... Slackware, Debian, Knoppix (live then Debian via KNX), Dyne:Bolic, Mandrake/Mandriva (caught that one on the transition of names), SuSE Pro, OpenSuSE, RHEL, SLES/SLED, back to OpenSuSE, Lubuntu.
Currently using OpenSuSE 11.4, Lubuntu 10.04, Zipslack-custom (from Slackware 8 originally, just so heavily modified I don't think I could build the image in any other distribution or version!) and Knoppix (currently 5.01 but I've just this minute pulled in the torrent for the latest version EN-DVD).
Article 9 – Freedom of thought, conscience and religion Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Article 10 – Freedom of expression Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
-0-
There is NOTHING in there that says ANYONE, whether real or imaginary, has the right not to be offended.
Maxim: If it is not specifically unlawful, then it is lawful (measured against Common Law). Stuff like murder, fraud, rape; all unlawful, whereas walking through the middle of a city with a bow and arrows in plain sight is not. Local ordinances may vary, please seek legal advice. Corollary: If it is not specifically illegal, then it is legal (measured against Statute). It's illegal to withhold rent, but it is not illegal to place that money in an escrow account until the landlord fulfills his part of the contract, eg repairing a roof.
I had to reflash my ancient V3i today. I just love the phone, and figured I might as well give it a go since the bootloader was crapped out already, there was little to lose. So I grabbed an image (took some finding), ran the flash update software, and I've gone from Vodafone-locked and branded to completely unlocked and no branding.
If I'd thought to do that five years ago, I'd've been even happier with it than I already am.
Did I suddenly forget how to read? Your previous post was a diatribe of negativity and laying sole blame on the software - when it could be any number of reasons for your obscenely bad luck with the simple installation of a platform and associated software, when it could as easily have been a flipped bit in RAM or other hardware issue that the attempted configuration just happened to trip on, or something as simple as a bad configuration.
if an iPad2 is comparable to a 1985 Cray 2, then an iPhone is a fully specced 1997 Compaq Proliant 2500 6/250H Model 1 (if you got one of the systems with matched Xeon processors like I have, then clock speed is 233MHz instead of 200). Not a minicomputer, more a small server.
store important files on the smallest, fastest flash device you can get away with, encrypted (I use a 2GB drive for transient secure filing, archive secure filing is in a secret and secure location that is recorded nowhere but my brain). The wipe button should trigger a military-grade sector-by-sector overwrite, which on a solid state drive will be permanent, instant and unrecoverable.
My laptop runs Win7/64 host and several virtual machines. I'm posting this from the Lubuntu 10.04 VM, and it's absolutely fine. No issues installing/configuring it (I had to do precisely nothing to it to tune it and get ALL the hardware working, it just did, even the networking), no issues using it. UI switching is a doddle, just one switch via system management console. I go between LXDE, Compiz and KDE depending on my mood. The most stable and fastest Linux platform I currently use on this machine.
Other virtual machines I use regularly, and any problems:
OSX86: doesn't detect the processor properly hence little past MMX extensions, panics on shutdown. OpenSuSE 11.4: Compiz is a bit stuttery at times, sound lags a little, otherwise OK. OS2/Warp Server 4: no problems whatsoever. Windows xp SP3: All I can say is, "Thank fuck it's in a sandbox!". Can't do anything really heavy on it, like play games: it will BSOD. RISC OS 3.0: I got this just for nostalgia's sake. OK, I lie. I have it because I still have my RISC BASIC V diskettes from college. And I like the word processor - it's clean, simple and unobtrusive.
One that immediately springs to mind is Medusa. I lost a machine to this in 1999(?): the thing wrote itself to the BIOS and killed the system dead. I managed to save everything else, but a new mainboard was required as I couldn't simply reflash the thing.
Indeed - part of the ageing process is thought to involve nucleotide sequences called telomeres - sections of DNA which normally shorten with each cellular generation to protect the active chromosomal ends, as DNA cannot normally replicate all the way to the end.
Once a certain point is reached (anywhere between 100-300 generations) where the next generation would result in non-viable cells (the teleomeric sections are exhausted), the cell stops dividing and terminal dementia signifies the end of the line.
For a larger organism, this is end-of-life when enough cells reach this point.
If a cell becomes diseased such that the enzyme tolemerase complex is activated, which lengthens the telomeres, the cell can become immortal - and cancerous.
Telomeres, while not directly involved in coding for parts of the whole, do have an important part to play in the normal lifecycle, hence in that regard cannot be considered as junk....and that's just one example of the importance of what were once publicly proclaimed to be extraneous.
For very large corporations, backend deployments are few. Frontend deployments are many. I'd say developers who know their backend environment, which changes little, can be trusted in deploying what they develop - with supervision and prior auditing by those entrusted with maintaining the environment. Absolutely not in the case of frontend deployments, where you may see many different configurations hardware-wise. Something which works on one box might bring another box down - workstation administrators are the people to trust with such deployments, who can then carry out diagnostics when something goes wrong. In this case documentation and audits are important.
As a former SQL developer, in a very small company, I had complete access to everything. For me, it made life easier but more complicated, to be paradoxical. Something goes wrong, I have to stop developing and fix it myself. Therefore I'm incentivised to get it right first time, which means careful coding and careful testbedding and careful debugging before the product even sees the production machines. Then I can move on to the next job safe in the knowledge that the chances of me getting a call at 3am because of some bit of rogue syntax brought a few thousand £ worth of gear to its knees is next to zero.
closure: if the developer is coding for production where he is not likely to be called upon to drop everything and fix a problem on a production box, such task reserved for someone else, then full documentation of every call and function is an absolute must.
"...the opinion of many scientists was that some 90% of the three billion DNA letters in our cells has no function at all--calling it “junk DNA.” Now, a ten year follow-on research project is beginning to publish discoveries centered within this so called junk DNA code. Like the complex rule base of an expert system on a computer, it is now estimated that 80% of our DNA contains a “complex network of regulatory switches that control how cells interpret the genetic instructions contained in DNA.”"
-and-
US Patent #4,318,184: 1982 patent that relates to generative process planning derived from design and material specifications.
"This interlocking network of regulatory switches that control gene activity certainly seems to me to be similar to an expert system. An expert system is carefully designed, with complex interactions between the rules of the system, often based on man-centuries of research and experience. As a programmer, it would be ludicrous to think that complicated programming logic similar to the production expert systems we worked on in industry could “write itself,” without intelligence or design."
Yet, that's exactly what's happened with DNA, over millions of years, from a pool of primordial sludge of amino acids and RNA to where we are now, a veritable feast of complex organisms. As a technological culture we're about to the point where growing earlobes on the backs of laboratory mice is done for giggles these days. All we're doing is rewriting some code, albeit using a soup of chemicals and an electric charge in lieu of a keyboard. And by applying the language of the engineer to the biological process, chemical engineers are able to con us all by demanding royalty with menaces on the use of something we were all born with.
Someone said somewhere (I forget where) that DNA, as a natural process, cannot be patented.
A year later, Big Pharma had patents on 98% of the Human genome, for what was then widely considered "junk DNA".
Why would a pharmaceutical company find the need to patent "junk DNA"?
For something claimed to have no discernible purpose?
For something which was publicly touted as being of no benefit to the betterment of the Human Race?
And now all of a sudden, once the patents are solidified, it's suddenly "discovered" that it's not junk DNA at all. In fact, it's all useful. Of course it is, otherwise it wouldn't be there.
It has come to my attention that your organisation has resorted to begging for free work from the Public in finding and reporting on prior art to already-issued patents. I have an issue with this action, since as an inventor myself I have invested thousands of Dollars in patenting actual technology that has no discovered prior art and in fact has potential to change the lives of everyone who uses it. The issue boils down to the amount of money I have paid to your organisation in fees with my patent applications, on the understanding that you yourselves employ staff to perform patent searches and research into prior art on patent applications; indeed, a small proportion of my applications have been rejected due to prior art that I either did not consider relevant or I missed and you informed me that it did in fact exist. That is a system which works.
And now you're asking the public to carry out this work for nothing? Is this overflow for the sheer number of patents that are disputed in courts up and down the country? Or are you laying off staff and diverting that workload that you should be paying staff to do in order for your executive board to pocket the fees in massive bonuses and now granting every application that hits your inbox? Frankly I think you should be watching patent cases and automatically invalidating those which are found to be without merit in such disputes.
troll: noun: a mountain cave-dwelling humanlike creature from Scandinavian and Norse mythology which is described as not particularly ugly and rarely helpful to humans. Co-opted in contemporary language to describe someone who posts inflammatory or offtopic comments on internet forums.
Not too much of a surprise to learn that the channel from which the video was broadcast had evolved from a pop culture channel to a militant islamist channel in only a few months... what better way to incite violence than to play such material to an already angered and captive audience?
Slashdot Mirror
oh, Slack4DOS, forgot to add that to my list... Linux on a FAT12 filesystem. Clunky, but it worked(!)
...
Slackware, Debian, Knoppix (live then Debian via KNX), Dyne:Bolic, Mandrake/Mandriva (caught that one on the transition of names), SuSE Pro, OpenSuSE, RHEL, SLES/SLED, back to OpenSuSE, Lubuntu.
Currently using OpenSuSE 11.4, Lubuntu 10.04, Zipslack-custom (from Slackware 8 originally, just so heavily modified I don't think I could build the image in any other distribution or version!) and Knoppix (currently 5.01 but I've just this minute pulled in the torrent for the latest version EN-DVD).
...then I wouldn't rely on it too much.
Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms
as amended by Protocols No. 11 and No. 14
Rome, 4.XI.1950
Articles 9 and 10: full text
Article 9 – Freedom of thought, conscience and religion
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Article 10 – Freedom of expression
Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
-0-
There is NOTHING in there that says ANYONE, whether real or imaginary, has the right not to be offended.
Maxim: If it is not specifically unlawful, then it is lawful (measured against Common Law). Stuff like murder, fraud, rape; all unlawful, whereas walking through the middle of a city with a bow and arrows in plain sight is not. Local ordinances may vary, please seek legal advice.
Corollary: If it is not specifically illegal, then it is legal (measured against Statute). It's illegal to withhold rent, but it is not illegal to place that money in an escrow account until the landlord fulfills his part of the contract, eg repairing a roof.
I had to reflash my ancient V3i today. I just love the phone, and figured I might as well give it a go since the bootloader was crapped out already, there was little to lose. So I grabbed an image (took some finding), ran the flash update software, and I've gone from Vodafone-locked and branded to completely unlocked and no branding.
If I'd thought to do that five years ago, I'd've been even happier with it than I already am.
take out the battery?
Do not try and pass off that chilled gnat's piss as beer, because it is not.
Did I suddenly forget how to read? Your previous post was a diatribe of negativity and laying sole blame on the software - when it could be any number of reasons for your obscenely bad luck with the simple installation of a platform and associated software, when it could as easily have been a flipped bit in RAM or other hardware issue that the attempted configuration just happened to trip on, or something as simple as a bad configuration.
yeah, good luck with that #shock_degaussed_electronics
if an iPad2 is comparable to a 1985 Cray 2, then an iPhone is a fully specced 1997 Compaq Proliant 2500 6/250H Model 1 (if you got one of the systems with matched Xeon processors like I have, then clock speed is 233MHz instead of 200). Not a minicomputer, more a small server.
-1 Dead Wrong.
Also, you don't need anything as expensive as a drill press. A hammer will do the job. All you have to do is split the core.
store important files on the smallest, fastest flash device you can get away with, encrypted (I use a 2GB drive for transient secure filing, archive secure filing is in a secret and secure location that is recorded nowhere but my brain). The wipe button should trigger a military-grade sector-by-sector overwrite, which on a solid state drive will be permanent, instant and unrecoverable.
Truecrypt does this.
easy.
red phosphorous and a cigarette lighter.
I used to make diskette bombs with red phosphorous. Dramatic but fairly harmless. Unless you're a floppy disk drive.
I have an antique bowl that's more radioactive than fuel glass...
mod troll.
My laptop runs Win7/64 host and several virtual machines. I'm posting this from the Lubuntu 10.04 VM, and it's absolutely fine. No issues installing/configuring it (I had to do precisely nothing to it to tune it and get ALL the hardware working, it just did, even the networking), no issues using it. UI switching is a doddle, just one switch via system management console. I go between LXDE, Compiz and KDE depending on my mood. The most stable and fastest Linux platform I currently use on this machine.
Other virtual machines I use regularly, and any problems:
OSX86: doesn't detect the processor properly hence little past MMX extensions, panics on shutdown.
OpenSuSE 11.4: Compiz is a bit stuttery at times, sound lags a little, otherwise OK.
OS2/Warp Server 4: no problems whatsoever.
Windows xp SP3: All I can say is, "Thank fuck it's in a sandbox!". Can't do anything really heavy on it, like play games: it will BSOD.
RISC OS 3.0: I got this just for nostalgia's sake. OK, I lie. I have it because I still have my RISC BASIC V diskettes from college. And I like the word processor - it's clean, simple and unobtrusive.
One that immediately springs to mind is Medusa. I lost a machine to this in 1999(?): the thing wrote itself to the BIOS and killed the system dead. I managed to save everything else, but a new mainboard was required as I couldn't simply reflash the thing.
Indeed - part of the ageing process is thought to involve nucleotide sequences called telomeres - sections of DNA which normally shorten with each cellular generation to protect the active chromosomal ends, as DNA cannot normally replicate all the way to the end.
Once a certain point is reached (anywhere between 100-300 generations) where the next generation would result in non-viable cells (the teleomeric sections are exhausted), the cell stops dividing and terminal dementia signifies the end of the line.
For a larger organism, this is end-of-life when enough cells reach this point.
If a cell becomes diseased such that the enzyme tolemerase complex is activated, which lengthens the telomeres, the cell can become immortal - and cancerous.
Telomeres, while not directly involved in coding for parts of the whole, do have an important part to play in the normal lifecycle, hence in that regard cannot be considered as junk. ...and that's just one example of the importance of what were once publicly proclaimed to be extraneous.
For very large corporations, backend deployments are few. Frontend deployments are many. I'd say developers who know their backend environment, which changes little, can be trusted in deploying what they develop - with supervision and prior auditing by those entrusted with maintaining the environment. Absolutely not in the case of frontend deployments, where you may see many different configurations hardware-wise. Something which works on one box might bring another box down - workstation administrators are the people to trust with such deployments, who can then carry out diagnostics when something goes wrong. In this case documentation and audits are important.
As a former SQL developer, in a very small company, I had complete access to everything. For me, it made life easier but more complicated, to be paradoxical. Something goes wrong, I have to stop developing and fix it myself. Therefore I'm incentivised to get it right first time, which means careful coding and careful testbedding and careful debugging before the product even sees the production machines. Then I can move on to the next job safe in the knowledge that the chances of me getting a call at 3am because of some bit of rogue syntax brought a few thousand £ worth of gear to its knees is next to zero.
closure: if the developer is coding for production where he is not likely to be called upon to drop everything and fix a problem on a production box, such task reserved for someone else, then full documentation of every call and function is an absolute must.
From this:
"...the opinion of many scientists was that some 90% of the three billion DNA letters in our cells has no function at all--calling it “junk DNA.” Now, a ten year follow-on research project is beginning to publish discoveries centered within this so called junk DNA code. Like the complex rule base of an expert system on a computer, it is now estimated that 80% of our DNA contains a “complex network of regulatory switches that control how cells interpret the genetic instructions contained in DNA.”"
-and-
US Patent #4,318,184:
1982 patent that relates to generative process planning derived from design and material specifications.
"This interlocking network of regulatory switches that control gene activity certainly seems to me to be similar to an expert system. An expert system is carefully designed, with complex interactions between the rules of the system, often based on man-centuries of research and experience. As a programmer, it would be ludicrous to think that complicated programming logic similar to the production expert systems we worked on in industry could “write itself,” without intelligence or design."
Yet, that's exactly what's happened with DNA, over millions of years, from a pool of primordial sludge of amino acids and RNA to where we are now, a veritable feast of complex organisms. As a technological culture we're about to the point where growing earlobes on the backs of laboratory mice is done for giggles these days. All we're doing is rewriting some code, albeit using a soup of chemicals and an electric charge in lieu of a keyboard. And by applying the language of the engineer to the biological process, chemical engineers are able to con us all by demanding royalty with menaces on the use of something we were all born with.
Someone said somewhere (I forget where) that DNA, as a natural process, cannot be patented.
A year later, Big Pharma had patents on 98% of the Human genome, for what was then widely considered "junk DNA".
Why would a pharmaceutical company find the need to patent "junk DNA"?
For something claimed to have no discernible purpose?
For something which was publicly touted as being of no benefit to the betterment of the Human Race?
And now all of a sudden, once the patents are solidified, it's suddenly "discovered" that it's not junk DNA at all. In fact, it's all useful. Of course it is, otherwise it wouldn't be there.
Dear United States Patents and Trademarks Office,
It has come to my attention that your organisation has resorted to begging for free work from the Public in finding and reporting on prior art to already-issued patents. I have an issue with this action, since as an inventor myself I have invested thousands of Dollars in patenting actual technology that has no discovered prior art and in fact has potential to change the lives of everyone who uses it. The issue boils down to the amount of money I have paid to your organisation in fees with my patent applications, on the understanding that you yourselves employ staff to perform patent searches and research into prior art on patent applications; indeed, a small proportion of my applications have been rejected due to prior art that I either did not consider relevant or I missed and you informed me that it did in fact exist. That is a system which works.
And now you're asking the public to carry out this work for nothing? Is this overflow for the sheer number of patents that are disputed in courts up and down the country? Or are you laying off staff and diverting that workload that you should be paying staff to do in order for your executive board to pocket the fees in massive bonuses and now granting every application that hits your inbox? Frankly I think you should be watching patent cases and automatically invalidating those which are found to be without merit in such disputes.
Sincerely,
Disgruntled inventors everywhere.
troll: noun: a mountain cave-dwelling humanlike creature from Scandinavian and Norse mythology which is described as not particularly ugly and rarely helpful to humans. Co-opted in contemporary language to describe someone who posts inflammatory or offtopic comments on internet forums.
...it's purely down to being that everyone who *wants* a Blackberry *has* a Blackberry.
...and asking the court to award on top of the judgment they already have in their favour.
That says "Troll" with hundred foot high letters and fucking lightbars.
Not too much of a surprise to learn that the channel from which the video was broadcast had evolved from a pop culture channel to a militant islamist channel in only a few months... what better way to incite violence than to play such material to an already angered and captive audience?