> So tell me what Distro doesn't have this problem? > I know I have had it happen to me on OpenSuse, Ubuntu, and Debian.
I suspect not. Unless by "Debian" you mean Sid/Unstable.... But since servers seem to be the only machines that don't run Sid.....
It really isn't all that hard folks, if you want a stable consistent experience you run a STABLE distribution. No you won't get the latest bling, that is the whole POINT.
Ubuntu doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up so yea instability seems to be par for the course there... unless you run one of their STABLE versions that seems aimed at servers only and is treated like unwanted stepchildren. Hint: Those Dell preloads should have been loaded with a STABLE Ubuntu.
OpenSUSE is a Fedora like bleeding edge testing distro. "openSUSE also provides the base for Novell's award-winning SUSE Linux Enterprise products." says the website.
> Just about the only place I haven't had it happen was Centos but I have not used it all that much.
And here you answer your own question. Centos is a rebuild of RHEL, a STABLE but apparently not new & sexy enough for ya distribution so you don't use it all that much. Which is a perfectly fine attitude, you can apparently cope with the occasional glitch and prefer having the newer versions of things that riding the edge gives you. Just don't complain about not having the stability you traded off. Life is about compromises, there ain't no free lunches.
Really, these arguments make about as much sense as if back when Vista was still in beta/RC, the testers were flocking to places like slashdot and bitching about it not being stable. Duh! Only difference is in the Open world everybody can be a beta tester, developer, end user, at will. Just wish more peeps understood the tradeoffs involved. Guess the distros should make more effort to hammer it into people's heads BEFORE they download the.iso files.
> It's certainly not the outbreak of common sense this will undoubtedly being tagged as. It's simply that > they saw their sales hurt more by pushing DRM rather than dealing with the "loss" of "only" selling us > music once.
No, I don't think that is the reason at all. In the end they would probably have won on the take it or leave it tactics with DRM. Most people were lining up, buying iPods and giving each other iTunes gift certificates like good little consumers. No, what did it was fear and greed. Fear among the music cartels that Apple and Microsoft were about to become a duopoly and control all access to media... i.e. replace the music (and eventually movie distributors) companies as the gatekeepers. Really, once they were distributing most music it would have been a totally natural step to start signing up artists directly.... Apple already IS doing that with indy acts. So fear of being cut ALL the way out was motivating them to find a way to create enough retailers in the digital download space to avoid being marginalized.
Now consider the greed and fear at Amazon, Walmart etc. They could read the same tea leaves. Walmart with it's huge iPod display and shrinking sales in their CD dept and the uneasy reality that the Walmart online music store will NEVER be compatible with the Apple or Zune DRM scheme. I.E. every ipod or Zune sale is helping Apple and Microsoft dismantle Walmart's current huge percentage of nationwide music sales. Ditto for Amazon, selling the crap out of iPods, each one sold eating away at future content sales unless they found a way to 'kick the table over' and change the rules of the game.
Odds of convincing either His Steveness or the Borg to open up their DRM system being zero, even with the full unified might (yea, as if) of all of the media megacorps, the only way out of the hole they had dug themselves after considering the file compatibility matrix of the huge installed base of players was unencumbered mp3.
The question can't be answered without knowing what is important.
If you don't need the extreme runtime epaper can provide (no power use when displaying static text... except for the Kindle if you don't disable the radio.) just get a small laptop, tablet computer or pda. The Nokia handheld has close to the same number of pixels in smaller space so the dpi is actually better.
For epaper devices it really comes down to three choices, Amazon, Sony or Other
Amazon is selling you a cell phone with an epaper display. Yes you CAN shove other material into it but they don't make it easy and probably can't trust em to not make it harder in the future. It is so obviously a play to lock Amazon in as THE supplier of etexts in the same way the iPod was a brazen attempt to monopolize digital music and video distribution. And remember that it uses a cell phone as it's CPU. Violate the Amazon TOS and kiss your content goodbye.
Sony uses the exact same display (according to the epaper vendor) so if you have seen one you know what the display quality of the other is like. (Low res, low contrast and slow IMHO) Sony probably has equally sinister desires as Amazon but considering their position in the book market has no hope of achiving any sort of monopoly. So if evil is out, count on em being stupid at some point and killing the product with something mindbogglingly retarded.
Or you can go third party, google for em there are several smaller vendors selling the same panel with essentially the same pokey CPUs in various colors of plastic shell.
Many run Linux but that won't do you much good unless you find a hack to blow their DRM infested firmware out. No DRM, no ebooks from mainstream houses but the free stuff, tech docs and pirate stuff would still be good to go. Of course there isn't much point to hacking one anyway, they are slow and the screen refresh is bad enough to preclude any interactive app.
> This sounds to me like a great example of passing the buck.
Great example of an ATTEMPT to pass the buck. Remember Itanic tried something similar, passing the buck to the compiler. When the new miracle 'smart' compilers didn't appear Itanic's fortunes faded away. Now few people even know Intel makes a non-x86 arch chip other than low end ARM stuff.
Multi-core shows no sign of having a similar fate yet. Because two or even four cores can speed up existing workloads enough people see the benefit. The question still waiting to be answered is whether 8-16 cores can be utilized. If the software devels fail to produce the required miracle.... well our industry is in for a world of pain. Because it is now clear massive multicore is the ONLY way forward for x86 and the market has demonstrated again and again it isn't interested in anything else. But if performance stops increasing the upgrade treadmill that generates all of the money stops.
> From a more practical demonstration point of view, if there was a backdoor, governments > would not need to get warrants for inserting hardware keyloggers or custom malware on > systems to access system information. Governments both in the US and elsewhere do this, > which suggests that no backdoor is available.
You made a fairly convincing argument until you spouted this idiocy. It is so error filled I'm uncertain where to begin the disection but since I must pick one....
1. A backdoor gives no LEGAL right to collect information from a system thus anything obtained in such a manner would be inadmissable. A court approved keylogger, etc. yields admissable evidence.
2. The existance of such a backdoor, if it existed, would be one of the US government's most treasured secrets, not to be squandered collecting inadmissable evidence on some petty crimelord or terrorist. I doubt it would be considered 'worth it' to bag UBL and his top ten minions. It probably wouldn't be worth giving up (and enduring the shitstorm from the Kostards) to prevent another 9/11 scale attack.
Here one should reflect on history to see how such a resource would be used, and examine the rules that governed actionable intelligence gathered via Ultra. Unless a plausible alternative method can be shown where a piece of intelligence COULD have been obtained (even if they had to use other Ultra derived info to fake things) such that the enemy would not conclude that a break in Enigma was the ONLY way the allies could have known a fact, then it could not be used. England was willing to allow an entire city to be firebombed to preserve the Ultra Secret.
3. Just because the NSA doesn't make public use of things pulled from the ultimate backdoor doesn't mean they aren't using it or wouldn't use it in some future crisis. And it doesn't mean someone else might not discover it and instead of publishing, ferret out a way to themselves activate it. (unlikely given the nature of public key crypto)
Personally I'd like it if we someday learned the NSA had such a backdoor since it would prove they still knew how to 'spy hard' but sadly I doubt they have the chops for that sort of caper anymore, content instead to just sit in their lair and listen to signals.
> The funniest thing about the whole situation is that if Microsoft just shut up and added > ODF support to Office, they could turn around and say, "Buy your Office 2008 licenses! > It's got ODF support, you NEED ODF support!".
And kill the revenue stream forver. That is why you post on slashdot and Balmer buys legislatures with his ill gotten gains. The whole point of all Microsoft products isn't to just be sold once per customer, but to be sold over and over, preferrrably as a regularized revenue stream/subscription. A single sale, regardless of how large only helps the quarter the sale is booked in, a continuing stream keeps the money flowing for decades.
The major driver for upgrades is interoperability so a standard, even one controlled by Microsoft itself, is a death sentence. Only by continually breaking backward compatibility can they force what would otherwise be products upgraded at most every five-ten years into a regular hassle that users endure because they must.
Re:vimdiff
on
Hacking VIM
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· Score: 4, Informative
> the rest of us, who use more decent tools, can just snicker.
I take it you are a code monkey developing mainstream apps, most of the more evolved ones are emacs folks. But admins and embedded folks are often working in diverse environments, many of which don't have emacs but any *NIX type environment will have vi. Busybox implements a vi clone. I seriously doubt you will find emacs on very many routers, access points, settop boxes, cell phones, etc.
Since I use so many different machines it just makes sense to default to vi/vim and stick to assuming only the default behaviour. Emacs only makes sense if you mostly use a single home directory where you can have emacs customized.
PDF won't happen for a while
on
The Cult of Kindle
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· Score: 2, Informative
> To me, the inability to function as a printer and the utter incompetence on displaying PDFs renders both the Kindle > and Sony's offerings more or less useless.
Two factors prevent this in the current generation. The e-ink screens are SLOW. Not lcd slow, but hundreds of milliseconds slow. Panning and scrolling around a PDF would be a nightmare and the current generation is orders of magnitude to low in both the resolution and size departments to present an 8.5x11" page in a readable form.
Then there is the total lack of CPU power that dealing with PDF needs for a good user experience. The Kindle is essentially a cell phone (and not a smartphone with a fast CPU) with an oversized epaper display and a keyboard. Most of the other e-book readers currently offered are underpowered as well and for the same reason, battery life and form factor. In the small thin form factor there isn't much room for a battery and to get long life they depend on a slow energy effecient CPU that can be powered off almost all the time.
Give Moore's Law some time and we will see exactly what you describe appear. And it will totally RULE.
>...it is not hard to argue that each was trying to take over the other.
And I'm sure if our Founding Fathers had possessed the ability to inflict damage on the British Isles they would have done so, in the (correct) belief that it would have hastened the end of the war. Likewise once War was joined the CSA did indeed attack enemy targets outside it's own borders. Intent is important however.
History records that General Lee did indeed contemplate sacking Washington DC as a means of forcing the Union to come to terms. He decided against that plan for military reasons (thinking it was an ambush) but had the plan been implemented and successful history records no desire on the part of the general or anyone of note in the Confederacy of any intention of retaining Washington or any other Union territory.
Hence my asstertion that it was NOT a Civil War, defined by all posters in this subthread as two or more factions seeking to control a single nation-state, but was instead a War of Independence. Union apologists generally can't bring themselves to admit this even today because it casts the Union, Lincoln, etc. in a very bad light but reality is what IS not what we wish were so.
> He has more individual donors than any other candidate in the race, Republican or Democrat.
I don't seem to recall Mr. Dean's incredible support among the nutroots propelling him into the White House. Likewise I tend to doubt the Ronulans will do more than queer the race in some open primaty states in the same way McCain did in 2000. None (McCain and Paul for the Repubs, Dean for the Dems) are candidates normal party voters would vote for but attract plenty of crossover votes, nutballs, and diehards who will donate and spam online polls. Dennis Kucinich's supporters were spamming online polls almost as badly until most simply dropped him to stop it. Many had also dropped Paul until he rose enough in real polling some have added him back, whereupon the Ronulans instantly spammed em.
If anybody actually cared to research it, I'd expect you would find large numbers of registered Democrats donating to Paul just because they raealize how much mischief he will cause with a few million dollars to spend on TV ads.
> And to avoid be labeled a civil war, simply declare a portion of the country "independant"?
By your 'logic' the War in 1776 was also a Civil War. The difference is pretty obvious to anyone with a functioning brain and a basic understanding of the English language.
The US, an internationally recognized territory of the British Empire, wanted to be free of the Crown, thus making it a War of Independence. The CSA quit the Union, wishing to be recognized as an independent nation in exactly the same way as their forefathers had sent their Declaration of Independence to King George. The Union objected pretty much the same as King George did and for much the same reason (fear of losing a critical revenue stream, the North was very dependent on taxing Southern exports mixed with pride) and a War for Southern Independence was fought. The Union won, obviously and thus wrote the official histories.
Had it actually been a Civil War the CSA would have been trying to conquer the Union and thus win the right (through contest at arms) to control the whole of the United States and impose it's views.
> you sir are a fucking moron.
And thee are a foul mouthed twerp that needs to grow up and learn how adults discourse in public.
> It's no secret that a lot of Republicans are livid about his candidacy and don't like being associated > with him, and therefore would be glad to tarnish him, even if he has no chance of winning.
Of course not. Which is kinda beside the point. Of course Ron Paul isn't going to get the nomination and wouldn't win the general if it somehow did. I know that, you know that and Ron Paul knows that. Just like Ross Perot knew he wasn't going to be POTUS in 1992 but he DID get to determine the outcome of the election. Perot hated Bush Sr. with a white hot passion and was ensuring "Not Bush" won that election. Don't think he cared one way or the other about Mr. Clinton, just that he wasn't Bush was good enough for him. It was pretty obvious he only went through the motions again in '96 because he was guilt tripped over getting so many ignorant but honest folk worked up over him.
Many Republicans (rightly) fear Paul has much the same motivation, to influence the nomination process with his unwinnable campaign. Especially now that he has real money to throw around. Expect him to create MUCH mischief in NH, I'd be shocked if he DOESN'T end up in double digits there, especially if Mrs. Clinton puts BHO away in IA all of the nutballs will be crossing over to vote for Paul, pretty much ending McCain's candidacy at a minimum. Maximum damage Paul could cause? Unknown, which is why the fear and loathing in the Republican ranks. There are a lot of open primary states and Paul will probably do well in all of them if Hillary seals the deal early.
Of course I don't have a problem with that, since McCain is a bigger menace to the Republic than Paul as far as I'm concerned. What part of "Congress shall make no law..." is Mr. McCain having problems with?
> if MS is willing to subsidize the extra cost associated with the upgraded design and will > give the "shrunken" Windows XP to the project for free as an optional choice for those who wish to use it
Nope, wrong attitude. OLPC isn't just giving out hardware, they are trying to provide an end to end solution. Just getting XP to boot does nothing. If Microsoft wants to order large lots with additional flash they should be offered the opportunity.... provided THEY intend to provide an operating system, applications, the Microsoft based server infrastructure to support the mesh networking (from Windows clients) back end data store, Internet connectivity, securing the laptops from malware and theft, etc. I.e. the total solution OLPC is offering.
But since OLPC has already expended countless hours of both paid and contributed labor designing the current system and since just an offer of XP (even if offered for $0) adds zero functionality and would require a total redesign of both the hardware, software and infrastructure it would be pointless for OLPC to consider switching at this late stage.
> It's bad law and the bum's rush it got implies somebody paid the Democratic and Republican > leaderships some serious money to pass it quickly.
Ding! Givethis guy a cookie!
Follow the money, it never fails. Who wins and who loses with this bill?
For fee wireless hotspot providers are currently going the way of the dodo because every small coffeeshop and public library, hotel, etc. figured out it was far easier to just buy a net connection and a $50 linky and quit worrying about trying to nickle and dime their customers. Yes a few will abuse the free net connection but they cost they impose is dwarfed by the expense and hassle fo offering the for pay systems.
But the for pay systems imply they have bug infrastructure behind them, i.e. they CAN monitor and comply with this law, they can just jack their prices if needed.... once they make free, open access points a legal minefield.
Pursuing self-interest at the absolute expense of all other considerations is pretty much the definition of evil.
Not if you happen to be a libertarian. Enlightened self interest is the ONLY pure motivation. Not that most corporations actually ACT in their enlightened self interest of course...:(
btw, The only reason I'm not a "Ronulan" is because he is an idiotarian libertarian. (See ESR's Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto for details.)
>...as I actually find myself cheering for the evil WalMart empire who doesn't seem so evil at the moment.
Sounds like you just took your first step into the real world. Walmart isn't evil. Walmart isn't good either. Just like almost every other publicly traded corporation they simply ARE. They exist to produce returns for their shareholders in the form of increasing stock valuations and/or dividends. They will do whatever it takes to accomplish the goal because if they fail the shareholders will punish the executives.
In this case Walmart needs to grow their digital music business since they know CD sales will only shrink from here. Not only does the iPod account for the majority of the installed base of portable music players, Walmart itself gives the damned things the best placement in their stores. This couldn't continue. They had a few choices. Dump the iPod and throw their full weight behind a second tier product line such as the Sandisk Sansa. (Remember that MS's Zune is just as closed to Walmart since it doesn't do Plays for Sure) Second option would have been to use their clout to force Apple to support a DRMed format they could sell. Not even Walmart can force His Steveness and both sides probably understand that. That left forcing the music industry to abandon DRM. They are many and easy to play against each other, especially with every other online store as ready allies because DRM ensures they all remain also rans behind the iTunes store and the Zune Store. See Amazon.
See? Totally explainable without any conspiracy theories or battles between Good and Evil.
> Those books are still copyrighted, the publisher won't sell you a copy, yet they > want to deny everyone access to it.
They have to follow the law so I forgive them on books under copyright. But they don't appear to even want to make it easy to access complete copies of books that are out of copyright. You can write them and ask for a full copy of a book. Bah. And no easy way to mirror the site (even just the out of copyright material) either.
Our library already hosts a Project Guttenberg mirror. Doing some back of the envelope math says we would need to bulk up the RAID somewhat more to even take the public domain english content from this project since it is all TIFFs but it would be something we would consider if it were easy (rsync) and the content were in a form that would actually be, ya know, USEFUL!
> If you have problems getting pdfs to print, there is something seriously wrong.
Bah, perhaps you have few problems getting vanilla PDFs to print from Windows. Try it from Linux. Acroread is a turd! xpdf opens almost every pdf we throw at it but since patrons expect acroread we keep it as the default in the patron lab. If (and I say IF) it is no certainty that it will print it. Ok, we aren't using HP printers anymore, and our Oki is not using an Adobe Postscript implemenation but we don't have many general postscript issues, just Acroread problems. And toss the same file over to xpdf and it prints.
Even better, our library automation vendor recommends against using acroread to print labels because it always screws up the sizing. Again, xpdf works every time.
And as for these ads, if xpdf renders them you can bet it won't be a week before somebody has a patch to nip it in the bud.
> Unless its porn. Porn works better as video than text.
For us guys your statement holds. However the huge 'romance' novel industry argues that for most women text porn is preferred over visual. Whatever. Wonder if Bezos has made sure to have lots of that sort of stuff ready to sell on the Kindle.:)
(And no, with eight gray levels and 800x600 resolution forget jpeg/gif.)
> Aren't you guys missing the point of the device, which is the E-Ink display?
No, most aren't. It ain't 'all that.' It uses the exact same display (according to the website of the vendor) as the Sony e-book reader and I have seen one of those. Is it paper? No. It looks more like paper under glass, which of course it is. The 'ink' is about as black as real ink but the paper isn't nearly as white as the cheapo office depot house brand crap you run read once and toss stuff on. Resolution is crap, so to get a clear display you jack up the font until it looks like a large print edition. Of course that means more frequent page flips that only makes the horrible slow screen refresh that includes a all dark all white sequence even more annoying.
I can tell you what the Kindle is. It is a cell phone blown up in size to hold a big epaper display. Go look at the specs and tell me different. What makes it expensive is covering the wireless charges as an upfront fully paid up annuity instead of a monthly contract. Which I don't really fault Amazon for since trying to sell it as a monthly subscription would have almost certainly been fatal.
In quantity (such as Amazon is ordering in) the BOM can't be much more than $100. The only relative unknown is the e-ink screen's cost in 10K lots but if it were $50 it would make more sense to use something else. (non-backlit LCD for example, such as the OLPC's daylight mode)
Why? It is a joke. The BOM on the thing would run you less than $200 quantity one and I seriously doubt Amazon paid $100. Most of the sticker price is an all up front subscription to their cellular based wireless network that probably isn't even available out here in flyover country where I live. So if yuu don't value the handcuffs to the Amazon Store that why would you bother buying one just to hack it?
No, we need to design our own. There ain't squat in one hardware wise. No wireless (eats battery like crazy) and two SD slots (for easy copy action!) along with the ability to read PDF files. But first e-paper tech needs to finish developing. Current incarnations lack the resolution of a cheap laser printer, to say nothing of commercial printing and the screen refresh speeds blow goats. And color would really be helpful along with a touchscreen UI.
But like all things tech these issues will be solved after enough early adopters with big wallets and small brains spend insane amounts of cash on not ready for prime time hardware that won't even be compatible with whatever ends up becoming the standard. Then I'll buy one.:)
While I'd bet that the editors had that in mind and even better odds Fujitsu is milking that angle the issue of standby power waste is a real one that has only been growing worse in recent years. Combine with general shortages in fuel sources (especially if you don't like the idea of giving our enemies in the GWOT Sagan's of dollars to fund terrorists with) and a stressed out distribution grid and there are real reasons to think ideas like this one have merit.
> What the fuck is going on with this human-caused global warming bullshit.
Notice how the founder of the Weather Channel comes out saying human caused GW is a hoax and gets (so far Drudge is the biggest site to carry it) zero mainstream coverage. So ya I'm with you on that but don't let it blind you to actual useful stuff.
> why can't people just be disciplined enough to switch off their monitors before leaving for home/office?
Go ahead, push the button on the front if it makes you feel 'green' or something. But other than the LED on the front going off instead of blinking and/or changing colors you ain't done a goddamned thing. It is still wasting almost (less the couple of milliwatts for the LED) exactly as much power as if you hadn't pushed the button. Because the button on the front is just a 'soft button' on almost every LCD panel. Mine has a real switch on the back that will discontinue all power... and is useful to reboot the retarded thing when it's CPU locks up.
It does help to know something about the problem before spouting off answers.
Ok, you are rational enough to be worth a followup post. Apology in advance, I just looked at a preview and this one is long. I got on a roll.:)
> If you're not a prisoner in a criminal case with rights afforded by the criminal > justice system, and you're not a prisoner of war, then what are you, exactly?
Well we can look to the Geneva Conventions themselves for some of the answer. Combatants out of uniform, hiding behind civilian populations, etc. are mentioned. And what it has to say about an 'unlawful combatant' ain't pretty. Basically we could just line em up and shoot em on sight and be 100% in compliance. Read some history of the French Resistance for an example as they are a fairly close case except that they were careful to target military/political targets. The Germans shot em and nobody uttered a peep about the Geneva Conventions because it was kosher. For all their other sins the German Army considered itself to be professional and 'civilized', certain notorious units obviously excepted, thus they generally adhered to the Geneva Conventions[1]. We should be doing likewise in Iraq and Afganistan. In this case I doubt prompt public executions would discourage them very much but it certainly couldn't hurt.
In a nutshell the original Geneva Conventions were designed to define the conduct of war between Great Powers using ranked formations of conscript soldiers. Later additions (some of which the US didn't sign onto) are mostly Cold War relics where the Soviets were making it easier for their proxy states and revolutionaries to win by conning Western Civilization into fighting with one hand tied behind it's back.
None of which is applicable to the current GWOT being fought with no massed armies and one side without even a proxy nation state to sign the GC even if they believed all that 'touchy feelly crap that just illustrates how weak and spinless the West is' was something they wanted to be a part of. But notice that Taliban soldiers in uniform did get GC protection. We didn't get bogged down with rule book lawyer questions as to whether the Taliban were the lawful descendent of the previous soviet puppet state that had signed, they were recognizable soldiers so we extended them the protection of the GC.
Terrorists hiding in civilian populations and as often as not attacking those same civilians deserve no protection. Catch em, give some minimal justice where needed to try to make sure the Mohammad you caught really is the same Mohammad that blew up a marketplace last week and then shoot the bastard.
For all that most of the action is taking place away from the TV cameras this IS a total war because they won't stop until we kill em or they cut our heads off. Longer term we have to change the conditions that breed this brand of nutter but GWB's drain the swamp and plant democracy theory certainly hasn't been working out all that well.
So we try, try again until we find a way that works since failure isn't an option. I'm an agnostic so I'll get my head cut off right behind the queers and athiests.... assuming I don't go out shooting earlier.
> Yes, it can be debated that there's a legal distinction between me as a US > citizen sitting at my desk and a farmer in Afghanistan with respect to the > provision of rights under US law.
No it can't be debated because it is obvious to any sane persion that there is a night and day difference. The expectations a Free People have regarding their relationship with their own government can and indeed must be vastly different from that governments's obligation to enemies taken on the field of combat. Even if taken inside the camp of an enemy a known US citizen (John Walker Lindh for example) has the expectation of certain rights. Inalienable Rights.
Just like there is a world of difference between law enforcement and intelligence. Rules that apply in the context of criminal investigations of citizens have almost to resemblence to how the law of the
Slashdot Mirror
> So tell me what Distro doesn't have this problem?
.iso files.
> I know I have had it happen to me on OpenSuse, Ubuntu, and Debian.
I suspect not. Unless by "Debian" you mean Sid/Unstable.... But since servers seem to be the only machines that don't run Sid.....
It really isn't all that hard folks, if you want a stable consistent experience you run a STABLE distribution. No you won't get the latest bling, that is the whole POINT.
Ubuntu doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up so yea instability seems to be par for the course there... unless you run one of their STABLE versions that seems aimed at servers only and is treated like unwanted stepchildren. Hint: Those Dell preloads should have been loaded with a STABLE Ubuntu.
OpenSUSE is a Fedora like bleeding edge testing distro. "openSUSE also provides the base for Novell's award-winning SUSE Linux Enterprise products." says the website.
> Just about the only place I haven't had it happen was Centos but I have not used it all that much.
And here you answer your own question. Centos is a rebuild of RHEL, a STABLE but apparently not new & sexy enough for ya distribution so you don't use it all that much. Which is a perfectly fine attitude, you can apparently cope with the occasional glitch and prefer having the newer versions of things that riding the edge gives you. Just don't complain about not having the stability you traded off. Life is about compromises, there ain't no free lunches.
Really, these arguments make about as much sense as if back when Vista was still in beta/RC, the testers were flocking to places like slashdot and bitching about it not being stable. Duh! Only difference is in the Open world everybody can be a beta tester, developer, end user, at will. Just wish more peeps understood the tradeoffs involved. Guess the distros should make more effort to hammer it into people's heads BEFORE they download the
> It's certainly not the outbreak of common sense this will undoubtedly being tagged as. It's simply that
> they saw their sales hurt more by pushing DRM rather than dealing with the "loss" of "only" selling us
> music once.
No, I don't think that is the reason at all. In the end they would probably have won on the take it or leave it tactics with DRM. Most people were lining up, buying iPods and giving each other iTunes gift certificates like good little consumers. No, what did it was fear and greed. Fear among the music cartels that Apple and Microsoft were about to become a duopoly and control all access to media... i.e. replace the music (and eventually movie distributors) companies as the gatekeepers. Really, once they were distributing most music it would have been a totally natural step to start signing up artists directly.... Apple already IS doing that with indy acts. So fear of being cut ALL the way out was motivating them to find a way to create enough retailers in the digital download space to avoid being marginalized.
Now consider the greed and fear at Amazon, Walmart etc. They could read the same tea leaves. Walmart with it's huge iPod display and shrinking sales in their CD dept and the uneasy reality that the Walmart online music store will NEVER be compatible with the Apple or Zune DRM scheme. I.E. every ipod or Zune sale is helping Apple and Microsoft dismantle Walmart's current huge percentage of nationwide music sales. Ditto for Amazon, selling the crap out of iPods, each one sold eating away at future content sales unless they found a way to 'kick the table over' and change the rules of the game.
Odds of convincing either His Steveness or the Borg to open up their DRM system being zero, even with the full unified might (yea, as if) of all of the media megacorps, the only way out of the hole they had dug themselves after considering the file compatibility matrix of the huge installed base of players was unencumbered mp3.
The question can't be answered without knowing what is important.
If you don't need the extreme runtime epaper can provide (no power use when displaying static text... except for the Kindle if you don't disable the radio.) just get a small laptop, tablet computer or pda. The Nokia handheld has close to the same number of pixels in smaller space so the dpi is actually better.
For epaper devices it really comes down to three choices, Amazon, Sony or Other
Amazon is selling you a cell phone with an epaper display. Yes you CAN shove other material into it but they don't make it easy and probably can't trust em to not make it harder in the future. It is so obviously a play to lock Amazon in as THE supplier of etexts in the same way the iPod was a brazen attempt to monopolize digital music and video distribution. And remember that it uses a cell phone as it's CPU. Violate the Amazon TOS and kiss your content goodbye.
Sony uses the exact same display (according to the epaper vendor) so if you have seen one you know what the display quality of the other is like. (Low res, low contrast and slow IMHO) Sony probably has equally sinister desires as Amazon but considering their position in the book market has no hope of achiving any sort of monopoly. So if evil is out, count on em being stupid at some point and killing the product with something mindbogglingly retarded.
Or you can go third party, google for em there are several smaller vendors selling the same panel with essentially the same pokey CPUs in various colors of plastic shell.
Many run Linux but that won't do you much good unless you find a hack to blow their DRM infested firmware out. No DRM, no ebooks from mainstream houses but the free stuff, tech docs and pirate stuff would still be good to go. Of course there isn't much point to hacking one anyway, they are slow and the screen refresh is bad enough to preclude any interactive app.
> This sounds to me like a great example of passing the buck.
Great example of an ATTEMPT to pass the buck. Remember Itanic tried something similar, passing the buck to the compiler. When the new miracle 'smart' compilers didn't appear Itanic's fortunes faded away. Now few people even know Intel makes a non-x86 arch chip other than low end ARM stuff.
Multi-core shows no sign of having a similar fate yet. Because two or even four cores can speed up existing workloads enough people see the benefit. The question still waiting to be answered is whether 8-16 cores can be utilized. If the software devels fail to produce the required miracle.... well our industry is in for a world of pain. Because it is now clear massive multicore is the ONLY way forward for x86 and the market has demonstrated again and again it isn't interested in anything else. But if performance stops increasing the upgrade treadmill that generates all of the money stops.
> From a more practical demonstration point of view, if there was a backdoor, governments
> would not need to get warrants for inserting hardware keyloggers or custom malware on
> systems to access system information. Governments both in the US and elsewhere do this,
> which suggests that no backdoor is available.
You made a fairly convincing argument until you spouted this idiocy. It is so error filled I'm uncertain where to begin the disection but since I must pick one....
1. A backdoor gives no LEGAL right to collect information from a system thus anything obtained in such a manner would be inadmissable. A court approved keylogger, etc. yields admissable evidence.
2. The existance of such a backdoor, if it existed, would be one of the US government's most treasured secrets, not to be squandered collecting inadmissable evidence on some petty crimelord or terrorist. I doubt it would be considered 'worth it' to bag UBL and his top ten minions. It probably wouldn't be worth giving up (and enduring the shitstorm from the Kostards) to prevent another 9/11 scale attack.
Here one should reflect on history to see how such a resource would be used, and examine the rules that governed actionable intelligence gathered via Ultra. Unless a plausible alternative method can be shown where a piece of intelligence COULD have been obtained (even if they had to use other Ultra derived info to fake things) such that the enemy would not conclude that a break in Enigma was the ONLY way the allies could have known a fact, then it could not be used. England was willing to allow an entire city to be firebombed to preserve the Ultra Secret.
3. Just because the NSA doesn't make public use of things pulled from the ultimate backdoor doesn't mean they aren't using it or wouldn't use it in some future crisis. And it doesn't mean someone else might not discover it and instead of publishing, ferret out a way to themselves activate it. (unlikely given the nature of public key crypto)
Personally I'd like it if we someday learned the NSA had such a backdoor since it would prove they still knew how to 'spy hard' but sadly I doubt they have the chops for that sort of caper anymore, content instead to just sit in their lair and listen to signals.
> The funniest thing about the whole situation is that if Microsoft just shut up and added
> ODF support to Office, they could turn around and say, "Buy your Office 2008 licenses!
> It's got ODF support, you NEED ODF support!".
And kill the revenue stream forver. That is why you post on slashdot and Balmer buys legislatures with his ill gotten gains. The whole point of all Microsoft products isn't to just be sold once per customer, but to be sold over and over, preferrrably as a regularized revenue stream/subscription. A single sale, regardless of how large only helps the quarter the sale is booked in, a continuing stream keeps the money flowing for decades.
The major driver for upgrades is interoperability so a standard, even one controlled by Microsoft itself, is a death sentence. Only by continually breaking backward compatibility can they force what would otherwise be products upgraded at most every five-ten years into a regular hassle that users endure because they must.
> the rest of us, who use more decent tools, can just snicker.
I take it you are a code monkey developing mainstream apps, most of the more evolved ones are emacs folks. But admins and embedded folks are often working in diverse environments, many of which don't have emacs but any *NIX type environment will have vi. Busybox implements a vi clone. I seriously doubt you will find emacs on very many routers, access points, settop boxes, cell phones, etc.
Since I use so many different machines it just makes sense to default to vi/vim and stick to assuming only the default behaviour. Emacs only makes sense if you mostly use a single home directory where you can have emacs customized.
> To me, the inability to function as a printer and the utter incompetence on displaying PDFs renders both the Kindle
> and Sony's offerings more or less useless.
Two factors prevent this in the current generation. The e-ink screens are SLOW. Not lcd slow, but hundreds of milliseconds slow. Panning and scrolling around a PDF would be a nightmare and the current generation is orders of magnitude to low in both the resolution and size departments to present an 8.5x11" page in a readable form.
Then there is the total lack of CPU power that dealing with PDF needs for a good user experience. The Kindle is essentially a cell phone (and not a smartphone with a fast CPU) with an oversized epaper display and a keyboard. Most of the other e-book readers currently offered are underpowered as well and for the same reason, battery life and form factor. In the small thin form factor there isn't much room for a battery and to get long life they depend on a slow energy effecient CPU that can be powered off almost all the time.
Give Moore's Law some time and we will see exactly what you describe appear. And it will totally RULE.
> ...it is not hard to argue that each was trying to take over the other.
And I'm sure if our Founding Fathers had possessed the ability to inflict damage on the British Isles they would have done so, in the (correct) belief that it would have hastened the end of the war. Likewise once War was joined the CSA did indeed attack enemy targets outside it's own borders. Intent is important however.
History records that General Lee did indeed contemplate sacking Washington DC as a means of forcing the Union to come to terms. He decided against that plan for military reasons (thinking it was an ambush) but had the plan been implemented and successful history records no desire on the part of the general or anyone of note in the Confederacy of any intention of retaining Washington or any other Union territory.
Hence my asstertion that it was NOT a Civil War, defined by all posters in this subthread as two or more factions seeking to control a single nation-state, but was instead a War of Independence. Union apologists generally can't bring themselves to admit this even today because it casts the Union, Lincoln, etc. in a very bad light but reality is what IS not what we wish were so.
> He has more individual donors than any other candidate in the race, Republican or Democrat.
I don't seem to recall Mr. Dean's incredible support among the nutroots propelling him into the White House. Likewise I tend to doubt the Ronulans will do more than queer the race in some open primaty states in the same way McCain did in 2000. None (McCain and Paul for the Repubs, Dean for the Dems) are candidates normal party voters would vote for but attract plenty of crossover votes, nutballs, and diehards who will donate and spam online polls. Dennis Kucinich's supporters were spamming online polls almost as badly until most simply dropped him to stop it. Many had also dropped Paul until he rose enough in real polling some have added him back, whereupon the Ronulans instantly spammed em.
If anybody actually cared to research it, I'd expect you would find large numbers of registered Democrats donating to Paul just because they raealize how much mischief he will cause with a few million dollars to spend on TV ads.
> And to avoid be labeled a civil war, simply declare a portion of the country "independant"?
By your 'logic' the War in 1776 was also a Civil War. The difference is pretty obvious to anyone with a functioning brain and a basic understanding of the English language.
The US, an internationally recognized territory of the British Empire, wanted to be free of the Crown, thus making it a War of Independence. The CSA quit the Union, wishing to be recognized as an independent nation in exactly the same way as their forefathers had sent their Declaration of Independence to King George. The Union objected pretty much the same as King George did and for much the same reason (fear of losing a critical revenue stream, the North was very dependent on taxing Southern exports mixed with pride) and a War for Southern Independence was fought. The Union won, obviously and thus wrote the official histories.
Had it actually been a Civil War the CSA would have been trying to conquer the Union and thus win the right (through contest at arms) to control the whole of the United States and impose it's views.
> you sir are a fucking moron.
And thee are a foul mouthed twerp that needs to grow up and learn how adults discourse in public.
> It's no secret that a lot of Republicans are livid about his candidacy and don't like being associated
> with him, and therefore would be glad to tarnish him, even if he has no chance of winning.
Of course not. Which is kinda beside the point. Of course Ron Paul isn't going to get the nomination and wouldn't win the general if it somehow did. I know that, you know that and Ron Paul knows that. Just like Ross Perot knew he wasn't going to be POTUS in 1992 but he DID get to determine the outcome of the election. Perot hated Bush Sr. with a white hot passion and was ensuring "Not Bush" won that election. Don't think he cared one way or the other about Mr. Clinton, just that he wasn't Bush was good enough for him. It was pretty obvious he only went through the motions again in '96 because he was guilt tripped over getting so many ignorant but honest folk worked up over him.
Many Republicans (rightly) fear Paul has much the same motivation, to influence the nomination process with his unwinnable campaign. Especially now that he has real money to throw around. Expect him to create MUCH mischief in NH, I'd be shocked if he DOESN'T end up in double digits there, especially if Mrs. Clinton puts BHO away in IA all of the nutballs will be crossing over to vote for Paul, pretty much ending McCain's candidacy at a minimum. Maximum damage Paul could cause? Unknown, which is why the fear and loathing in the Republican ranks. There are a lot of open primary states and Paul will probably do well in all of them if Hillary seals the deal early.
Of course I don't have a problem with that, since McCain is a bigger menace to the Republic than Paul as far as I'm concerned. What part of "Congress shall make no law..." is Mr. McCain having problems with?
> if MS is willing to subsidize the extra cost associated with the upgraded design and will
> give the "shrunken" Windows XP to the project for free as an optional choice for those who wish to use it
Nope, wrong attitude. OLPC isn't just giving out hardware, they are trying to provide an end to end solution. Just getting XP to boot does nothing. If Microsoft wants to order large lots with additional flash they should be offered the opportunity.... provided THEY intend to provide an operating system, applications, the Microsoft based server infrastructure to support the mesh networking (from Windows clients) back end data store, Internet connectivity, securing the laptops from malware and theft, etc. I.e. the total solution OLPC is offering.
But since OLPC has already expended countless hours of both paid and contributed labor designing the current system and since just an offer of XP (even if offered for $0) adds zero functionality and would require a total redesign of both the hardware, software and infrastructure it would be pointless for OLPC to consider switching at this late stage.
> It's bad law and the bum's rush it got implies somebody paid the Democratic and Republican
> leaderships some serious money to pass it quickly.
Ding! Givethis guy a cookie!
Follow the money, it never fails. Who wins and who loses with this bill?
For fee wireless hotspot providers are currently going the way of the dodo because every small coffeeshop and public library, hotel, etc. figured out it was far easier to just buy a net connection and a $50 linky and quit worrying about trying to nickle and dime their customers. Yes a few will abuse the free net connection but they cost they impose is dwarfed by the expense and hassle fo offering the for pay systems.
But the for pay systems imply they have bug infrastructure behind them, i.e. they CAN monitor and comply with this law, they can just jack their prices if needed.... once they make free, open access points a legal minefield.
Not if you happen to be a libertarian. Enlightened self interest is the ONLY pure motivation. Not that most corporations actually ACT in their enlightened self interest of course... :(
btw, The only reason I'm not a "Ronulan" is because he is an idiotarian libertarian. (See ESR's Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto for details.)
> ...as I actually find myself cheering for the evil WalMart empire who doesn't seem so evil at the moment.
Sounds like you just took your first step into the real world. Walmart isn't evil. Walmart isn't good either. Just like almost every other publicly traded corporation they simply ARE. They exist to produce returns for their shareholders in the form of increasing stock valuations and/or dividends. They will do whatever it takes to accomplish the goal because if they fail the shareholders will punish the executives.
In this case Walmart needs to grow their digital music business since they know CD sales will only shrink from here. Not only does the iPod account for the majority of the installed base of portable music players, Walmart itself gives the damned things the best placement in their stores. This couldn't continue. They had a few choices. Dump the iPod and throw their full weight behind a second tier product line such as the Sandisk Sansa. (Remember that MS's Zune is just as closed to Walmart since it doesn't do Plays for Sure) Second option would have been to use their clout to force Apple to support a DRMed format they could sell. Not even Walmart can force His Steveness and both sides probably understand that. That left forcing the music industry to abandon DRM. They are many and easy to play against each other, especially with every other online store as ready allies because DRM ensures they all remain also rans behind the iTunes store and the Zune Store. See Amazon.
See? Totally explainable without any conspiracy theories or battles between Good and Evil.
> Those books are still copyrighted, the publisher won't sell you a copy, yet they
> want to deny everyone access to it.
They have to follow the law so I forgive them on books under copyright. But they don't appear to even want to make it easy to access complete copies of books that are out of copyright. You can write them and ask for a full copy of a book. Bah. And no easy way to mirror the site (even just the out of copyright material) either.
Our library already hosts a Project Guttenberg mirror. Doing some back of the envelope math says we would need to bulk up the RAID somewhat more to even take the public domain english content from this project since it is all TIFFs but it would be something we would consider if it were easy (rsync) and the content were in a form that would actually be, ya know, USEFUL!
> If you have problems getting pdfs to print, there is something seriously wrong.
Bah, perhaps you have few problems getting vanilla PDFs to print from Windows. Try it from Linux. Acroread is a turd! xpdf opens almost every pdf we throw at it but since patrons expect acroread we keep it as the default in the patron lab. If (and I say IF) it is no certainty that it will print it. Ok, we aren't using HP printers anymore, and our Oki is not using an Adobe Postscript implemenation but we don't have many general postscript issues, just Acroread problems. And toss the same file over to xpdf and it prints.
Even better, our library automation vendor recommends against using acroread to print labels because it always screws up the sizing. Again, xpdf works every time.
And as for these ads, if xpdf renders them you can bet it won't be a week before somebody has a patch to nip it in the bud.
Adobe is just so yesterday.
> Unless its porn. Porn works better as video than text.
:)
For us guys your statement holds. However the huge 'romance' novel industry argues that for most women text porn is preferred over visual. Whatever. Wonder if Bezos has made sure to have lots of that sort of stuff ready to sell on the Kindle.
(And no, with eight gray levels and 800x600 resolution forget jpeg/gif.)
> Aren't you guys missing the point of the device, which is the E-Ink display?
No, most aren't. It ain't 'all that.' It uses the exact same display (according to the website of the vendor) as the Sony e-book reader and I have seen one of those. Is it paper? No. It looks more like paper under glass, which of course it is. The 'ink' is about as black as real ink but the paper isn't nearly as white as the cheapo office depot house brand crap you run read once and toss stuff on. Resolution is crap, so to get a clear display you jack up the font until it looks like a large print edition. Of course that means more frequent page flips that only makes the horrible slow screen refresh that includes a all dark all white sequence even more annoying.
I can tell you what the Kindle is. It is a cell phone blown up in size to hold a big epaper display. Go look at the specs and tell me different. What makes it expensive is covering the wireless charges as an upfront fully paid up annuity instead of a monthly contract. Which I don't really fault Amazon for since trying to sell it as a monthly subscription would have almost certainly been fatal.
In quantity (such as Amazon is ordering in) the BOM can't be much more than $100. The only relative unknown is the e-ink screen's cost in 10K lots but if it were $50 it would make more sense to use something else. (non-backlit LCD for example, such as the OLPC's daylight mode)
Perhaps this might explain that:
http://www.e-ink.com/products/customers_type.html
> Crack it.
:)
Why? It is a joke. The BOM on the thing would run you less than $200 quantity one and I seriously doubt Amazon paid $100. Most of the sticker price is an all up front subscription to their cellular based wireless network that probably isn't even available out here in flyover country where I live. So if yuu don't value the handcuffs to the Amazon Store that why would you bother buying one just to hack it?
No, we need to design our own. There ain't squat in one hardware wise. No wireless (eats battery like crazy) and two SD slots (for easy copy action!) along with the ability to read PDF files. But first e-paper tech needs to finish developing. Current incarnations lack the resolution of a cheap laser printer, to say nothing of commercial printing and the screen refresh speeds blow goats. And color would really be helpful along with a touchscreen UI.
But like all things tech these issues will be solved after enough early adopters with big wallets and small brains spend insane amounts of cash on not ready for prime time hardware that won't even be compatible with whatever ends up becoming the standard. Then I'll buy one.
> This story is contrived to fit that "agenda."
While I'd bet that the editors had that in mind and even better odds Fujitsu is milking that angle the issue of standby power waste is a real one that has only been growing worse in recent years. Combine with general shortages in fuel sources (especially if you don't like the idea of giving our enemies in the GWOT Sagan's of dollars to fund terrorists with) and a stressed out distribution grid and there are real reasons to think ideas like this one have merit.
> What the fuck is going on with this human-caused global warming bullshit.
Notice how the founder of the Weather Channel comes out saying human caused GW is a hoax and gets (so far Drudge is the biggest site to carry it) zero mainstream coverage. So ya I'm with you on that but don't let it blind you to actual useful stuff.
> why can't people just be disciplined enough to switch off their monitors before leaving for home/office?
Go ahead, push the button on the front if it makes you feel 'green' or something. But other than the LED on the front going off instead of blinking and/or changing colors you ain't done a goddamned thing. It is still wasting almost (less the couple of milliwatts for the LED) exactly as much power as if you hadn't pushed the button. Because the button on the front is just a 'soft button' on almost every LCD panel. Mine has a real switch on the back that will discontinue all power... and is useful to reboot the retarded thing when it's CPU locks up.
It does help to know something about the problem before spouting off answers.
Ok, you are rational enough to be worth a followup post. Apology in advance, I just looked at a preview and this one is long. I got on a roll. :)
> If you're not a prisoner in a criminal case with rights afforded by the criminal
> justice system, and you're not a prisoner of war, then what are you, exactly?
Well we can look to the Geneva Conventions themselves for some of the answer. Combatants out of uniform, hiding behind civilian populations, etc. are mentioned. And what it has to say about an 'unlawful combatant' ain't pretty. Basically we could just line em up and shoot em on sight and be 100% in compliance. Read some history of the French Resistance for an example as they are a fairly close case except that they were careful to target military/political targets. The Germans shot em and nobody uttered a peep about the Geneva Conventions because it was kosher. For all their other sins the German Army considered itself to be professional and 'civilized', certain notorious units obviously excepted, thus they generally adhered to the Geneva Conventions[1]. We should be doing likewise in Iraq and Afganistan. In this case I doubt prompt public executions would discourage them very much but it certainly couldn't hurt.
In a nutshell the original Geneva Conventions were designed to define the conduct of war between Great Powers using ranked formations of conscript soldiers. Later additions (some of which the US didn't sign onto) are mostly Cold War relics where the Soviets were making it easier for their proxy states and revolutionaries to win by conning Western Civilization into fighting with one hand tied behind it's back.
None of which is applicable to the current GWOT being fought with no massed armies and one side without even a proxy nation state to sign the GC even if they believed all that 'touchy feelly crap that just illustrates how weak and spinless the West is' was something they wanted to be a part of. But notice that Taliban soldiers in uniform did get GC protection. We didn't get bogged down with rule book lawyer questions as to whether the Taliban were the lawful descendent of the previous soviet puppet state that had signed, they were recognizable soldiers so we extended them the protection of the GC.
Terrorists hiding in civilian populations and as often as not attacking those same civilians deserve no protection. Catch em, give some minimal justice where needed to try to make sure the Mohammad you caught really is the same Mohammad that blew up a marketplace last week and then shoot the bastard.
For all that most of the action is taking place away from the TV cameras this IS a total war because they won't stop until we kill em or they cut our heads off. Longer term we have to change the conditions that breed this brand of nutter but GWB's drain the swamp and plant democracy theory certainly hasn't been working out all that well.
So we try, try again until we find a way that works since failure isn't an option. I'm an agnostic so I'll get my head cut off right behind the queers and athiests.... assuming I don't go out shooting earlier.
> Yes, it can be debated that there's a legal distinction between me as a US
> citizen sitting at my desk and a farmer in Afghanistan with respect to the
> provision of rights under US law.
No it can't be debated because it is obvious to any sane persion that there is a night and day difference. The expectations a Free People have regarding their relationship with their own government can and indeed must be vastly different from that governments's obligation to enemies taken on the field of combat. Even if taken inside the camp of an enemy a known US citizen (John Walker Lindh for example) has the expectation of certain rights. Inalienable Rights.
Just like there is a world of difference between law enforcement and intelligence. Rules that apply in the context of criminal investigations of citizens have almost to resemblence to how the law of the