a question about this though. why / what exactly are the positives to having to unmount devices (perhaps it's just not the best way for a flashdrive?) ?
There are no positives, just common sense. If OS doesn't know you're about to pull of the drive, it can't possibly do anything that might be unfinished.
i mean, i hate to bring up windows (and i don't really miss this tiny 'functionality') but i could just yank out the drive and it'll be fine.
Most of the time it might be fine, but there's NO GUARANTEE even on windows, every time you "just yank out the drive" you're gambling with your data.
what has to happen and why, in linux that it can't just write the data to the drive? is it because it's all in the RAM cache? i wonder if you could change that behavior for certain devices...
It's not any different in linux, it's just that it doesn't encourage you to do stupid things like windows does, most of the times data will not be in cache any more, but it might be. You're free to take your changes.
And you can change the behaviour to try to keep the disk synchronized all the time, it's called "-o sync", if the mount manpage is up to date it only works with ufs and ext2/3, so no dice if your thumbdrives contain fat.
Not particularly hard to guess since it is enabled in everything else...
And no, I don't suppose there is. There was an easy way to turn it back on in rh8 (9?) - fc1, but no more. It's not insanely hard either, just turning one #define from 0 to 1 or so and recompiling.
It's nowhere as bad as taking more cpu than the actual compiling, though granted the overhead is quite sizeable...
Besides, you're assuming the problem is in terminal itself and not the underlying font layout and rendering libraries (pango and xft).. full unicode support and anti-aliasing take a toll.
Can't you just run rxv/x/e/aterm if you know you need to run something that's going to put a LOT of stuff to stdout, if gnome-terminal isn't fast enough and konsole hogs as much memory as running the whole KDE?
In reality, we modern Americans[1], Europeans, and X-ans[2] enjoy more freedoms than almost anyone ever has in the entire history of human civilisation!
That is true, so far, but it's not an excuse for taking more and more of them away with each new law. And citizens of some of those countries do enjoy less freedoms that they did, say, a hundred to fifty years ago.
[2] where X is whatever the proper collective term is for the citizens of Australia and New Zealand. Man, there must be a better word for all this...
Australasian? That would include New Guinea too, though.
A hard drive that is out of production if effectively impossible to repair without HUGE expenses, so you'll get a new, larger, drive anyway instead of any refurbs, if it's old enough.
This, however, is not a cool hack even in that sense of the word. iPod doesn't do anything that it wasn't originally intended to do, it just plays audio files. IR gizmo doesn't do anything it wasn't intended to do, either. Considering neither of the devices used in this operation are doing anything else than they're supposed to do, it's not a hack at all.
It would be a hack if they'd built the IR gizmo themselves, though even still it's so simple concept I would't call even that a cool hack.
It works the same way as your brain can sample someone sending morse-code with flashlight without needing to understand anything (color aside) about wavelength of visible light.
Which is to say, IR phototransistor deals with receiving IR light, and the actual frequency of modulation on top of it is much lower, apparently under 44kHz.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you're going to buy an Pocket PC, why do you need the IR Gadget?
You don't.
Usually, however, the IR gizmos built in to devices for communication purposes are rather limited in transmission power, and sometimes in what kind of waveform or frequency you can abuse them to outputting/reading, so the gadget is there mostly for extending the range.
The iPod enters the equation only because it can, though IMHO is useless and stupid. iPod can play audio files? WOW, I'd never have guessed.
Mozilla is not very good example, in fact I think it gives a pretty fine proof against your point - a project that was, for a long time, backed out by a large corporation, didn't get anywhere and only started focusing, and getting notice from, end-users AFTER the company got out of the way.
His main beef with gratis software seems to be that he doesn't want to be in the business of selling customized software (why not?) and can't create a "general" version because of free competitors undermine him.
He brings carpenter as an example of a person who CAN do that, but is that true? I don't think so. A lone carpenter can not make a living by selling handcrafted woodworks that are exactly the same as those sold by a factory next door, only the factory can mass-produce million pieces a day and sell them ten times cheaper. No, he needs to differentiate himself to get a market, a carpenter is in customization business just as much as a lone developer is forced to be in area dominated by cheaper (free or not, as long as it's less expensive) alternatives. I'm sorry to say, but days of writing über-simple generic app and living off it are gone, even without open source, you just can't pull off "McAfee" any more.
Also, this all seems very contradictory to his point (which is probably, for some projects at least, true) about open source not "scratching an itch" of users, but only developers themselves - if that's the case, you CAN compete in software market, without being solely in customization business, just scratch your users itches better and open source versions should be no threat.
That's a worst-case scenario, and in my humble opinion not usual, or ever average. Especially when it comes to clear bugs - instead of RFE's and something that can or can not be a bug depending on who you ask - things tend to get fixed pretty fast after reporting. And yes, developers of non-trivial projects do upkeep and read bug tracking systems too.
RTFA. Real's engineers certainly had to obtain iTunes and an iPod to make this happen. When they did so, they agreed to the license accompanying the iPod.
Despite what companies would want all you sheep to think, there's no magical "you're agreeing to something by a mere purchase/click of button" law. Licence agreement is a contract, and unless Apple has a piece of paper with a signature from Real, TOUGH LUCK, perhaps they should stop selling those pieces of shit if they don't want anyone to use them.
To spite what Real says, when they say "re-create their own version in their labs" that means reverse engineer!
Maybe it does mean that. Since the EULA does not apply, nothing prevents them from reverse-engineering from compability purposes.
They'd have us believe they sat some engineers down in a room who had never looked at an iPod or iTunes (much less crack them) but yet were somehow able to "recreate their own version"?
If you've never heard of cleanroom development, would you please come out of the damn barrel?
BULL shit. Off to jail, fuckers.
What law was it again the broke? They didn't break the contract law because there is no contract, they didn't break copyright law because they don't distribute anything that's under Apples copyright, they reverse-engineer, and they don't break even the über-stupid DMCA because it explicitly allows reverse-engineering for compability purposes.
Would you please stop the BULL shitting and get frickin' clue (and perhaps some professional treatment if you can't get that clue by yourself), fucker?
If you write a book, should anyone be allowed to use that text as they desire, selling their own copies of it for profit?
Of course not.
Why is this any different?
Because Real is not distributing any material that is copyrighted by Apple, instead they study it and make their own implementation that does same thing.
Reverse-engineering does not apply well to book metaphors, but it's like reading a book, and instead of copying it, you either describe it to someone (clean-room) or write a book yourself, that is somewhat similar, but not identifical.
EULA, which grants one side privileges and the another responsibilities over those stated in copyright law is clearly a contract.
Contract is something you need to sign, so unless you were presented with that text in store on a paper before you were allowed to purchase the hardware or software, it's NOT LEGALLY BINDING.
Perhaps, but the big issue most people have with nuclear plants is that the waste they produce is difficult to get rid of.
Quite the contrary. Nuclear waste is very easy to get rid of, it's in big, solid clumps, if you put it somewhere and take care that water does not get near, it stays there basically forever.
Compare this to, say the mentioned coal waste, ash and smoke gases that are already in environment and IMPOSSIBLE to get rid of, even in the new filtered plants you only get to same position as with nuclear waste.
Oh, and "send it to sun" though often proposed as an idea, but even discounting unsafe rockets, straight-to-sun trajectories are hard and energy wasting to accomplish.
If you want a nifty hi-tech solution (as opposed to storing it for few thousand years, after which the "hot" isotopes are gone and it's no more radioactive than the original uranium ore), put it into subduction zones, from where it'll slowly sink towards core of Earth and be diluted in kazillions of tons of lava (which is already full of other radioactive elements, the heat from their decay is what keeps the mantle molten)
And there's no way to consume coal cleanly, unless you filter it with molecular precision for all other materials, after which you still couldn't get rid of CO2.
Better drivers won't sell any more Toyota cars, so THAT would be a waste of their money.
In fact it'd probably result in quite the opposite, since if all people were perfect drivers, nobody would be in a need of new car after they wrecked their old one.
Considering that their cars already are the most fuel efficient vehicles in the whole goddamn world, it's not like anyone else is at the position to whine about them not doing something about fuel efficiency.
Let the poor engineers have their fun for a while, after they've laughed their arses off, they're more refreshed to get back to serious business, designing those nifty über-fuel efficient engines.
Yeah, spending few hundred EUR/USD more in a small PC is so GODDAMNED expensive compared to few thousands for redecorating the whole mess, or especially few hundred thousand for a new house.
That also should mean it is roughly 4 times as effective against global warming if you were to plant hemp and not use it as fuel instead of planting trees.
Trees bind carbon for centuries in optimal case, though, hemp or any other annual plant needs to be regrown each year as it dies, rots and releases the CO2 back to atmosphere.
Nor are the most folks to go trough them, even when something goes wrong it's usually the secondary bacterial infections (particularly pneumonia), not the mild viral infections themselves, though chickenpox and rubella can cause nasty things to fetus if a pregnant woman gets them.
Yes. Considering how hard OCR is to do properly even when you're reading well-written text, recognizing some of the more ornamental scribbles in book spines is going to be simply impossible. Heck, it's hard for human to read those flowery scripts.
Even barcodes would be vastly better than nothing, but RFID beats them handily.
Some number of libraries around the world already uses RFID as well, there's one (http://www.tietoenator.com/default.asp?path=1,96, 135&hid=948209) in the next town. It's pretty nifty, though somewhat spooky, to pile books on a regular-looking desk and have them show up in the loaning automatons screen, Clarke hit the nail with "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
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I don't think I'm trollin, I honestly want to know if that icon can be user-defined.
Yes, it can be defined. It's part of the icon theme, just like every other icon on the desktop.
a question about this though. why / what exactly are the positives to having to unmount devices (perhaps it's just not the best way for a flashdrive?) ?
...
There are no positives, just common sense. If OS doesn't know you're about to pull of the drive, it can't possibly do anything that might be unfinished.
i mean, i hate to bring up windows (and i don't really miss this tiny 'functionality') but i could just yank out the drive and it'll be fine.
Most of the time it might be fine, but there's NO GUARANTEE even on windows, every time you "just yank out the drive" you're gambling with your data.
what has to happen and why, in linux that it can't just write the data to the drive? is it because it's all in the RAM cache? i wonder if you could change that behavior for certain devices
It's not any different in linux, it's just that it doesn't encourage you to do stupid things like windows does, most of the times data will not be in cache any more, but it might be. You're free to take your changes.
And you can change the behaviour to try to keep the disk synchronized all the time, it's called "-o sync", if the mount manpage is up to date it only works with ufs and ext2/3, so no dice if your thumbdrives contain fat.
Not particularly hard to guess since it is enabled in everything else...
i d=81215
And no, I don't suppose there is. There was an easy way to turn it back on in rh8 (9?) - fc1, but no more. It's not insanely hard either, just turning one #define from 0 to 1 or so and recompiling.
Perhaps in time for FC3... here's the page if you want to keep up with this http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?
and add something to the menu. No such luck with Gnome 1.6.
Yup, there absolutely can't be such functionality in gnome 1.6 since that version does not exist.
It is, however, in 2.6, that's disabled in Fedora, but it's hardly Gnome problem if RedHat decides to customize some features away.
It's nowhere as bad as taking more cpu than the actual compiling, though granted the overhead is quite sizeable...
Besides, you're assuming the problem is in terminal itself and not the underlying font layout and rendering libraries (pango and xft).. full unicode support and anti-aliasing take a toll.
Can't you just run rxv/x/e/aterm if you know you need to run something that's going to put a LOT of stuff to stdout, if gnome-terminal isn't fast enough and konsole hogs as much memory as running the whole KDE?
In reality, we modern Americans[1], Europeans, and X-ans[2] enjoy more freedoms than almost anyone ever has in the entire history of human civilisation!
That is true, so far, but it's not an excuse for taking more and more of them away with each new law. And citizens of some of those countries do enjoy less freedoms that they did, say, a hundred to fifty years ago.
[2] where X is whatever the proper collective term is for the citizens of Australia and New Zealand. Man, there must be a better word for all this...
Australasian? That would include New Guinea too, though.
A hard drive that is out of production if effectively impossible to repair without HUGE expenses, so you'll get a new, larger, drive anyway instead of any refurbs, if it's old enough.
And it's a PDA that has been crippled to only run the remote-control software, that is.
Finding any more braindead idea is going to be very hard.
(the "tactile" display sounds pretty nifty though, perhaps it will spread to all touchscreens with a little time...)
Yes, that's true.
This, however, is not a cool hack even in that sense of the word. iPod doesn't do anything that it wasn't originally intended to do, it just plays audio files. IR gizmo doesn't do anything it wasn't intended to do, either. Considering neither of the devices used in this operation are doing anything else than they're supposed to do, it's not a hack at all.
It would be a hack if they'd built the IR gizmo themselves, though even still it's so simple concept I would't call even that a cool hack.
It works the same way as your brain can sample someone sending morse-code with flashlight without needing to understand anything (color aside) about wavelength of visible light.
Which is to say, IR phototransistor deals with receiving IR light, and the actual frequency of modulation on top of it is much lower, apparently under 44kHz.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you're going to buy an Pocket PC, why do you need the IR Gadget?
You don't.
Usually, however, the IR gizmos built in to devices for communication purposes are rather limited in transmission power, and sometimes in what kind of waveform or frequency you can abuse them to outputting/reading, so the gadget is there mostly for extending the range.
The iPod enters the equation only because it can, though IMHO is useless and stupid. iPod can play audio files? WOW, I'd never have guessed.
Mozilla is not very good example, in fact I think it gives a pretty fine proof against your point - a project that was, for a long time, backed out by a large corporation, didn't get anywhere and only started focusing, and getting notice from, end-users AFTER the company got out of the way.
His main beef with gratis software seems to be that he doesn't want to be in the business of selling customized software (why not?) and can't create a "general" version because of free competitors undermine him.
He brings carpenter as an example of a person who CAN do that, but is that true? I don't think so. A lone carpenter can not make a living by selling handcrafted woodworks that are exactly the same as those sold by a factory next door, only the factory can mass-produce million pieces a day and sell them ten times cheaper. No, he needs to differentiate himself to get a market, a carpenter is in customization business just as much as a lone developer is forced to be in area dominated by cheaper (free or not, as long as it's less expensive) alternatives. I'm sorry to say, but days of writing über-simple generic app and living off it are gone, even without open source, you just can't pull off "McAfee" any more.
Also, this all seems very contradictory to his point (which is probably, for some projects at least, true) about open source not "scratching an itch" of users, but only developers themselves - if that's the case, you CAN compete in software market, without being solely in customization business, just scratch your users itches better and open source versions should be no threat.
That's a worst-case scenario, and in my humble opinion not usual, or ever average. Especially when it comes to clear bugs - instead of RFE's and something that can or can not be a bug depending on who you ask - things tend to get fixed pretty fast after reporting. And yes, developers of non-trivial projects do upkeep and read bug tracking systems too.
Yeah, it wasn't very nice, but as you probably noticed, it was a modification of your original.
:)
A kind of reminder about "As you treat others, so shall you be treated.", no big personal offense meant
RTFA. Real's engineers certainly had to obtain iTunes and an iPod to make this happen. When they did so, they agreed to the license accompanying the iPod.
Despite what companies would want all you sheep to think, there's no magical "you're agreeing to something by a mere purchase/click of button" law. Licence agreement is a contract, and unless Apple has a piece of paper with a signature from Real, TOUGH LUCK, perhaps they should stop selling those pieces of shit if they don't want anyone to use them.
To spite what Real says, when they say "re-create their own version in their labs" that means reverse engineer!
Maybe it does mean that. Since the EULA does not apply, nothing prevents them from reverse-engineering from compability purposes.
They'd have us believe they sat some engineers down in a room who had never looked at an iPod or iTunes (much less crack them) but yet were somehow able to "recreate their own version"?
If you've never heard of cleanroom development, would you please come out of the damn barrel?
BULL shit. Off to jail, fuckers.
What law was it again the broke? They didn't break the contract law because there is no contract, they didn't break copyright law because they don't distribute anything that's under Apples copyright, they reverse-engineer, and they don't break even the über-stupid DMCA because it explicitly allows reverse-engineering for compability purposes.
Would you please stop the BULL shitting and get frickin' clue (and perhaps some professional treatment if you can't get that clue by yourself), fucker?
Because it's illegal.
It's not.
If you write a book, should anyone be allowed to use that text as they desire, selling their own copies of it for profit?
Of course not.
Why is this any different?
Because Real is not distributing any material that is copyrighted by Apple, instead they study it and make their own implementation that does same thing.
Reverse-engineering does not apply well to book metaphors, but it's like reading a book, and instead of copying it, you either describe it to someone (clean-room) or write a book yourself, that is somewhat similar, but not identifical.
Sorry, but that's utter, and total bullshit.
EULA, which grants one side privileges and the another responsibilities over those stated in copyright law is clearly a contract.
Contract is something you need to sign, so unless you were presented with that text in store on a paper before you were allowed to purchase the hardware or software, it's NOT LEGALLY BINDING.
Perhaps, but the big issue most people have with nuclear plants is that the waste they produce is difficult to get rid of.
Quite the contrary. Nuclear waste is very easy to get rid of, it's in big, solid clumps, if you put it somewhere and take care that water does not get near, it stays there basically forever.
Compare this to, say the mentioned coal waste, ash and smoke gases that are already in environment and IMPOSSIBLE to get rid of, even in the new filtered plants you only get to same position as with nuclear waste.
Oh, and "send it to sun" though often proposed as an idea, but even discounting unsafe rockets, straight-to-sun trajectories are hard and energy wasting to accomplish.
If you want a nifty hi-tech solution (as opposed to storing it for few thousand years, after which the "hot" isotopes are gone and it's no more radioactive than the original uranium ore), put it into subduction zones, from where it'll slowly sink towards core of Earth and be diluted in kazillions of tons of lava (which is already full of other radioactive elements, the heat from their decay is what keeps the mantle molten)
And there's no way to consume coal cleanly, unless you filter it with molecular precision for all other materials, after which you still couldn't get rid of CO2.
Better drivers won't sell any more Toyota cars, so THAT would be a waste of their money.
In fact it'd probably result in quite the opposite, since if all people were perfect drivers, nobody would be in a need of new car after they wrecked their old one.
Considering that their cars already are the most fuel efficient vehicles in the whole goddamn world, it's not like anyone else is at the position to whine about them not doing something about fuel efficiency.
Let the poor engineers have their fun for a while, after they've laughed their arses off, they're more refreshed to get back to serious business, designing those nifty über-fuel efficient engines.
Yeah, spending few hundred EUR/USD more in a small PC is so GODDAMNED expensive compared to few thousands for redecorating the whole mess, or especially few hundred thousand for a new house.
That also should mean it is roughly 4 times as effective against global warming if you were to plant hemp and not use it as fuel instead of planting trees.
Trees bind carbon for centuries in optimal case, though, hemp or any other annual plant needs to be regrown each year as it dies, rots and releases the CO2 back to atmosphere.
And I'm none the worse for any of it.
Nor are the most folks to go trough them, even when something goes wrong it's usually the secondary bacterial infections (particularly pneumonia), not the mild viral infections themselves, though chickenpox and rubella can cause nasty things to fetus if a pregnant woman gets them.
Yes. Considering how hard OCR is to do properly even when you're reading well-written text, recognizing some of the more ornamental scribbles in book spines is going to be simply impossible. Heck, it's hard for human to read those flowery scripts.
, 135&hid=948209) in the next town. It's pretty nifty, though somewhat spooky, to pile books on a regular-looking desk and have them show up in the loaning automatons screen, Clarke hit the nail with "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Even barcodes would be vastly better than nothing, but RFID beats them handily.
Some number of libraries around the world already uses RFID as well, there's one (http://www.tietoenator.com/default.asp?path=1,96