> Does anyone happen to know whether GNU Arch has been considered? I've been using it for a while and find it quite good (it's not perfect, but it's the best versionning system I've used so far).
Linus needs it to be fast, scriptable, and let him pull changesets. It needs to be a distributed system where everybody has their own version controlled repositories, and the SCM recognises when Linux pulls a patch that he already has and doesn't reapply it. To name just a few things.
Those *were* private citizens. The corporation didn't go to jail, and the corporation can't vote. The individual people go to jail and the individual people can vote. The coporation is not an extra person.
> I think corporations should be entitled to the same rights and privileges as private citizens.
Like voting? And do corporations get the same negative sides as private citizens, like going to jail? If you won't send a company to jail, and give it a vote, you can't equate them to private citizens
Remarkably, this doesn't appear to be an april fools joke. The comments in the discussion seem to date from quite a few days ago. This is probably just a bit of code that is inserted in the GDI and has a guess at a reasonable adjustment for pixel intensity. Hopefully it doesn't adjust gamma, because that would look dumb, a faded monitor needs the darker intensities to be raised, while mid intensities stay roughly where they were. Raising gamma increases the middle intensities too much. I also doubt this would work for games using DirectX or OpenGL (too much effort, and unrobust).
> Doctors have removed Terry Schiavo's feeding tube.
Actually that could show a bias, because such a task is more frequently done by nurses. The doctor just asks a nurse to do it or arrange for it to be done. If, in fact, it *was* a nurse, it would show the bias of the reporter that nurses are fairly inconsequential in medicine, that the nurse performing an act is equivalent to the doctor that asked for it to be done doing it. It is also unlikely that more than one doctor did it as the statement implies. It demonstrates a bias that a doctor is beyond individual reproach for inappropriate decisions, and a disgruntled party must challenge a force of a plurality of doctors.
Its always interesting how an utterance can be chosen to subtly induce an opinion not explicit in the discussion. Emphasis is used in this way also - "I'm not letting *you* have it", says more than "I'm not letting you have it". The second, neutral, sentence leaves the status of the second person undisputed, the first sentence tells the second person that their behaviour has indicated a belief in their status that the first person disagrees with. Enough, even, to demonstrate to anybody around that the second persons status is open for challenge. That's why that sort of emphasis, in particular, can be so discomforting, and why it causes arguments that are suprising when the statement is mis-quoted without the emphasis. When used, such an emphasis indicates that the speaker feels his/her position is close to being compromised so far that he/she needs to place doubt in the second person's position into the minds of others to help "quash" the confidence of the second person.
No it is not a bias. Mathematics is tautological. Tautologies are not biased. The full statement is something like:
Using a certain interpretation of the symbols "2", "4", "+", and "=", "2 + 2 = 4" is not absurd.
It states nothing about anything except how those interpretations can be combined so that a person who finds a way to unify the symbols with observable phenomena can immediately make a leap in the interpretation of the phenomena that results in an assessment no more biased than the original mapping of phenomena to mathematical symbols that the person chose. A tautology is a non-biased statement. It is also the only knowable thing. Everything *else* is opinion and interpretation.
That's why tautologies are used in logic, if a tautology that is not absurd is used to transform an interpretation into an absurd statement, then the interpretation is shown to be incorrect.
I think I'm a 4 but with satisfying moments of 5. But you missed one out:
0. Scared Shitless:
Guru: What do you see on the screen? Scared Shitless: Nothing at all! (Guru translates as "Same blue desktop, task bar, start menu, normal icons, whatever windows SS already had open...")
G: Hold the Alt key down while you breifly but firmly tap the key marked "F4", then let go of the Alt key. SS: Oh no! something's gone wrong, I don't know what's happened. G: Did you accidently tap the wrong key, or hit another key as well, or what? SS: I don't know what I pressed, I don't pay attention to the effect I have on the world around me.
SS: It isn't going in. G: What isn't going in, and into where? SS: When I click, it doesn't go in to the window. G: What doesn't go into the window? SS: The screen. G: How the fuck am I supposed to help with entirely non descriptive references to the things your eyes are seeing? SS: I don't know computers. G: What colour is the sky? SS: Blue. G: What colour is predominantly being shown on the TV screen part. SS: I don't don't know, what's a colour? G: same as normal. SS: what is it normally? G: Jim has a ball. The ball is Red. Red is a colour.
> That's a cop-out for people who want to pretend they're doing nothing wrong when sharing music illegally.
No it's not. Murder is not theft, but it's not a cop out for murderers. Copyright infringement is a different thing to theft, but that makes no claim on the relative morality of it.
Theft is taking a thing from the owner or his/her agent or beneficiary. Copying a file leaves the owner with the original, so it must be a different thing to theft. Eg, I will never buy any of westlife's current albums, so if a made a copy of one, the record label will not have been deprived of the album I took the copy from. Nor would they even have been deprived of income they would have obtained from me, since they would not have had that income anyway. It is still wrong for me to do that, but it is not theft.
Copyright is a privilege granted to the creator of a valued contribution to cultural development to reimburse them for the expense of making the contribution. It is intended to allow artists to create art without having to rely on their ability to source and supply precious metals and stones with their art engraved/moulded on. It gives the creation of art an intrinsic value in market terms. If you claim that a particular form is property (as opposed to a particular concrete piece) then the contribution to society has little value as society can not build on that art - it only has value as a singular peice of entertainment. If you claim copyright infringement to be theft, then you strip copyright laws of the justification for their very existence.
> If you don't agree with the price, or don't think the money goes to the right people, then don't buy it.
If I buy it, then it is my property, so I can do what I want with it and it is impossible for me to steal it from myself. And thus copyright infringement is definately not theft as it is *far* more restrictive (and that is why it has a limited duration, as it would render the art utterly valueless as art, and only allow it a value as entertainment).
It is your association between maggots and refuse. People make decisions on where they spend their time and what they consume on the principle of "contamination". Maggots are contaminated by liking refuse, food with maggots in is thus contaminated. Cooking is not felt to be enough to decontaminate. Experiments with dipping cockroaches into orange juice showed that even a thoroughly disinfected (recently deceased) cockroach "contaminates" orange juice by being dipped in it.
I myself will happily rinse a used glass and re-use it, but if it has been put into a dishwasher which has dirty items in it (even if they are nowhere near the glass), I will normally get a fresh glass - I feel it is contaminated, though I know it isn't.
These associations to decide what is a contaminant and how much effort is required to decontaminate is mostly determined by how you perceived your parents reaction to them to be. IE a fishermans son will probably not care about a maggot in his dinner if he can just pull it out (decontamination is trivial as he saw his father happily warm maggots in his mouth).
I intend to try to react according to available scientific evidence in front of my children when I have them (regardless of how I feel about things myself), since it is important that they be able to make more realistic judgements about the world around them than I am capable of. While I *can* react more sensibly than I feel, I want my children to be able to react sensibly without effort so they can confidently be highly effective in their personal business and business business.
It is important to remember that these card readers in shops are made by allcomers. They are not any where near as trustworthy as a cashpoint.
We need cards that can be loaded with an amount to pay by the terminal, and a keypad (where the numbers move around to avoid showing wear). When you tak the card out, it shows the amount (via static electronic paper) and you type your number to authorise it. Then put your card back in, and the bank sends a crytographic message to be decrypted by the card (using the pin as a key for the card to calculate the key for the banks message). Once decrypted, the terminal sends the message back to the bank, and the bank pays up.
To get access to your funds, the criminal needs both the card and plenty of the bank card authentication messages (or the card and your pin). They'd have to be pretty damned sharp to manage that.
Yeah, so I found out from another poster, I had understood that the basic facilities of a regular network connected system were not crippled or missing in the so called "Professional" version, seems like I would need to buy an expensive "server" system for the minimum reasonable feature set like many free/"hobbiest" operating systems.
> No consumer antivirus on the market today NEEDS admin privs to update the virus definitions.
That is incorrect, McAfee does, and that is what they have definition update subscriptions paid for.
> I specifically referred to an average older user needing internet, email and maybe some flash/java games.
My parents are below average, and they have required many changes to their system. I am finally becoming happy that they are not going to do anything new for a while, but I still expect to check on things, and remove programs from thier HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Run key, and I expect to do it without having to negotiate console availability. This is 2005 ferchissake. If they were new computer users I would give them Linux and have the sort of administrative capabilities one would expect from even a free OS ten years ago, but they are very used to how Windows responds, and the particular phrasing of the error messages.
My dad gets confused if you change the wallpaper. Any slight difference in behaviour has him throwing tantrums out of frustration. Switching from Windows ME to Windows XP introduced a new login screen, which he has almost figured out now after three months. Also, their webcam is not supported by Linux, and BT communicator (VoIP integrated with their standard phone service) doesn't have a Linux version.
needs reconfiguring when the parents want to do something new, or when they accidentally allow access for something if it is one of the ones that offers. The former type should be used for computer illiterates.
> Firefox with common plugins installed (flash, java, etc)
Needs options changing as workarounds for security problems. Also needs Administrator logon to install updates.
> Auto-updating antivirus with scheduled scan.
Many need Administrator priviledges to update (unless you've got money to spend on serious business grade AV).
> Anti-spyware with a realtime scanner.
Again with the Administrator privileges
> And do you really have to fight with them over the mouse in VNC when they know you're trying to help them?? If you do, then you have more problems than the computer.
No, they will stop for me to do something almost any time, but they shouldn't have to, not in this day and age when even a free OS like Linux can do it.
And they need an rdesktop server so their kids can log in remotely to do admin for them. VNC doesn't cut it since XP Home has only one screen so I can only do admin if they are willing to stop what they're doing and watch the mouse dancing.
That will work out very slow in at least ghc and hugs (not sure about nhc) as they seem to build the whole string in core before putStr can do its business. Use (mapM_ putStrLn lines) for the last line of code instead to get iterative behaviour instead of recursive.
Check out Epigram, hopefully they'll think of a better "helper" program, and a syntax that doesn't kill you to write without the helper (and that is clearer even with the helper).
And one day it may even be capable of I/O.
Re:More incompatibilities on the way?
on
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Their attitude is that code that is incorrect was unpredictable in its behaviour at the time it was written. If they let it break, then it's *still* unpredictable in its behaviour, so those crappy programmers have lost nothing, and the rest of us get a better compiler.
Uh, the problem is not that there aren't any volunteers to maintain a full architecture repo. It is that the amount of effort for the low-level core stuff (installer, kernel, etc...) is very high since that is where all the differences are. It doesn't need people to work on a port, but a way of keeping all those low-level bits working roughly the same on all the official arches. I think most of the problem is that the linus kernel does not maintain consistency across arches. That is where the problem lies.
IMHO, the next best solution is to do an installer and well managed kernel for PPC, i386 and amd64, and release bootable cd images for all the other arches that you run debootstrap from as and when, and install your own kernel on the created system, but the rest of the packages are maintained for all the distro's in a similar fashion. Most packages require very little effort to make them work on all arches if you can make them work on four.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I knew it was slow. Thanks for the link
> Does anyone happen to know whether GNU Arch has been considered? I've been using it for a while and find it quite good (it's not perfect, but it's the best versionning system I've used so far).
Then you haven't tried darcs
Linus needs it to be fast, scriptable, and let him pull changesets. It needs to be a distributed system where everybody has their own version controlled repositories, and the SCM recognises when Linux pulls a patch that he already has and doesn't reapply it. To name just a few things.
Those *were* private citizens. The corporation didn't go to jail, and the corporation can't vote. The individual people go to jail and the individual people can vote. The coporation is not an extra person.
> I think corporations should be entitled to the same rights and privileges as private citizens.
Like voting? And do corporations get the same negative sides as private citizens, like going to jail? If you won't send a company to jail, and give it a vote, you can't equate them to private citizens
The toothers all died of sexually transmitted diseases. Either that or they got banned from the public transport network.
Remarkably, this doesn't appear to be an april fools joke. The comments in the discussion seem to date from quite a few days ago. This is probably just a bit of code that is inserted in the GDI and has a guess at a reasonable adjustment for pixel intensity. Hopefully it doesn't adjust gamma, because that would look dumb, a faded monitor needs the darker intensities to be raised, while mid intensities stay roughly where they were. Raising gamma increases the middle intensities too much. I also doubt this would work for games using DirectX or OpenGL (too much effort, and unrobust).
> Doctors have removed Terry Schiavo's feeding tube.
Actually that could show a bias, because such a task is more frequently done by nurses. The doctor just asks a nurse to do it or arrange for it to be done. If, in fact, it *was* a nurse, it would show the bias of the reporter that nurses are fairly inconsequential in medicine, that the nurse performing an act is equivalent to the doctor that asked for it to be done doing it. It is also unlikely that more than one doctor did it as the statement implies. It demonstrates a bias that a doctor is beyond individual reproach for inappropriate decisions, and a disgruntled party must challenge a force of a plurality of doctors.
Its always interesting how an utterance can be chosen to subtly induce an opinion not explicit in the discussion. Emphasis is used in this way also - "I'm not letting *you* have it", says more than "I'm not letting you have it". The second, neutral, sentence leaves the status of the second person undisputed, the first sentence tells the second person that their behaviour has indicated a belief in their status that the first person disagrees with. Enough, even, to demonstrate to anybody around that the second persons status is open for challenge. That's why that sort of emphasis, in particular, can be so discomforting, and why it causes arguments that are suprising when the statement is mis-quoted without the emphasis. When used, such an emphasis indicates that the speaker feels his/her position is close to being compromised so far that he/she needs to place doubt in the second person's position into the minds of others to help "quash" the confidence of the second person.
No it is not a bias. Mathematics is tautological. Tautologies are not biased. The full statement is something like:
Using a certain interpretation of the symbols "2", "4", "+", and "=", "2 + 2 = 4" is not absurd.
It states nothing about anything except how those interpretations can be combined so that a person who finds a way to unify the symbols with observable phenomena can immediately make a leap in the interpretation of the phenomena that results in an assessment no more biased than the original mapping of phenomena to mathematical symbols that the person chose. A tautology is a non-biased statement. It is also the only knowable thing. Everything *else* is opinion and interpretation.
That's why tautologies are used in logic, if a tautology that is not absurd is used to transform an interpretation into an absurd statement, then the interpretation is shown to be incorrect.
It would be far more efficient to use mirrors, less of the incoming light is used to heat the spacecraft.
I think I'm a 4 but with satisfying moments of 5. But you missed one out:
0. Scared Shitless:
Guru: What do you see on the screen?
Scared Shitless: Nothing at all! (Guru translates as "Same blue desktop, task bar, start menu, normal icons, whatever windows SS already had open...")
G: Hold the Alt key down while you breifly but firmly tap the key marked "F4", then let go of the Alt key.
SS: Oh no! something's gone wrong, I don't know what's happened.
G: Did you accidently tap the wrong key, or hit another key as well, or what?
SS: I don't know what I pressed, I don't pay attention to the effect I have on the world around me.
SS: It isn't going in.
G: What isn't going in, and into where?
SS: When I click, it doesn't go in to the window.
G: What doesn't go into the window?
SS: The screen.
G: How the fuck am I supposed to help with entirely non descriptive references to the things your eyes are seeing?
SS: I don't know computers.
G: What colour is the sky?
SS: Blue.
G: What colour is predominantly being shown on the TV screen part.
SS: I don't don't know, what's a colour?
G: same as normal.
SS: what is it normally?
G: Jim has a ball. The ball is Red. Red is a colour.
> That's a cop-out for people who want to pretend they're doing nothing wrong when sharing music illegally.
No it's not. Murder is not theft, but it's not a cop out for murderers. Copyright infringement is a different thing to theft, but that makes no claim on the relative morality of it.
Theft is taking a thing from the owner or his/her agent or beneficiary. Copying a file leaves the owner with the original, so it must be a different thing to theft. Eg, I will never buy any of westlife's current albums, so if a made a copy of one, the record label will not have been deprived of the album I took the copy from. Nor would they even have been deprived of income they would have obtained from me, since they would not have had that income anyway. It is still wrong for me to do that, but it is not theft.
Copyright is a privilege granted to the creator of a valued contribution to cultural development to reimburse them for the expense of making the contribution. It is intended to allow artists to create art without having to rely on their ability to source and supply precious metals and stones with their art engraved/moulded on. It gives the creation of art an intrinsic value in market terms. If you claim that a particular form is property (as opposed to a particular concrete piece) then the contribution to society has little value as society can not build on that art - it only has value as a singular peice of entertainment. If you claim copyright infringement to be theft, then you strip copyright laws of the justification for their very existence.
> If you don't agree with the price, or don't think the money goes to the right people, then don't buy it.
If I buy it, then it is my property, so I can do what I want with it and it is impossible for me to steal it from myself. And thus copyright infringement is definately not theft as it is *far* more restrictive (and that is why it has a limited duration, as it would render the art utterly valueless as art, and only allow it a value as entertainment).
The real problem is where you get a nude sunbather, and they give you read-only access.
It is your association between maggots and refuse. People make decisions on where they spend their time and what they consume on the principle of "contamination". Maggots are contaminated by liking refuse, food with maggots in is thus contaminated. Cooking is not felt to be enough to decontaminate. Experiments with dipping cockroaches into orange juice showed that even a thoroughly disinfected (recently deceased) cockroach "contaminates" orange juice by being dipped in it.
I myself will happily rinse a used glass and re-use it, but if it has been put into a dishwasher which has dirty items in it (even if they are nowhere near the glass), I will normally get a fresh glass - I feel it is contaminated, though I know it isn't.
These associations to decide what is a contaminant and how much effort is required to decontaminate is mostly determined by how you perceived your parents reaction to them to be. IE a fishermans son will probably not care about a maggot in his dinner if he can just pull it out (decontamination is trivial as he saw his father happily warm maggots in his mouth).
I intend to try to react according to available scientific evidence in front of my children when I have them (regardless of how I feel about things myself), since it is important that they be able to make more realistic judgements about the world around them than I am capable of. While I *can* react more sensibly than I feel, I want my children to be able to react sensibly without effort so they can confidently be highly effective in their personal business and business business.
It is important to remember that these card readers in shops are made by allcomers. They are not any where near as trustworthy as a cashpoint.
We need cards that can be loaded with an amount to pay by the terminal, and a keypad (where the numbers move around to avoid showing wear). When you tak the card out, it shows the amount (via static electronic paper) and you type your number to authorise it. Then put your card back in, and the bank sends a crytographic message to be decrypted by the card (using the pin as a key for the card to calculate the key for the banks message). Once decrypted, the terminal sends the message back to the bank, and the bank pays up.
To get access to your funds, the criminal needs both the card and plenty of the bank card authentication messages (or the card and your pin). They'd have to be pretty damned sharp to manage that.
Yeah, so I found out from another poster, I had understood that the basic facilities of a regular network connected system were not crippled or missing in the so called "Professional" version, seems like I would need to buy an expensive "server" system for the minimum reasonable feature set like many free/"hobbiest" operating systems.
Goddam, then I need Win 2k3 just to do what any workstation with network access should be able to do.
> No consumer antivirus on the market today NEEDS admin privs to update the virus definitions.
That is incorrect, McAfee does, and that is what they have definition update subscriptions paid for.
> I specifically referred to an average older user needing internet, email and maybe some flash/java games.
My parents are below average, and they have required many changes to their system. I am finally becoming happy that they are not going to do anything new for a while, but I still expect to check on things, and remove programs from thier HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Run key, and I expect to do it without having to negotiate console availability. This is 2005 ferchissake. If they were new computer users I would give them Linux and have the sort of administrative capabilities one would expect from even a free OS ten years ago, but they are very used to how Windows responds, and the particular phrasing of the error messages.
My dad gets confused if you change the wallpaper. Any slight difference in behaviour has him throwing tantrums out of frustration. Switching from Windows ME to Windows XP introduced a new login screen, which he has almost figured out now after three months. Also, their webcam is not supported by Linux, and BT communicator (VoIP integrated with their standard phone service) doesn't have a Linux version.
> Firewall program
needs reconfiguring when the parents want to do something new, or when they accidentally allow access for something if it is one of the ones that offers. The former type should be used for computer illiterates.
> Firefox with common plugins installed (flash, java, etc)
Needs options changing as workarounds for security problems. Also needs Administrator logon to install updates.
> Auto-updating antivirus with scheduled scan.
Many need Administrator priviledges to update (unless you've got money to spend on serious business grade AV).
> Anti-spyware with a realtime scanner.
Again with the Administrator privileges
> And do you really have to fight with them over the mouse in VNC when they know you're trying to help them?? If you do, then you have more problems than the computer.
No, they will stop for me to do something almost any time, but they shouldn't have to, not in this day and age when even a free OS like Linux can do it.
And they need an rdesktop server so their kids can log in remotely to do admin for them. VNC doesn't cut it since XP Home has only one screen so I can only do admin if they are willing to stop what they're doing and watch the mouse dancing.
That will work out very slow in at least ghc and hugs (not sure about nhc) as they seem to build the whole string in core before putStr can do its business. Use (mapM_ putStrLn lines) for the last line of code instead to get iterative behaviour instead of recursive.
Check out Epigram, hopefully they'll think of a better "helper" program, and a syntax that doesn't kill you to write without the helper (and that is clearer even with the helper).
And one day it may even be capable of I/O.
Their attitude is that code that is incorrect was unpredictable in its behaviour at the time it was written. If they let it break, then it's *still* unpredictable in its behaviour, so those crappy programmers have lost nothing, and the rest of us get a better compiler.
Uh, the problem is not that there aren't any volunteers to maintain a full architecture repo. It is that the amount of effort for the low-level core stuff (installer, kernel, etc...) is very high since that is where all the differences are. It doesn't need people to work on a port, but a way of keeping all those low-level bits working roughly the same on all the official arches. I think most of the problem is that the linus kernel does not maintain consistency across arches. That is where the problem lies.
IMHO, the next best solution is to do an installer and well managed kernel for PPC, i386 and amd64, and release bootable cd images for all the other arches that you run debootstrap from as and when, and install your own kernel on the created system, but the rest of the packages are maintained for all the distro's in a similar fashion. Most packages require very little effort to make them work on all arches if you can make them work on four.