Blue scatters too much in fog, mists and smoke; that's why fog-lights are usualy yellow.
Incidentally, it's also why the sky is blue during the day and orange/red at sunrise and sunset. When the sun is overhead, blue light gets scattered in the atmosphere, giving the whole sky a blue look. When the sun is near the horizon, there's a greater thickness of air between it and you, which scatters all the blue light away (toward the part of the Earth where the sun is overhead, and some back into space).
If you're talking about "transaction checkpoints", what that means is nested transactions. It has nothing to do with handling database crashes; it's for limiting how much of your transaction you have to roll back when an SQL command fails. Say you issue these SQL commands:
BEGIN TRANSACTION; SELECT foo FROM bar; SELECT bar FROM foo; UPDATE bar SET foo = foo + 1 WHERE xyz; COMMIT;
If the second SELECT (for example) fails, the transaction is automatically aborted and you have to start over again with the first SELECT. If that first SELECT was complex and time-consuming and it succeeded the first time, it's wasteful to have to do it again. With nested transactions, you can write this:
BEGIN TRANSACTION; SELECT foo FROM bar; BEGIN TRANSACTION; -- Nested! SELECT bar FROM foo; COMMIT; UPDATE bar SET foo = foo + 1 WHERE xyz; COMMIT;
Now, if the second SELECT fails, only the inner transaction is aborted, and you can begin again from the beginning of the inner transaction without losing work done since the beginning of the outer transaction.
Why would it break the ability to print? Those are all outbound connections; I'm pretty sure the XP firewall only restricts inbound connections. The type of data you're sending, or the protocol you're using, is irrelevant.
Having the service running doesn't necessarily mean it's downloading and applying updates; it just means that updates can be applied, either automatically if you've configured it to do so, or by the Windows Update ActiveX control. The "Automatic" setting for a service means, IIRC, that it's not started at boot time but it can be started running automatically by Windows when something (such as Windows Update) needs to use it.
Windows has lots of services that run in the background just to be available when they're needed. The Sound service must be running to be able to play sound, but it remains running even when you're not playing sound. The Themes service must be running to use XP's visual styles, but you can choose to use the "classic" look without having to stop Themes. You get the idea.
I don't know what issues you have with Debian, but I never said "just use Debian". I referred to "my Debian box" because I do in fact run Debian, but APT has been ported to RPM-based distributions too. I do think the Debian package system has some other advantages over RPM, APT or not, but if you just want to get out of dependency hell, APT or Yum on a Fedora box will serve you just as well.
I couldn't agree more. My biggest problem is related to this, it's dependancy handling. In order to install App X you need XLib, that needs XLib-Devel, that needs XXYLib, that needs XXYLib-Devel, and so on. When you go more than 2 or 3 levels deep in depends it's nigh impossible to install the App you want.
That's an issue with your distro's package system, not with Linux systems in general. On my Debian box I'd type
apt-get install AppX
and apt would download and install AppX, XLib, XXYLib, and so on if they weren't installed already. There's no nightmare at all with a decent package manager.
(Note that I didn't mention the devel packages in my example -- they're only needed if you want to compile something against the library. Unless you're running a source-based distro like Gentoo, AppX is a precompiled binary package and you don't need devel packages to run it.)
I hope you're citing Gentoo for "ease of administration", and not "ease of installation" for non-savvy users. Updating Portage is fairly easy, but Grandma is not going to go through the manual steps of partitioning, mounting, extracting a stage tarball, bootstrapping if necessary, etc.
Add Debian to the "ease of administration" list too. It's not source-based so you don't have as much fine-grained control over optional features, (though many packages have multiple builds you can choose between), but the package metadata is more robust, so (for example) you can uninstall a package without having to worry about breaking other packages which depend on it -- if there are any, it'll tell you so and abort the removal as a safeguard.
I've always wondered why those download pages return an HTML file with a redirect, as opposed to just returning the data. You can easily write a PHP script which opens the file and returns its contents directly with an appropriate Content-Type header, or if you don't want the PHP script to have to figure out the Content-Type, send an HTTP redirect so the browser requests the file direcly. Both of these methods would be just as effective in getting you your file, and you wouldn't have to "wait 5 seconds" for the download to start.
Why aren't sites using those methods already, IE changes aside?
The antivirus companies want you to get infected. That way, if you have their software, it tells you it found the virus and you see that your purchase was justified; if you don't have their software, you get hit by the virus and start thinking that maybe you should buy some antivirus software.
If antivirus vendors told everyone how to avoid getting the virus without using antivirus software, they'd be reducing demand for their own products.
egrep and fgrep are, on my Debian system and probably most others, small shell scripts which run grep with the '-E' and '-F' options respectively, and a pattern. They're just conveniences to save you some typing; all the actual functionality is in the grep program, which happens to have three modes of operation for different types of use.
The naming of "head", "tail", and "more" make sense to me and are quick to type -- what do you think is wrong with those?
It depends on your style of play -- as I mentioned an another reply in this thread, there are many races and classes available, which are played differently. I have another character going (you can have several at once) who's a mage -- he does about 4 damage whacking monsters with his staff, a few hundred casting Manathrust, but there's a limit on how long you can do that before you run out of mana and have to rest for a while to recharge. He can cast Identify, which is very useful in the dungeon, but not Greater Identify, so if I find an artifact I won't know its special properties until I'm in town and can buy a scroll (assuming the store has one available).
One of these days I want to start a necromancer character -- they turn corpses into undead pets, and by raising your level in the Monster-Lore skill you can gain experience from your pets' kills. (Raising this skill also reduces the chance of your pets turning against you.)
I think it's nice to be able to recall back to town (using scrolls of Word of Recall, or a spellbook if your Conveyance level is high enough) from the dungeon. You can sell stuff you've found that's useless to your character (what's a mage going to do with a a battle-axe of *Slay Animal* ?) and buy other things that are useful, like new spellbooks or enchanted ammo. And if you get to a depth in a given dungeon that's too difficult for your character, or just get bored of that dungeon, you can travel to a different dungeon (they each have a different "feel") and spend some time there instead.
Probably one of the greatest features of ToME is the monster memory. When you first see a given type of monster, you know very little about it but its description. The first time you kill one you learn how much experience it's worth, and as you interact with them further, you learn more things about them (how many hit points, whether they're good or evil, attacks and special abilities as you see them used, etc.) When you die and start a new character with the same savefile, this information is preserved. ("Your ancestors have killed 12 of these creatures.") This matches up pretty well with the knowledge that you, the human player, gain about the various types of monsters, and provides a nice convenience without being a spoiler. (You're not going to know the abilities of a Great Wyrm of Power until you've had a character actually face one...)
Omega's fun too, but it's not as extensive. All the spells and special abilities are hard-coded; ToME has a much cleaner separation between "engine" and the data which drives the engine, so it's possible to add many new features without much coding. Because of this, ToME has (as I mentioned earlier) a wide variety of races and character classes, which lend themselves to completely different styles of play -- you can be a gnome assassin, or an elven ranger, or a skeleton troll demonologist, or a vampire dark-elf sorceror, or an ent druid... you get the idea.
I stopped playing Nethack when I found Omega, and stopped playing Omega when I found ToME.
I have a swordmaster character in ToME who's doing pretty well though -- all stats maxed, over 1000 attack damage per turn. Just a bit more game time and Morgoth's head will be mine.
Try ToME. It's an Angband variant that features a world map with multiple dungeons, quests, a skill system, a huge set of available races and character classes (and variants thereof) and, best of all, a Lua interpreter so you can write new items, spells, and whole new variants.
Nethack is fun, but it gets dull just going down and down and down. In ToME you can recall to town (Bree, say, or Lothlorien), sell treasure you've found, buy some new equipment with the money, and return to the dungeon to continue exploring.
(No, I'm not one of the developers or anything. I just play it a lot.)
"TCP/IP" refers to a family of networking protocols including IP, TCP, UDP, ARP, and less strictly, DNS and the routing protocols. So it's perfectly valid for a game to use UDP and say that it's using TCP/IP.
What in the world are you talking about? Email has nothing to do with operating systems, and Hotmail is a Web-based service. This "exploit" is made possible by Microsoft's policy, not their products.
He's not saying that talking about freedom is bad. He's saying that use of the term "free" allows Microsoft to take advantage of the ambiguity (gratis vs. libre) to make an argument that sounds convincing on the surface even though it's unsound.
Well, he wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which has helped to show people that the open-source model of development is viable. He personally talked with executives at Netscape, who had previously read this paper, and convinced them to open-source their browser product, which we know today as Mozilla and its derivatives.
He also maintains the Jargon File, and as you probably know, he published the Halloween Documents, which give the open-source community a look into Microsoft's "attack plans" so we know what to expect and can respond accordingly.
On a smaller scale, he's also one of the founders of CCIL, a freenet in Chester County, Pennsylvania, USA which provides Internet access to people who live or work in the area. This was my first exposure to the Internet (aside from a few emails to AOL and Compuserve members back when I was using Prodigy) and I still use my account, so I think it's a very worthwhile project.
After those previous two replies, I think you deserve one that's not profane and closed-minded.
In a perfect world, inferior products would have no chance of survival against superior ones, and would die. Howver, this is not a perfect world. Microsoft is entrenched -- they have much more money with which to advertise to the public, and influence other companies and political leaders. They can tell the world that their product is better even if it isn't, and people will believe it if they don't see any opposition to those statements.
Winning the battle with Microsoft is about writing better software, but it's also about letting people know that better software is available. When the enemy shoots at you, you'd better shoot back or you're going to get mowed down.
That's funny... I've been running Debian for about 4 years and I've been quite happy with it the whole time, but when I try out Fedora I can't even find a tool similar to debfoster for keeping the system clean from unnecessary packages.
Point is, the thing you're familiar with is always going to be easier for you to use than the thing you're unfamiliar with. No surprise there. You can choose to stay in your shell and bash other distros that you know little about, or you can choose to broaden your horizons and learn them. Or you can take the middle ground and keep using your preferred distro while respecting others' preferences for different ones.
We know his claims are garbage, but the book's intended audience -- government policymakers, people who decide whether the government should support and invest in open-source software -- do not.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, there's a window of time before the order begins being processed, and you can cancel an accidental purchase during that time.
Incidentally, it's also why the sky is blue during the day and orange/red at sunrise and sunset. When the sun is overhead, blue light gets scattered in the atmosphere, giving the whole sky a blue look. When the sun is near the horizon, there's a greater thickness of air between it and you, which scatters all the blue light away (toward the part of the Earth where the sun is overhead, and some back into space).
If you're talking about "transaction checkpoints", what that means is nested transactions. It has nothing to do with handling database crashes; it's for limiting how much of your transaction you have to roll back when an SQL command fails. Say you issue these SQL commands:
If the second SELECT (for example) fails, the transaction is automatically aborted and you have to start over again with the first SELECT. If that first SELECT was complex and time-consuming and it succeeded the first time, it's wasteful to have to do it again. With nested transactions, you can write this:
Now, if the second SELECT fails, only the inner transaction is aborted, and you can begin again from the beginning of the inner transaction without losing work done since the beginning of the outer transaction.
Why would it break the ability to print? Those are all outbound connections; I'm pretty sure the XP firewall only restricts inbound connections. The type of data you're sending, or the protocol you're using, is irrelevant.
Having the service running doesn't necessarily mean it's downloading and applying updates; it just means that updates can be applied, either automatically if you've configured it to do so, or by the Windows Update ActiveX control. The "Automatic" setting for a service means, IIRC, that it's not started at boot time but it can be started running automatically by Windows when something (such as Windows Update) needs to use it.
Windows has lots of services that run in the background just to be available when they're needed. The Sound service must be running to be able to play sound, but it remains running even when you're not playing sound. The Themes service must be running to use XP's visual styles, but you can choose to use the "classic" look without having to stop Themes. You get the idea.
I don't know what issues you have with Debian, but I never said "just use Debian". I referred to "my Debian box" because I do in fact run Debian, but APT has been ported to RPM-based distributions too. I do think the Debian package system has some other advantages over RPM, APT or not, but if you just want to get out of dependency hell, APT or Yum on a Fedora box will serve you just as well.
That's an issue with your distro's package system, not with Linux systems in general. On my Debian box I'd type
and apt would download and install AppX, XLib, XXYLib, and so on if they weren't installed already. There's no nightmare at all with a decent package manager.(Note that I didn't mention the devel packages in my example -- they're only needed if you want to compile something against the library. Unless you're running a source-based distro like Gentoo, AppX is a precompiled binary package and you don't need devel packages to run it.)
I hope you're citing Gentoo for "ease of administration", and not "ease of installation" for non-savvy users. Updating Portage is fairly easy, but Grandma is not going to go through the manual steps of partitioning, mounting, extracting a stage tarball, bootstrapping if necessary, etc.
Add Debian to the "ease of administration" list too. It's not source-based so you don't have as much fine-grained control over optional features, (though many packages have multiple builds you can choose between), but the package metadata is more robust, so (for example) you can uninstall a package without having to worry about breaking other packages which depend on it -- if there are any, it'll tell you so and abort the removal as a safeguard.
Only if you're installing Gentoo. :-P
I'm just teasing -- I like Gentoo -- but seriously, most distros install as fast as Windows, if not faster.
I've always wondered why those download pages return an HTML file with a redirect, as opposed to just returning the data. You can easily write a PHP script which opens the file and returns its contents directly with an appropriate Content-Type header, or if you don't want the PHP script to have to figure out the Content-Type, send an HTTP redirect so the browser requests the file direcly. Both of these methods would be just as effective in getting you your file, and you wouldn't have to "wait 5 seconds" for the download to start.
Why aren't sites using those methods already, IE changes aside?
The antivirus companies want you to get infected. That way, if you have their software, it tells you it found the virus and you see that your purchase was justified; if you don't have their software, you get hit by the virus and start thinking that maybe you should buy some antivirus software.
If antivirus vendors told everyone how to avoid getting the virus without using antivirus software, they'd be reducing demand for their own products.
Maybe he meant that only 25 pounds have been recovered by humans -- it's risky fighting those tube worms, you know... :-)
egrep and fgrep are, on my Debian system and probably most others, small shell scripts which run grep with the '-E' and '-F' options respectively, and a pattern. They're just conveniences to save you some typing; all the actual functionality is in the grep program, which happens to have three modes of operation for different types of use.
The naming of "head", "tail", and "more" make sense to me and are quick to type -- what do you think is wrong with those?
It depends on your style of play -- as I mentioned an another reply in this thread, there are many races and classes available, which are played differently. I have another character going (you can have several at once) who's a mage -- he does about 4 damage whacking monsters with his staff, a few hundred casting Manathrust, but there's a limit on how long you can do that before you run out of mana and have to rest for a while to recharge. He can cast Identify, which is very useful in the dungeon, but not Greater Identify, so if I find an artifact I won't know its special properties until I'm in town and can buy a scroll (assuming the store has one available).
One of these days I want to start a necromancer character -- they turn corpses into undead pets, and by raising your level in the Monster-Lore skill you can gain experience from your pets' kills. (Raising this skill also reduces the chance of your pets turning against you.)
I think it's nice to be able to recall back to town (using scrolls of Word of Recall, or a spellbook if your Conveyance level is high enough) from the dungeon. You can sell stuff you've found that's useless to your character (what's a mage going to do with a a battle-axe of *Slay Animal* ?) and buy other things that are useful, like new spellbooks or enchanted ammo. And if you get to a depth in a given dungeon that's too difficult for your character, or just get bored of that dungeon, you can travel to a different dungeon (they each have a different "feel") and spend some time there instead.
Probably one of the greatest features of ToME is the monster memory. When you first see a given type of monster, you know very little about it but its description. The first time you kill one you learn how much experience it's worth, and as you interact with them further, you learn more things about them (how many hit points, whether they're good or evil, attacks and special abilities as you see them used, etc.) When you die and start a new character with the same savefile, this information is preserved. ("Your ancestors have killed 12 of these creatures.") This matches up pretty well with the knowledge that you, the human player, gain about the various types of monsters, and provides a nice convenience without being a spoiler. (You're not going to know the abilities of a Great Wyrm of Power until you've had a character actually face one...)
Omega's fun too, but it's not as extensive. All the spells and special abilities are hard-coded; ToME has a much cleaner separation between "engine" and the data which drives the engine, so it's possible to add many new features without much coding. Because of this, ToME has (as I mentioned earlier) a wide variety of races and character classes, which lend themselves to completely different styles of play -- you can be a gnome assassin, or an elven ranger, or a skeleton troll demonologist, or a vampire dark-elf sorceror, or an ent druid... you get the idea.
I stopped playing Nethack when I found Omega, and stopped playing Omega when I found ToME.
Zero -- I got tired of it and stopped playing.
I have a swordmaster character in ToME who's doing pretty well though -- all stats maxed, over 1000 attack damage per turn. Just a bit more game time and Morgoth's head will be mine.
Try ToME. It's an Angband variant that features a world map with multiple dungeons, quests, a skill system, a huge set of available races and character classes (and variants thereof) and, best of all, a Lua interpreter so you can write new items, spells, and whole new variants.
Nethack is fun, but it gets dull just going down and down and down. In ToME you can recall to town (Bree, say, or Lothlorien), sell treasure you've found, buy some new equipment with the money, and return to the dungeon to continue exploring.
(No, I'm not one of the developers or anything. I just play it a lot.)
"TCP/IP" refers to a family of networking protocols including IP, TCP, UDP, ARP, and less strictly, DNS and the routing protocols. So it's perfectly valid for a game to use UDP and say that it's using TCP/IP.
What in the world are you talking about? Email has nothing to do with operating systems, and Hotmail is a Web-based service. This "exploit" is made possible by Microsoft's policy, not their products.
He's not saying that talking about freedom is bad. He's saying that use of the term "free" allows Microsoft to take advantage of the ambiguity (gratis vs. libre) to make an argument that sounds convincing on the surface even though it's unsound.
Well, he wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which has helped to show people that the open-source model of development is viable. He personally talked with executives at Netscape, who had previously read this paper, and convinced them to open-source their browser product, which we know today as Mozilla and its derivatives.
He also maintains the Jargon File, and as you probably know, he published the Halloween Documents, which give the open-source community a look into Microsoft's "attack plans" so we know what to expect and can respond accordingly.
On a smaller scale, he's also one of the founders of CCIL, a freenet in Chester County, Pennsylvania, USA which provides Internet access to people who live or work in the area. This was my first exposure to the Internet (aside from a few emails to AOL and Compuserve members back when I was using Prodigy) and I still use my account, so I think it's a very worthwhile project.
After those previous two replies, I think you deserve one that's not profane and closed-minded.
In a perfect world, inferior products would have no chance of survival against superior ones, and would die. Howver, this is not a perfect world. Microsoft is entrenched -- they have much more money with which to advertise to the public, and influence other companies and political leaders. They can tell the world that their product is better even if it isn't, and people will believe it if they don't see any opposition to those statements.
Winning the battle with Microsoft is about writing better software, but it's also about letting people know that better software is available. When the enemy shoots at you, you'd better shoot back or you're going to get mowed down.
Simple: having all that, and realizing that it's all going to go away, and there's nothing you can do about it.
That's funny... I've been running Debian for about 4 years and I've been quite happy with it the whole time, but when I try out Fedora I can't even find a tool similar to debfoster for keeping the system clean from unnecessary packages.
Point is, the thing you're familiar with is always going to be easier for you to use than the thing you're unfamiliar with. No surprise there. You can choose to stay in your shell and bash other distros that you know little about, or you can choose to broaden your horizons and learn them. Or you can take the middle ground and keep using your preferred distro while respecting others' preferences for different ones.
We know his claims are garbage, but the book's intended audience -- government policymakers, people who decide whether the government should support and invest in open-source software -- do not.