storage, and fast contiguous writes. Hard disks fit perfectly fine for those requirements, and there's no need to even try to switch to SSDs.
SSDs have their advantage in their very low latency, which you probably don't care about. However your case is a very specialized usage that's very far from what a normal desktop uses, so your criticism has little relevance on that market.
It may be the idea, but it never worked for me.
I never bought a single thing due to an online ad. When I buy something, I search for the general class of thing (MP3 player, book on Perl), then check specs, reviews, etc, andpick the ones that match my interests.
For buying things like motherboards, I will go to the shop's website, open a tab for every item that is immediately available for purchase and satisfies my basic requirements and has a non-insane price, then go tab by tab discarding ones that don't fit the requirements. Then I choose from the ones that remain. For instance, to buy a motherboard I opened about 20 tabs with available boards, discarded the ones without ECC support, discarded the ones that didn't list Phenom II as supported, discarded uATX sized boards, discarded the ones that had no integrated video, and was left with 3 to choose from by price.
For MP3 players, I checked the wikipedia list, and checked out each that seemed to fit, and chose the one that best fit (Cowon, who I never seen an ad for, and didn't know theyeven existed)
For things like food in a bar, I will purchase a different option every day until I tried them all, then alternate between the ones I like. I tried every flavor of ice cream ata kiosk, going from top to bottom.
Then you need to start looking for some new way to store data, since traditional hard disks eventually wear out as well. As any mechanical device it will suffer wear, and sooner or later something will get out of tolerance.
Everything wears out at some point. Moving hard disk parts wear out mechanically, all chips will eventually suffer from enough electromigration to fail, electolytic capacitors will eventually dry out and fail.
If AMD owns a fab and only uses it for its own purposes, any time they don't need anything made, all that expensive equipment sits idle.
And here's why: There's little reason to make an intelligent in the human sense of "intelligent" machine.
Computers that can understand human speech would be of course interesting and useful, for automated translation for instance. But who wants that to be performed by an AI that can get bored and refuse to do it because it's sick of translating medical texts?
It seems to me that having a full human-like AI perform boring tasks would be something akin to slavery: it would somehow need to be forced to perform the job, as anything with a human intelligence would quickly rebel if told that its existence would consist of processing terabytes of data and nothing else.
We definitely don't want an AI that can think by itself, we want one just advanced enough to understand what we want from it. We want machines that can automatically translate, monitor security cameras for suspicious events, or understand verbal commands. We don't want one that's going to protest that the material it's given is boring, ogle pretty girls on security camera feeds, or reply "I can't let you do that, Dave". An AI in a word processor would be worse than Clippy. Who wants the word processor to criticize their grammar in detail and explain why the slashdot post they're writing is stupid?
Resuming, I don't think doomsday Skynet-like AIs will be made in large enough amounts, because people won't like dealing with them. We'll maybe go to the level of an obedient dog and stop there.
And when the asteroid comes at us while Jupiter is nowhere near, how are you going to drag Jupiter into the right position for it to intercept it?
In the solar system, planets rotate around the Sun. It's not a given that Jupiter will always be in the right place at the right time to intercept something. It certainly didn't take care of the dinosaur killing one.