To have the fact that I was arrested used against me in any way is just plain wrong.
Amen. For those who think this is just an inconvenience, let me just point out that you're no longer allowed to visit the US anymore without having to:
* ring up the US embassy (on their hideously expensive premium-rate line) * stay on hold for up to hours to get an appointment * travel to London and queue up for hours for your appointment * suffer an interview to get a visa, attempting to explain away your arrest * pay a fortune for the visa
See the US embassy website "Important: Some travelers may not be eligible to enter the United States visa free under the VWP. These include people who have been arrested, even if the arrest did not result in a criminal conviction,"
I don't think that USAnians realise how horribly their goverment treat even tourist visitors who've been arrested at anytime (regardless of any charge being bought, let alone a conviction).
Or maybe my inner ears are just deformed. Who knows.
Interesting. I can't hear most CRTs, but some (something to do dodgy tranformers?) irritate me a lot. 5% maybe - older ones. But I can hear bats. Go figure. Maybe you don't come across them, or you haven't mentioned it. And ultrasonic pet scarers that some people have in gardens.
This is how some load levelling is actually done at modern power plants.
Plants? National Grids, in some instances! Dinorwig Power Station in North Wales can bring 1800MW online in 16 seconds. It also has diesel generators and what's basically a massive UPS so that it can actually self-start if the whole grid is down, to help kick-start the entire national grid. All built inside a mountain. I visited before they installed the turbines, that was one big rock chamber...
Yes, Pump storage plants will become increasingly important if we move to less constant renewable sources of energy.
This shouldn't have been marked as a troll. It's a real, informative post. I guess that his point 5 was what attracted the 'troll' rating, but you can't discount the spend on maintaining oil security when comparing energy costs, even if you argue that only a small proportion of the Middle East Excursion is spent on oil security.
Yeah. Except of course for the fact that I'm 100% correct, more knowledgeable about the issue than practically anyone, and your "personal experience" is an utterly different subject than the topic at-hand.
If you had spent 10 seconds looking at other comments in the thread, before spouting-off like the dozen of other idiots before you, you'd see why you're so completely wrong, on every level.
Why can I only read your post with Comic Book Guy's voice in my head?
Sigh deeper. Digidesign Pro Tools on the PC has a lot of issues, and no one uses it. Pro Tools can't use a SAN or NAS for storage.
What do you mean? You can't drop an FC card into your mac, plug it into the SAN and use it? You'll get a faster transfer rate from a half-decent SAN than from any local disk array you can fit in your G5. Or is it an OS issue? Or does Pro Tools discriminate against remotely-mounted systems? I'm genuinely interested! (we're procuring a SAN here and will have Macs doing video digitization to it)
I'd like to know that, too. Name some of these companies. Because I work with a lot of big end users, most of them running Linux in some fashion, and they all seem to enjoy telling the MSFT rep they lost those sales. I've been in the meetings, MSFT has questioned Linux IP but not in any specific fashion. When I asked them point blank if that was a threat they backed right off it.
Knowing what Jeremy's field is, and the type of companies that he'd be talking to re samba, my guess is this:
He's not talking about end-users of samba. He's talking about companies that distribute samba, probably in appliances. NAS appliances, that kind of thing. I can certainly see MS asking them for a cut of the action, even though I can't see what leg they'd have to stand on. They're also the kind of companies more likely to just see it as another licencing cost and pony up.
I've no inside information on this, but that would be my best guess, and certainly more likely than samba endusers paying up, which I can't see at all.
Ctrl-A, Properties. Voila, set properties for all the 1000 files at once.
Yes, set. Now try it for viewing properties (which I'd argue you'd want to do a lot more often) without dropping down to the command-line tools. ACLs can be good and crunchy, but they can quickly turn into an auditing nightmare without strict discipline - ie more than I've seen in most situations. And when you need CACLS, good luck processing that output easily.
Besides, I would hardly call Linux's support for Welsh "comprehensive". It's not like they translated all the man pages, HOWTOs, and included programs into Welsh.
Erm, man pages and howtos, no. Programs, help files, system tools, yes. [he said, typing this on his Welsh localized Fedora Core 6 laptop] The KDE apps, Gnome apps, firefox etc *are* translated into Welsh. It's pretty comprehensive if you ask me - hundreds of apps all in Welsh, thanks to a few dozen dedicated localizers here in Wales.
You have a point, up until you tried to use "stone" as a measurement, because until you did, I didnt even know it existed.
if you are gonna compare units, use the commonly used ones vs the craziest version you can find.
In the UK, stone is the standard unit for weight of people, not pounds. If you asked a UKnian how much they weigh in pounds, most of them couldn't tell you (slightly more could probably tell you in kilos), everybody uses stones. 7 stone is slight, 15 stone is heavy. 20 stone is American.
As Pine is not free software, time to move on to mutt or its next-gen friend, mutt-ng. No need to use a bloated GUI app to read mail.
As for what "pine" means, here is the truth: "Pine Is Not Enough".
Agreed. At my first job c. 1994 'pine' was the MUA we offered the dumb students, if they showed much of a clue, or needed to actually do something useful with their mail, we pointed them to 'elm'. It's quite funny to see the "I'm a power user, I distain these graphical clients and use the power of pine" posts when pine was considered the dumbed-down version.
Not a criticism of pine or its users, and it may have vastly improved since I last supported it about ten years ago, but a reflection of how things have changed.
So I will ask, give us even one example of something that Linux is capable of that Windows is not capable of doing.
Could I plug two (or three) keyboards, mice and monitors into a windows box and have three people running totally seperate desktops all at the same time from the same box? You can do it on linux without virtualization. Just curious.
Is this some kind of American version of Mornington Crescent? How much can you write about something without giving people who don't know what it is any clue about what you're discussing?
You appear to believe that keeping the bits alive is all there is to digital preservation. Your bits are meaningless without the means to access the content expressed by those bits.
Standard formats. OpenDocument is a good thing, too.
Yes, good. Will anybody know anything about OD in 200 years' time? We'll need format migration as well (keeping the original datastreams too). How do you trigger a format migration? How do you know you haven't had datastream corruption in the meantime? How do you know this was the original ingested digital object? What kind of technical metadata are you holding about the object? How do you trigger and handle media migration? Do you intend to deliver the object with the same 'look and feel' as it was originally intended (think applications). Do you have the right to preserve any enviroment which may be necessary to access the datastream at all? Will they even work if you do have the right? What about DRM?
You haven't bothered to say much to convince me that your field is of the first type, and not the second. Certainly, even in the case of database professionals, you don't always need to hire a database genius, depending on the scale of you're project. I'll freely admit that I could be entirely wrong, and of course, this is just some random Slashdot post, so you should feel no obligation to spend much time setting me right. But that is why I'm being arrogant here.
I don't think you're being arrogant - Digital Preservation isn't a major issue for most people, but it should be for us all. It's not rocket science, but it needs to be thought through and interoperable standards must appear. When vendors don't seem to care the community are forming their own. It does suddenly throw up a lot of issues with formats and applications that people take as 'standard', when you tell people their Word document is impossible to preserve beyond the short term, they take notice. Standards are appearing, and they're open ones - they have to be.
Thanks for the discussion. We're probably waaaay offtopic by now.
I've had to run backups that are supposed to last as long as we need them, and more on the order of gigabytes. Where, exactly, am I off here? You did read past "that's easy enough", right? I don't mean to imply that there are no issues whatsoever, merely that this isn't as complex as people think it is, especially when compared to paper filing methods.
You appear to believe that keeping the bits alive is all there is to digital preservation. Your bits are meaningless without the means to access the content expressed by those bits. Google for digital preservation. Think a bit further than your limited horizons.
In fact, I can't help but wonder if I've obsoleted your field with that one paragraph. If so, I'm sorry.
Hmm - yes, all these information professionals and computer scientists can now throw in the towel and say "oh, yes, keep more than one copy on a bunch of different servers! That's all there is to it! Thank goodness for SanityInAnarchy, his statue shall adorn the Library of Congress".
If you're thinking of archives we want to be around for centuries, that's easy enough. Put them on a server with a fairly large RAID array, and replicate it over the Internet to another datacenter or two. If one hard drive dies, you swap it out for another. If one RAID controller or whole box goes down, hard, you build a new one and replicate the data back. If you don't want the hassle of doing this yourself, especially if it's just a small amount of personal data, you get Google to do it for you.
As somebody charged with looking after terabytes* of data in perpetuity**, I think I can confidently say you don't have the first clue what you're talking about. There's a reason why Digital Preservation is a field in itself. If you honestly think "that's easy enough" you obviously haven't thought about it enough, or at all.
[*for now. It used to be gigabytes, so it'll be petabytes soon...] [**OK, it may not actually be me all through perpetuity]
Neal Armstrong is pretty firmly in the permanent record.
He is for now, but Neal Armstrong is a meme,
...yes, a Slashdot meme, it appears. It's Neil Armstrong, for god's sake. The irony of discussing whether the guy will be known in a few hundred years when you can't even get his name right!
Welsh, by many accounts, is the only language that can correctly and phonetically spell a sneeze.
Cute, but probably untrue (depends on what sound a sneeze makes). Most people would include the '' (International Phonetic Alphabet) sound in a sneeze (first sound in 'chips'), and Welsh doesn't have that sound. When you want to write 'chips' in Welsh, you approximate it as 'tsips'. 'ch' in Welsh is pronounced 'x' (IPA), so it couldn't correctly be spelt 'chips'.
Welsh is pretty much spelt phonetically (some regional differences in 'u' & 'y'. 'y' has two sounds), mainly thanks to orthographical reforms of the 19th century. Irish Gaelic didn't reform, hence its pretty difficult orthography.
Slashdot Mirror
To have the fact that I was arrested used against me in any way is just plain wrong.
Amen. For those who think this is just an inconvenience, let me just point out that you're no longer allowed to visit the US anymore without having to:
* ring up the US embassy (on their hideously expensive premium-rate line)
* stay on hold for up to hours to get an appointment
* travel to London and queue up for hours for your appointment
* suffer an interview to get a visa, attempting to explain away your arrest
* pay a fortune for the visa
See the US embassy website
"Important: Some travelers may not be eligible to enter the United States visa free under the VWP. These include people who have been arrested, even if the arrest did not result in a criminal conviction,"
I don't think that USAnians realise how horribly their goverment treat even tourist visitors who've been arrested at anytime (regardless of any charge being bought, let alone a conviction).
Or maybe my inner ears are just deformed. Who knows.
Interesting. I can't hear most CRTs, but some (something to do dodgy tranformers?) irritate me a lot. 5% maybe - older ones. But I can hear bats. Go figure. Maybe you don't come across them, or you haven't mentioned it. And ultrasonic pet scarers that some people have in gardens.
It's like executing somebody for spitting out their gum on the sidewalk.
Ah, so you've been to Singapore too?
This is how some load levelling is actually done at modern power plants.
Plants? National Grids, in some instances! Dinorwig Power Station in North Wales can bring 1800MW online in 16 seconds. It also has diesel generators and what's basically a massive UPS so that it can actually self-start if the whole grid is down, to help kick-start the entire national grid. All built inside a mountain. I visited before they installed the turbines, that was one big rock chamber...
Yes, Pump storage plants will become increasingly important if we move to less constant renewable sources of energy.
10B GBP = $19B, give or take a few bills,
10B GBP = $20B . You're not keeping up with the news.
This shouldn't have been marked as a troll. It's a real, informative post. I guess that his point 5 was what attracted the 'troll' rating, but you can't discount the spend on maintaining oil security when comparing energy costs, even if you argue that only a small proportion of the Middle East Excursion is spent on oil security.
Yeah. Except of course for the fact that I'm 100% correct, more knowledgeable about the issue than practically anyone, and your "personal experience" is an utterly different subject than the topic at-hand.
If you had spent 10 seconds looking at other comments in the thread, before spouting-off like the dozen of other idiots before you, you'd see why you're so completely wrong, on every level.
Why can I only read your post with Comic Book Guy's voice in my head?
Sigh deeper. Digidesign Pro Tools on the PC has a lot of issues, and no one uses it. Pro Tools can't use a SAN or NAS for storage.
What do you mean? You can't drop an FC card into your mac, plug it into the SAN and use it? You'll get a faster transfer rate from a half-decent SAN than from any local disk array you can fit in your G5. Or is it an OS issue? Or does Pro Tools discriminate against remotely-mounted systems? I'm genuinely interested! (we're procuring a SAN here and will have Macs doing video digitization to it)
I'd like to know that, too. Name some of these companies. Because I work with a lot of big end users, most of them running Linux in some fashion, and they all seem to enjoy telling the MSFT rep they lost those sales. I've been in the meetings, MSFT has questioned Linux IP but not in any specific fashion. When I asked them point blank if that was a threat they backed right off it.
Knowing what Jeremy's field is, and the type of companies that he'd be talking to re samba, my guess is this:
He's not talking about end-users of samba. He's talking about companies that distribute samba, probably in appliances. NAS appliances, that kind of thing. I can certainly see MS asking them for a cut of the action, even though I can't see what leg they'd have to stand on. They're also the kind of companies more likely to just see it as another licencing cost and pony up.
I've no inside information on this, but that would be my best guess, and certainly more likely than samba endusers paying up, which I can't see at all.
Ctrl-A, Properties. Voila, set properties for all the 1000 files at once.
Yes, set. Now try it for viewing properties (which I'd argue you'd want to do a lot more often) without dropping down to the command-line tools. ACLs can be good and crunchy, but they can quickly turn into an auditing nightmare without strict discipline - ie more than I've seen in most situations. And when you need CACLS, good luck processing that output easily.
Simply because a tiger hasn't eaten your face yet doesn't mean it won't in the future.
Siegfried, is that you?
Besides, I would hardly call Linux's support for Welsh "comprehensive". It's not like they translated all the man pages, HOWTOs, and included programs into Welsh.
Erm, man pages and howtos, no. Programs, help files, system tools, yes. [he said, typing this on his Welsh localized Fedora Core 6 laptop] The KDE apps, Gnome apps, firefox etc *are* translated into Welsh. It's pretty comprehensive if you ask me - hundreds of apps all in Welsh, thanks to a few dozen dedicated localizers here in Wales.
You have a point, up until you tried to use "stone" as a measurement, because until you did, I didnt even know it existed.
if you are gonna compare units, use the commonly used ones vs the craziest version you can find.
In the UK, stone is the standard unit for weight of people, not pounds. If you asked a UKnian how much they weigh in pounds, most of them couldn't tell you (slightly more could probably tell you in kilos), everybody uses stones. 7 stone is slight, 15 stone is heavy. 20 stone is American.
As Pine is not free software, time to move on to mutt or its next-gen friend, mutt-ng. No need to use a bloated GUI app to read mail.
As for what "pine" means, here is the truth: "Pine Is Not Enough".
Agreed. At my first job c. 1994 'pine' was the MUA we offered the dumb students, if they showed much of a clue, or needed to actually do something useful with their mail, we pointed them to 'elm'. It's quite funny to see the "I'm a power user, I distain these graphical clients and use the power of pine" posts when pine was considered the dumbed-down version.
Not a criticism of pine or its users, and it may have vastly improved since I last supported it about ten years ago, but a reflection of how things have changed.
So I will ask, give us even one example of something that Linux is capable of that Windows is not capable of doing.
Could I plug two (or three) keyboards, mice and monitors into a windows box and have three people running totally seperate desktops all at the same time from the same box? You can do it on linux without virtualization. Just curious.
I think that this level of superhero-comics ignorance is grounds for revoking your Slashdot geek license, but OK.
Hey! Your pondism is showing. We had our own superheroes thank you (for example, Archie ain't a carrot-topped high school student)
Green Lantern is a classic DC superhero, going back some 60-70 years.
Thank you. Utterly unknown in the UK, except probably for some niche enthusiasts.
Is this some kind of American version of Mornington Crescent? How much can you write about something without giving people who don't know what it is any clue about what you're discussing?
You appear to believe that keeping the bits alive is all there is to digital preservation. Your bits are meaningless without the means to access the content expressed by those bits.
Standard formats. OpenDocument is a good thing, too.
Yes, good. Will anybody know anything about OD in 200 years' time? We'll need format migration as well (keeping the original datastreams too). How do you trigger a format migration? How do you know you haven't had datastream corruption in the meantime? How do you know this was the original ingested digital object? What kind of technical metadata are you holding about the object? How do you trigger and handle media migration? Do you intend to deliver the object with the same 'look and feel' as it was originally intended (think applications). Do you have the right to preserve any enviroment which may be necessary to access the datastream at all? Will they even work if you do have the right? What about DRM?
You haven't bothered to say much to convince me that your field is of the first type, and not the second. Certainly, even in the case of database professionals, you don't always need to hire a database genius, depending on the scale of you're project. I'll freely admit that I could be entirely wrong, and of course, this is just some random Slashdot post, so you should feel no obligation to spend much time setting me right. But that is why I'm being arrogant here.
I don't think you're being arrogant - Digital Preservation isn't a major issue for most people, but it should be for us all. It's not rocket science, but it needs to be thought through and interoperable standards must appear. When vendors don't seem to care the community are forming their own. It does suddenly throw up a lot of issues with formats and applications that people take as 'standard', when you tell people their Word document is impossible to preserve beyond the short term, they take notice. Standards are appearing, and they're open ones - they have to be.
Thanks for the discussion. We're probably waaaay offtopic by now.
I've had to run backups that are supposed to last as long as we need them, and more on the order of gigabytes. Where, exactly, am I off here? You did read past "that's easy enough", right? I don't mean to imply that there are no issues whatsoever, merely that this isn't as complex as people think it is, especially when compared to paper filing methods.
You appear to believe that keeping the bits alive is all there is to digital preservation. Your bits are meaningless without the means to access the content expressed by those bits. Google for digital preservation. Think a bit further than your limited horizons.
In fact, I can't help but wonder if I've obsoleted your field with that one paragraph. If so, I'm sorry.
Hmm - yes, all these information professionals and computer scientists can now throw in the towel and say "oh, yes, keep more than one copy on a bunch of different servers! That's all there is to it! Thank goodness for SanityInAnarchy, his statue shall adorn the Library of Congress".
which has led to e.g. the soft "r" at the end of syllables in most British dialects
This is pretty much confined to the South-East of England (perhaps into the Midlands? Not sure). It's certainly not in "most British dialects".
Huh? The british dialects pronounce a hard "r" at the end of a syllable (eg "colour" or "over") are definitely in a minority.
If you're thinking of archives we want to be around for centuries, that's easy enough. Put them on a server with a fairly large RAID array, and replicate it over the Internet to another datacenter or two. If one hard drive dies, you swap it out for another. If one RAID controller or whole box goes down, hard, you build a new one and replicate the data back. If you don't want the hassle of doing this yourself, especially if it's just a small amount of personal data, you get Google to do it for you.
As somebody charged with looking after terabytes* of data in perpetuity**, I think I can confidently say you don't have the first clue what you're talking about. There's a reason why Digital Preservation is a field in itself. If you honestly think "that's easy enough" you obviously haven't thought about it enough, or at all.
[*for now. It used to be gigabytes, so it'll be petabytes soon...]
[**OK, it may not actually be me all through perpetuity]
They most likely did,
I doubt it. They'd probably have used a fine-toothed comb. I'm not sure what a tooth comb is, and how you'd evaluate a fine one.
He is for now, but Neal Armstrong is a meme,
what I really want to see today is a story covering Nikola Tesla's 150th anniversary (he was born 150 years ago today, July 10th 1856).
Hear hear. The UK's Independent covered it yesterday FWIW. Not the greatest article, but it was a two-page spread in the news section.
Welsh, by many accounts, is the only language that can correctly and phonetically spell a sneeze.
Cute, but probably untrue (depends on what sound a sneeze makes). Most people would include the '' (International Phonetic Alphabet) sound in a sneeze (first sound in 'chips'), and Welsh doesn't have that sound. When you want to write 'chips' in Welsh, you approximate it as 'tsips'. 'ch' in Welsh is pronounced 'x' (IPA), so it couldn't correctly be spelt 'chips'.
Welsh is pretty much spelt phonetically (some regional differences in 'u' & 'y'. 'y' has two sounds), mainly thanks to orthographical reforms of the 19th century. Irish Gaelic didn't reform, hence its pretty difficult orthography.