Re:Mandrake really is one of the best.
on
MandrakeSoft Roundup
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· Score: 3, Informative
I have some rare BA speakers notorious for Linux incompatibilities. Only Drake9.1/SUSE/Lycoris seem to recognize them).
Said distros use ALSA for sound playback instead of the older OSS that comes with 2.4 kernels. ALSA is now the default sound system for 2.6 kernels, so hopefully other distributions will soon catch up.
They Don't *usually* suffer from the "don't buy point-oh releases" that Red Hat has tended to suffer from.
Historically Red Hat made major changes that break binary compatibility at point-oh releases. That was fine with most users as it allows for major changes to be made (RH was first with glibc, NPTL, exec-shield).
Mandrake releases tend to be of similar stability regardless of their minor numbers. Anyway, now that RHL has morphed into Fedora, with no concept of point-oh releases, the issue is moot.
they find that increasing the pipeline depth past 20 stages increases performance.
While that means Prescott would be a decent CPU, it just highlights how the P4 design was driven mostly by marketing... of course these research papers were published post-P4, with the benefit of hindsight.
I use it for mailing lists as well - only personal friends get my personal email address. Some lists do not hide addresses in their web archives, and most people on lists use POP to download their mail anyway, so there's no big deal.
If Unix-like OSes prevail and standardize on a couple of key platforms (x86-64 and PPC?), it would not matter. The other OSes could simply have a compatibility layer for the dominant OS and then, hey presto! they could run said OS' binaries unchanged.
The *BSDs have it today for Linux. Linux has compatibility modules for some other OSes too, though no distribution AFAIK ship the required userland libraries.
A lot of people see the prints from my digital SLR, a gracefully aging Nikon D1h and are astonished to learn it's from digital. Most then refuse to believe it's only a 2.7mp camera.
As a novice when it comes to proper digital photography (just bought a semi-SLR Minolta Z1, 3.2mp), I must concur. Picture quality is way nicer than those pocket digital cameras when you actually have more control over camera settings.
And sporting a larger-diameter lens probably helps quite a lot too.
For those of us living in third-world countries, subscribing to Safari lets you browse and download O'Reilly books, probably cheaper than importing the books themselves.
They do have some O'Reilly books at English-language bookshops in Indonesia, but the mark-up is anywhere from 30%-50%.
... that it still takes 3 CDs each for binaries and sources. I thought it might end up with more, since some libraries are available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
Since my dad wants an upgrade for his PC anyway, guess an Athlon 64 3000+ is the way to go then. Let's hope Indonesian vendors don't fleece their consumers as much as Malaysian ones for non-Intel hardware..
That I am doing, but it would be nice to have the option to save bandwith and not download them. I don't mind logging in to Yahoo once a day to do a cursory check for misidentified non-spams.
Incidentally, mail relay admins need to start verifying sender addresses. Some Russian bozo started sending Russian spams in my name a few days ago, as evidenced from the dozens of rejected messages a day.
Good thing I do not correspond with Russian addresses often, my Yahoo account is probably blacklisted there by now.
Yahoo currently soaks $19 a year out of anyone wanting more than 4 MB
Ehm, actually, Yahoo is still free with POP/SMTP access if you live outside the US:)
The annoying thing is that mails from the 'Bulk Mail' folder are still getting downloaded, unlike GMX.{net/de} where you have to specifically move suspected spams back to the Inbox to download them.
Both approaches have disadvantages; I just wish it could be made a user option!
But porting Gaim to PalmOS I assume is a much bigger task.
Maybe they're waiting for Palm OS 6 to be generally available. It's a true preemptive multitasking OS (finally) and done by a lot of the original Be developers.
Pity Palm/Handspring just released the Treo 600. An updated phone+PDA with Bluetooth running OS 6 and Gaim would be the ultimate communication tool.
... I was about to suggest MS would use 'we did not do this intentionally, our code is just of poor quality', but I guess their 'Trusted Computing' initiative kinds of shoots the argument down:)
The real significance of File Vault is that it makes the Mac the first OS that protects privacy, rather than just security.
SuSE has allowed creation of loopback encrypted images from YaST for the past few releases, AFAIR. Mandrake too, and hopefully soon Red Hat/Fedora once the new util-linux 2.12 hits Rawhide.
OS X is the first mass-market OS that does it, true, especially at that level of integration - after all, OS X 10.2 already could create encrypted images.
After Rome fell, much of its science and technology was preserved. It was not widespread, but mostly carried along by the scholars of the Church.
And before the Middle Ages, by the Arabs, used in a generic sense the way Europeans were classified as 'Latins' or 'Greeks' at that time.
The church had its history of book-burning as well, and let's not forget Galileo.
The existence of multiple civilizations make it possible for knowledge to survive the destruction of Rome, and later, the stagnation of the Arabic world. Makes one shudder to contemplate the consequences of having One Global Culture.
Would be nice if this catch on within the rest of the Un*x world. AFAIK so far the ROX Desktop is the only non-NEXTSTEP/OSX system implementing this concept. I wonder how version dependencies would be handled though. Perhaps/Libraries/Libname/v.xx/blah?
I seem to recall an alternative to Fink that provides OSX-style.app bundles for Unix apps, but the project name escapes my mind at the moment.
If Apple added the credit card number that was used to purchase the AAC file to the key, then I'll bet people would think twice about sharing their protected AAC files on Kazaa.
Getting your Windows Product ID blacklisted is probably enough of a hassle. Clearly Apple has this information as well - otherwise how do they lock the files you purchase in the first place?
And anyway, pirates would rather share the non-protected files. Once you could unlock the AAC stream for playback it should not be hard to then save it to a file, unencrypted.
RTFA - You need to exchange the key *and* the file itself, as the key is tailored to each computer. iTMS reps could then easily block computers with said Windows Product IDs.
This hack is, OTOH, useful for 'fair use' - for people who dual-boot Windows and Linux. As well as dedicated music pirates who would re-share the unlocked files as plain AAC.
Re:Some of the early plans are a bit out there
on
Dreams of the Moon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If water is found near surface, the 'one-way' mission would actually become quite attractive. One could carry less fuel on the way to the Moon, and synthesize H2(l) and O2(l) from water using sunlight.
This is similar to plans for Mars exploration, and with landing and taking off from the moon being much easier (witness the failure rate of Mars probes) could be a nice trial run. Provided presence of ground water is confirmed in both places, of course..
There are advantages and disadvantages of each system, of course. The proportional system is good for representing minority opinions and making it possible for new ideas and new voices to be heard. The disadvantage of the proportional system is that it can give tremendous power to minority parties when there are to larger power blocks competing for their support as part of a coalition. It also tends to give power to people with new and untried ideas fairly quickly.
Probably why political systems like Scotland's and Japan's use a combination of first-past-the-post (winner-takes-all) and proportional measures; one gets the stability and accountability of choosing directly one's representative, as well as giving voice to minority opinions.
One thing that I've found interesting is that the UK has managed to have to major parties for many years without any of the splinter parties gaining major power. That's not the common pattern in countries with some form of parliamentary rule.
The UK does use the first-past-the-post system, actually, even though it's parliamentarian. On the opposite side, France has a presidential system with a proportional parliament. The reason some minor parties survive in the UK for so long probably has to do with historical background: the Scottish National Party in Scotland and the Plaid Cymru in Wales represent ethnic nationalists wanting greater autonomy from the UK, while the Liberal-Democrats were descendants from the Liberal Party that used to be the major progressive party until the rise of Labour in the 20th century.
The biggest problem with most people's political thinking today is that it focuses on those two groups as the "extremes," and nothing outside of those two points is thought to exist. When people do that, they can't even think about other alternatives.
In a more flexible political system, alternative parties could try and fill the gap, but with pure first-past-the-post that does not tend to happen often.
The situation in US/UK is not too bad, though. In superficially democratic countries ruling parties tend to assert that voting for the opposition is tantamount to showing a lack of nationalism, or even treachery.
Nitpicking here, but a left-to-right-wing scale would be unidimensional, not bidimensional.
There is also another excellent political quiz at Political Compass, for those interested. Including interesting information about famous figures at their worst political behaviour...
Slashdot Mirror
Said distros use ALSA for sound playback instead of the older OSS that comes with 2.4 kernels. ALSA is now the default sound system for 2.6 kernels, so hopefully other distributions will soon catch up.
Historically Red Hat made major changes that break binary compatibility at point-oh releases. That was fine with most users as it allows for major changes to be made (RH was first with glibc, NPTL, exec-shield).
Mandrake releases tend to be of similar stability regardless of their minor numbers. Anyway, now that RHL has morphed into Fedora, with no concept of point-oh releases, the issue is moot.
While that means Prescott would be a decent CPU, it just highlights how the P4 design was driven mostly by marketing... of course these research papers were published post-P4, with the benefit of hindsight.
No disrespect to Apple, but currently OS X is as optimized for 64-bit computing as OSes 8&9 were optimized for PowerPC.
You could have more applications loaded in memory, but each of them AFAIK could still address only 2GB of RAM.
I use it for mailing lists as well - only personal friends get my personal email address. Some lists do not hide addresses in their web archives, and most people on lists use POP to download their mail anyway, so there's no big deal.
The *BSDs have it today for Linux. Linux has compatibility modules for some other OSes too, though no distribution AFAIK ship the required userland libraries.
As a novice when it comes to proper digital photography (just bought a semi-SLR Minolta Z1, 3.2mp), I must concur. Picture quality is way nicer than those pocket digital cameras when you actually have more control over camera settings.
And sporting a larger-diameter lens probably helps quite a lot too.
They do have some O'Reilly books at English-language bookshops in Indonesia, but the mark-up is anywhere from 30%-50%.
Since my dad wants an upgrade for his PC anyway, guess an Athlon 64 3000+ is the way to go then. Let's hope Indonesian vendors don't fleece their consumers as much as Malaysian ones for non-Intel hardware..
Incidentally, mail relay admins need to start verifying sender addresses. Some Russian bozo started sending Russian spams in my name a few days ago, as evidenced from the dozens of rejected messages a day.
Good thing I do not correspond with Russian addresses often, my Yahoo account is probably blacklisted there by now.
Ehm, actually, Yahoo is still free with POP/SMTP access if you live outside the US
The annoying thing is that mails from the 'Bulk Mail' folder are still getting downloaded, unlike GMX.{net/de} where you have to specifically move suspected spams back to the Inbox to download them.
Both approaches have disadvantages; I just wish it could be made a user option!
Maybe they're waiting for Palm OS 6 to be generally available. It's a true preemptive multitasking OS (finally) and done by a lot of the original Be developers.
Pity Palm/Handspring just released the Treo 600. An updated phone+PDA with Bluetooth running OS 6 and Gaim would be the ultimate communication tool.
... I was about to suggest MS would use 'we did not do this intentionally, our code is just of poor quality', but I guess their 'Trusted Computing' initiative kinds of shoots the argument down :)
SuSE has allowed creation of loopback encrypted images from YaST for the past few releases, AFAIR. Mandrake too, and hopefully soon Red Hat/Fedora once the new util-linux 2.12 hits Rawhide.
OS X is the first mass-market OS that does it, true, especially at that level of integration - after all, OS X 10.2 already could create encrypted images.
And before the Middle Ages, by the Arabs, used in a generic sense the way Europeans were classified as 'Latins' or 'Greeks' at that time.
The church had its history of book-burning as well, and let's not forget Galileo.
The existence of multiple civilizations make it possible for knowledge to survive the destruction of Rome, and later, the stagnation of the Arabic world. Makes one shudder to contemplate the consequences of having One Global Culture.
Talk to Peter Hamilton about that, since Heinlein is no longer among us ... :P
{,/usr}/sbin -> /Systems/Applications /Systems/Libraries /Applications
/Libraries/Libname/v.xx/blah?
.app bundles for Unix apps, but the project name escapes my mind at the moment.
{,/usr}/lib ->
{,/usr}/bin ->
Would be nice if this catch on within the rest of the Un*x world. AFAIK so far the ROX Desktop is the only non-NEXTSTEP/OSX system implementing this concept. I wonder how version dependencies would be handled though. Perhaps
I seem to recall an alternative to Fink that provides OSX-style
Yes, I'm just pointing out the hazard anyone silly enough to actually share their keys would potentially face.
Getting your Windows Product ID blacklisted is probably enough of a hassle. Clearly Apple has this information as well - otherwise how do they lock the files you purchase in the first place?
And anyway, pirates would rather share the non-protected files. Once you could unlock the AAC stream for playback it should not be hard to then save it to a file, unencrypted.
HD drive is actually correct - you should have made it HDD drive :P
This hack is, OTOH, useful for 'fair use' - for people who dual-boot Windows and Linux. As well as dedicated music pirates who would re-share the unlocked files as plain AAC.
This is similar to plans for Mars exploration, and with landing and taking off from the moon being much easier (witness the failure rate of Mars probes) could be a nice trial run. Provided presence of ground water is confirmed in both places, of course..
Probably why political systems like Scotland's and Japan's use a combination of first-past-the-post (winner-takes-all) and proportional measures; one gets the stability and accountability of choosing directly one's representative, as well as giving voice to minority opinions.
The UK does use the first-past-the-post system, actually, even though it's parliamentarian. On the opposite side, France has a presidential system with a proportional parliament. The reason some minor parties survive in the UK for so long probably has to do with historical background: the Scottish National Party in Scotland and the Plaid Cymru in Wales represent ethnic nationalists wanting greater autonomy from the UK, while the Liberal-Democrats were descendants from the Liberal Party that used to be the major progressive party until the rise of Labour in the 20th century.
HTH, and Happy New Year!
In a more flexible political system, alternative parties could try and fill the gap, but with pure first-past-the-post that does not tend to happen often.
The situation in US/UK is not too bad, though. In superficially democratic countries ruling parties tend to assert that voting for the opposition is tantamount to showing a lack of nationalism, or even treachery.
Nitpicking here, but a left-to-right-wing scale would be unidimensional, not bidimensional.
There is also another excellent political quiz at Political Compass, for those interested. Including interesting information about famous figures at their worst political behaviour...