My modems don't work on either computer in Linux mode.
You do not own any modems, then. All modems work with Linux, as long as they support standard RS-232 serial connections and (for most apps) the Hayes command set.
A WinModem is not a modem.
(I'm not quite sure whether I'm willing to consider an "internal modem" a modem, either. Internal modems are just yucky.)
I've been meaning, for a long time, to sit down, disembowel Omega, and write a bug-free clone. Care to help?
Actually, Omega is now under the maintainership of William Tanksley. Unfortunately, William hasn't released a stable version yet, and he doesn't have a permanent Omega web site yet.
As well, porno's are indeed the movies you watch over and over and over and over again.
There's at least one other genre with that characteristic: children's titles. Every seen a three-year-old watch his (or her) favorite movie? For the hundredth time?
lokisoft just leads to a teaser page, with a broken link on it (connection refused), but www.lokigames.com seems to be working now.
Re:On a somewhat debian related note.
on
Debian Freezing
·
· Score: 1
Asking for highly specific technical advice in the middle of a thread on slashdot is likely a waste of time. And technically it is somewhat off-topic.
If you think the gdm package has a bug, go ahead and file a bug report.
If you think you may need some help, or don't fully understand why gdm is doing what it's doing, then you should probably try asking on the debian-user mailing list.
(I don't use gdm, so I can't answer any questions about it.)
If dpkg can't purge a package you've got installed, typically this is because either
It is a dependency for some other package, or
Your package database is in an inconsistent state, usually because an installation didn't finish successfully (which is extremely rare unless you're running unstable, in which case it's quite common)
In any event, there's really nothing we can do without at least seeing the error message you're getting.
However, rather than posting the errors here, I recommend asking on debian-user.
The problem with/. moderation (as I currently see it) is the use-it-or-lose-it problem.
I had moderator points yesterday, but I didn't have much time for reading articles. So I used 1 point (well spent, I think). Today, when I'm at "work" and have lots of time for reading, I don't have moderator points. They must have expired.
On those rare occasions when I have points, I always feel like I have to find something, anything to use them on, quickly -- lest the points suddenly vanish, unused. Like they did today.
Moderator points should not expire! If I still have points left when I'm randomly chosen for getting points, then don't give me more (I don't need to stockpile hundreds of them) -- but dammit, at least give me enough time to use them wisely!
I think that there will always continue to be two broad categories of information services -- information which is sold, and information which is shared freely.
Commercial institutions (companies) rarely want answers. What they want is the ability to shift blame from themselves to someone else. So they'll prefer to pay for "safe" answers which come with some sort of guarantee of correctness (or at least a perceived guarantee of correctness -- e.g., advice from IBM about RS/6000 hardware is going to be taken as gospel even if it comes from the sales department).
And yeah, I thought of Snow Crash too.
But most of the people reading this forum, I think, are going to fit more comfortably in the other category -- those of us who share information freely. I like helping people with Unix/Linux questions -- I do so on Usenet, mailing lists and IRC (depending on mood). I don't want to get paid for this; it would feel too much like prostitution.
So, no, I don't think that formalized, subscription-based information services are going to take over any time soon. They may rise in popularity as commercial interests become more network-savvy, but I still think that traditional sharing is going to be the major source of most technical information.
(For the purposes of this article, I'm ignoring formal education and books.)
Please provide PROOF of where the 'rip off' artists don't 'share back'. Not rumors, but actual proof.
If you have access to a commercial version of Unix, just look around. For example, in AIX, install something with smit. What you'll see is hundreds of copies of the words "the Regents of the University of California". IBM was one of many, many versions of commercial Unix that used BSD code.
(I wouldn't call this a "rip off", though. The BSD code base was, as far as I can tell, intended to be used this way.)
The GPL "freedom" is like saying "sure, you're free as long as you do things exactly like we want you to."
That's unfair. The GPL simply says "we want this software to remain free, so we must ask you not to restrict other people's freedoms by making it proprietary".
people should be free to extend with other free and/or open source software, with slightly modified licenses like Qt, as shareware, or as full-blown commercial software. That would be a truly free license.
This is the only significant difference between the GPL and the BSD-derived licenses. Companies are free to use BSD source code in their proprietary products, but not GPL source code.
The GPL is designed to make sure programs stay free forever (but can't be used to make proprietary programs). The BSD licenses are designed to make sure code gets used (at least once). Different people have different opinions about which of these two goals is more noble -- that's why we have both of these licenses (and all of the new ones).
It seems to me that freedom would imply choices... "Requiring" something does not imply freedome.
There is much wisdom in this, but a distinction has to be made between the public and private sectors.
Requiring citizens to "choose" free software would, as you state, be an abhorrent abuse of power. However, requiring the government to use free software (or at least to give it proper consideration) is not the same thing.
The government has -- and should have -- restrictions upon it which are greater than the restrictions on citizens and corporations. It is only lately (since World Wars I and II and the Great Depression) that the US Government has had so much power, and caused so much harm to its own people.
So, is this to mean that the kiddies will have to get their parent's permission to sign up with Slashdot?
Sigh.... No, it does not. Didn't you read the text that michael wrote up at the top?
if you aren't commercial, or don't target yourself to children (even if you collect personal information from people) or just don't collect personal data from the kids, you aren't affected.
So Slashdot is out of the picture for two different reasons -- they're not commercial, and they don't target children.
People, please, read the article before asking questions about it!
Does anyone have the text of the actual act,
The link that michael provided ends with .pdf so I guess the strict answer is, no, nobody has the text. It's only available in the accursed PDF format (may it rot in hell).
How does this restrict a company from having an EULA like MS in that you cannot view this webpage unless you allow us to collect information on you.
The article includes this statement:
The notice also must state that the operator is prohibited from conditioning a child's participation in an activity on the child's disclosing more personal information than is reasonably necessary.
For a piece of legislation that was actually produced by a US government agency, this is actually extremely well-thought-out and realistic. I'm quite impressed.
obviously you dont know how elections work. Its the electoral college that matters.
The electoral college only applies to the election of the president. It doesn't apply to Congressional ballots. (And of course, Supreme Court justices, which are appointed.)
The president (executive branch of government) is only one of three branches of government -- the Congress arguably holds more power.
But do you know where the real power lies? It's in the ballots themselves. How many times do you recall a write-in candidate being elected? You have to be on the ballot to win -- and you're only going to get on the ballot if you pass through several layers of filtering. So in the end, most elections in this country end up as a choice between Candidate A and Candidate B, where A and B are so similar there's not much point to selecting either of them.
I managed to upgrade a Red Hat 4.2 installation to glibc 2.1 and kernel 2.2.12, by downloading and maually installing packages.
But as far as I can tell it is a completely undocumented procedure.
There's no way I could have been able to do it if I didn't already have a few years of Linux/Unix experience. I had to make educated guesses as to which packages to upgrade first, when to use --force, and so on. I could've shot myself in the foot easily -- and if I were still a Linux newbie, I probably would have.
For anyone who knows their way around Unix at all, Debian is clearly superior.
Quantum theory talks about numerous probability waves, all of which overlap. When you describe an object in QM, you describe ALL possible behaviours and outomes. However, when you perform an observation, only one of those is ever observed.
This is untrue. It also shows an incomplete understanding of quantum mechanics. (My understanding isn't complete either....)
Go back to the famous double-slit experiment. If you have an opaque barrier with two slits in it, and you shine a beam of light (stream of photons) at the barrier, you get an interference pattern. That is to say, the photons act like waves -- starting at the exit points of the slits, they propagate outward. When the waves intersect, the result is the sum of the amplitudes (which are signed, remember) -- the waves may reinforce each other or cancel each other out, in a periodic pattern.
But what happens when you emit a single photon at the opaque barrier? Newtonian physics would have you believe that the photon will go through one of the slits and then continue onward. But this isn't what happens -- instead, you still get an interference pattern! The single photon acts as though it were just a very short stream of photons. Or in other words, the single photon goes through both slits and interferes with itself.
But in addition to this, we can see that observation plays a key role in the outcome of the experiment. Now this is where it gets interesting (to me). If you place a sensor at one of the slits, which is capable of determining whether the photon is going through that slit, then the outcome of the experiment changes. With a sensor on either of the slits, when you send a single photon at the barrier, you don't get an interference pattern any more. The act of observation influences the behavior of the particle which is observed. When the sensor is in place, the photon stops acting like a quantum mechanical wave, and instead acts like a solid object, either going through the first (monitored) slit, or going through the second slit, at random.
I never understood the concerns over "Internet wiretapping". Every packet you send over the Internet goes through an unpredictable path to its destination. And everyone knows this. That's why everything that's critical should be encrypted.
So why is government "wiretapping" (call it what it is: packet sniffing) such a big deal? Twelve year old script kiddies already do this all the time.
They say that they are the "best selling". Perhaps that's true. But so what?
That doesn't even mean they're the most popular. All of the good Linux distributions are free software, which means that we're free to share them with our friends. Around here, a lot of people burn Red Hat CD-ROMs for each other. (Well, OK, not a lot of people, but enough that I thought it worthy of mention.) On the other hand, I use Debian, and while I have purchased Debian CD-ROMs (makes bootstrapping faster), usually I download from the unstable release.
So, in at least two cases, there are major Linux distributions in use where sales aren't being made. This is basically the same problem that the Linux counter project(s) have tried to address -- since Linux can be freely redistributed without accountability to the programmers, there's no real way to know how many people are using Linux, or what distribution(s) they're using.
And more to the point, most of us here are not strongly commercial. I don't care that AOL is the best-selling ISP in this country; I use a local ISP because they offer me real (albeit slow) connectivity to the Internet, whereas AOL... doesn't. I don't think AOL is a better ISP just because they're richer. And likewise, I don't think Mandrake is a better distribution just because it's selling.
I run Debian/potato, too. And for me, Netscape gives me a bus error when it's doing absolutely nothing at all. I even conscientiously whack the ESC key several times whenever some thrice-damned animated GIF starts moving around... but all to no avail. All of a sudden, at random, for no reason, and with no pattern -- when I'm not even looking at the damned thing (it's on a different virtual desktop) -- BOOM!, no more Netscape, and a Bus error in my.xsession-errors file.
And you can't try to convince me it's a glibc 2.1 issue. Look again, really hard:
The Debian/potato Netscape switched back to libc5 in version 4.61-11. The maintainer claims that this is less unstable than the libc6 versions, because they were built for glibc 2.0 instead of 2.1. Maybe he's right; I don't know. But the libc5 version is pretty pathetic.
But with no static IP address, how can you reasonably run a web server or a mail server? (Yeah, I know about some of the dyn-DNS services. But unless I'm seriously misinterpreting the current state of the art here, they suck...?)
Plus, there's just something wrong about having to violate the terms of service in order to get fair use out of something I've paid for. I can run IP masq with my dial-up line right now -- why does Adelphia think that I should give that up just to use their cable modem? Just because the rules aren't enforced doesn't really make me feel secure -- they could start enforcing at any time.
(And in my area, Adelphia's cable service has not been stellar. I've seen more outages than I thought were reasonable, especially the short ones that aren't during any sort of inclement weather. It could be worse, but they're not on par with the local phone company when it comes to uptime.)
It's never an argument about the technology, always about the providers
The technology is not relevant to the consumer -- only to the implementer. As an implementer yourself, your perspective is different from that of the consumer, and you're not seeing the same issues that we're seeing.
In my area, DSL is out of my budget ($100 per month for 128kbit, to $500 per month(!!) for 768kbit). And Adelphia hasn't quite got around to offering their PowerLink service in my area -- but from a quick glance at their FAQ I don't want these people anywhere near my computers when they're ready. (Yes, that's computers you evil bastards.)
Slashdot Mirror
My modems don't work on either computer in Linux mode.
You do not own any modems, then. All modems work with Linux, as long as they support standard RS-232 serial connections and (for most apps) the Hayes command set.
A WinModem is not a modem.
(I'm not quite sure whether I'm willing to consider an "internal modem" a modem, either. Internal modems are just yucky.)
I've been meaning, for a long time, to sit down, disembowel Omega, and write a bug-free clone. Care to help?
Actually, Omega is now under the maintainership of William Tanksley. Unfortunately, William hasn't released a stable version yet, and he doesn't have a permanent Omega web site yet.
You can visit the official Omega site, though. Or check the rec.games.roguelike.misc newsgroup.
I know that William sometimes reads /., so maybe he can give us some updates....
As well, porno's are indeed the movies you watch over and over and over and over again.
There's at least one other genre with that characteristic: children's titles. Every seen a three-year-old watch his (or her) favorite movie? For the hundredth time?
Your comments reminded me of Eben Moglen's excellent essay Anarchism Triumphant. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it.
lokisoft just leads to a teaser page, with a broken link on it (connection refused), but www.lokigames.com seems to be working now.
Asking for highly specific technical advice in the middle of a thread on slashdot is likely a waste of time. And technically it is somewhat off-topic.
If you think the gdm package has a bug, go ahead and file a bug report.
If you think you may need some help, or don't fully understand why gdm is doing what it's doing, then you should probably try asking on the debian-user mailing list.
(I don't use gdm, so I can't answer any questions about it.)
If dpkg can't purge a package you've got installed, typically this is because either
In any event, there's really nothing we can do without at least seeing the error message you're getting.
However, rather than posting the errors here, I recommend asking on debian-user.
An advantage you might get out of using C++ is that tight loops may compile down into much faster code than you would get with Perl.
Most of the CGI programs that I've written don't even have loops.
The problem with /. moderation (as I currently see it) is the use-it-or-lose-it problem.
I had moderator points yesterday, but I didn't have much time for reading articles. So I used 1 point (well spent, I think). Today, when I'm at "work" and have lots of time for reading, I don't have moderator points. They must have expired.
On those rare occasions when I have points, I always feel like I have to find something, anything to use them on, quickly -- lest the points suddenly vanish, unused. Like they did today.
Moderator points should not expire! If I still have points left when I'm randomly chosen for getting points, then don't give me more (I don't need to stockpile hundreds of them) -- but dammit, at least give me enough time to use them wisely!
New /. moderation slogan: "speed kills".
login: cyberphunks
It's cipherpunks .
I think that there will always continue to be two broad categories of information services -- information which is sold, and information which is shared freely.
Commercial institutions (companies) rarely want answers. What they want is the ability to shift blame from themselves to someone else. So they'll prefer to pay for "safe" answers which come with some sort of guarantee of correctness (or at least a perceived guarantee of correctness -- e.g., advice from IBM about RS/6000 hardware is going to be taken as gospel even if it comes from the sales department).
And yeah, I thought of Snow Crash too.
But most of the people reading this forum, I think, are going to fit more comfortably in the other category -- those of us who share information freely. I like helping people with Unix/Linux questions -- I do so on Usenet, mailing lists and IRC (depending on mood). I don't want to get paid for this; it would feel too much like prostitution.
So, no, I don't think that formalized, subscription-based information services are going to take over any time soon. They may rise in popularity as commercial interests become more network-savvy, but I still think that traditional sharing is going to be the major source of most technical information.
(For the purposes of this article, I'm ignoring formal education and books.)
You'll have to share with my wife, too. Hers (and her twin brother's) is December 28.
:-)
Won't say what year!
Please provide PROOF of where the 'rip off' artists don't 'share back'. Not rumors, but actual proof.
If you have access to a commercial version of Unix, just look around. For example, in AIX, install something with smit. What you'll see is hundreds of copies of the words "the Regents of the University of California". IBM was one of many, many versions of commercial Unix that used BSD code.
(I wouldn't call this a "rip off", though. The BSD code base was, as far as I can tell, intended to be used this way.)
The GPL "freedom" is like saying "sure, you're free as long as you do things exactly like we want you to."
That's unfair. The GPL simply says "we want this software to remain free, so we must ask you not to restrict other people's freedoms by making it proprietary".
people should be free to extend with other free and/or open source software, with slightly modified licenses like Qt, as shareware, or as full-blown commercial software. That would be a truly free license.
This is the only significant difference between the GPL and the BSD-derived licenses. Companies are free to use BSD source code in their proprietary products, but not GPL source code.
The GPL is designed to make sure programs stay free forever (but can't be used to make proprietary programs). The BSD licenses are designed to make sure code gets used (at least once). Different people have different opinions about which of these two goals is more noble -- that's why we have both of these licenses (and all of the new ones).
It seems to me that freedom would imply choices... "Requiring" something does not imply freedome.
There is much wisdom in this, but a distinction has to be made between the public and private sectors.
Requiring citizens to "choose" free software would, as you state, be an abhorrent abuse of power. However, requiring the government to use free software (or at least to give it proper consideration) is not the same thing.
The government has -- and should have -- restrictions upon it which are greater than the restrictions on citizens and corporations. It is only lately (since World Wars I and II and the Great Depression) that the US Government has had so much power, and caused so much harm to its own people.
It's time to reverse this trend.
So, is this to mean that the kiddies will have to get their parent's permission to sign up with Slashdot?
Sigh.... No, it does not. Didn't you read the text that michael wrote up at the top?
So Slashdot is out of the picture for two different reasons -- they're not commercial, and they don't target children.
People, please, read the article before asking questions about it!
Does anyone have the text of the actual act,
The link that michael provided ends with .pdf so I guess the strict answer is, no, nobody has the text. It's only available in the accursed PDF format (may it rot in hell).
How does this restrict a company from having an EULA like MS in that you cannot view this webpage unless you allow us to collect information on you.
The article includes this statement:
For a piece of legislation that was actually produced by a US government agency, this is actually extremely well-thought-out and realistic. I'm quite impressed.
obviously you dont know how elections work. Its the electoral college that matters.
The electoral college only applies to the election of the president. It doesn't apply to Congressional ballots. (And of course, Supreme Court justices, which are appointed.)
The president (executive branch of government) is only one of three branches of government -- the Congress arguably holds more power.
But do you know where the real power lies? It's in the ballots themselves. How many times do you recall a write-in candidate being elected? You have to be on the ballot to win -- and you're only going to get on the ballot if you pass through several layers of filtering. So in the end, most elections in this country end up as a choice between Candidate A and Candidate B, where A and B are so similar there's not much point to selecting either of them.
(Sorry, topic drift detected... aborting....)
I managed to upgrade a Red Hat 4.2 installation to glibc 2.1 and kernel 2.2.12, by downloading and maually installing packages.
But as far as I can tell it is a completely undocumented procedure.
There's no way I could have been able to do it if I didn't already have a few years of Linux/Unix experience. I had to make educated guesses as to which packages to upgrade first, when to use --force, and so on. I could've shot myself in the foot easily -- and if I were still a Linux newbie, I probably would have.
For anyone who knows their way around Unix at all, Debian is clearly superior.
Quantum theory talks about numerous probability waves, all of which overlap. When you describe an object in QM, you describe ALL possible behaviours and outomes. However, when you perform an observation, only one of those is ever observed.
This is untrue. It also shows an incomplete understanding of quantum mechanics. (My understanding isn't complete either....)
Go back to the famous double-slit experiment. If you have an opaque barrier with two slits in it, and you shine a beam of light (stream of photons) at the barrier, you get an interference pattern. That is to say, the photons act like waves -- starting at the exit points of the slits, they propagate outward. When the waves intersect, the result is the sum of the amplitudes (which are signed, remember) -- the waves may reinforce each other or cancel each other out, in a periodic pattern.
But what happens when you emit a single photon at the opaque barrier? Newtonian physics would have you believe that the photon will go through one of the slits and then continue onward. But this isn't what happens -- instead, you still get an interference pattern! The single photon acts as though it were just a very short stream of photons. Or in other words, the single photon goes through both slits and interferes with itself.
But in addition to this, we can see that observation plays a key role in the outcome of the experiment. Now this is where it gets interesting (to me). If you place a sensor at one of the slits, which is capable of determining whether the photon is going through that slit, then the outcome of the experiment changes. With a sensor on either of the slits, when you send a single photon at the barrier, you don't get an interference pattern any more. The act of observation influences the behavior of the particle which is observed. When the sensor is in place, the photon stops acting like a quantum mechanical wave, and instead acts like a solid object, either going through the first (monitored) slit, or going through the second slit, at random.
I never understood the concerns over "Internet wiretapping". Every packet you send over the Internet goes through an unpredictable path to its destination. And everyone knows this. That's why everything that's critical should be encrypted.
So why is government "wiretapping" (call it what it is: packet sniffing) such a big deal? Twelve year old script kiddies already do this all the time.
They say that they are the "best selling". Perhaps that's true. But so what?
That doesn't even mean they're the most popular. All of the good Linux distributions are free software, which means that we're free to share them with our friends. Around here, a lot of people burn Red Hat CD-ROMs for each other. (Well, OK, not a lot of people, but enough that I thought it worthy of mention.) On the other hand, I use Debian, and while I have purchased Debian CD-ROMs (makes bootstrapping faster), usually I download from the unstable release.
So, in at least two cases, there are major Linux distributions in use where sales aren't being made. This is basically the same problem that the Linux counter project(s) have tried to address -- since Linux can be freely redistributed without accountability to the programmers, there's no real way to know how many people are using Linux, or what distribution(s) they're using.
And more to the point, most of us here are not strongly commercial. I don't care that AOL is the best-selling ISP in this country; I use a local ISP because they offer me real (albeit slow) connectivity to the Internet, whereas AOL... doesn't. I don't think AOL is a better ISP just because they're richer. And likewise, I don't think Mandrake is a better distribution just because it's selling.
I run Debian/potato, too. And for me, Netscape gives me a bus error when it's doing absolutely nothing at all. I even conscientiously whack the ESC key several times whenever some thrice-damned animated GIF starts moving around... but all to no avail. All of a sudden, at random, for no reason, and with no pattern -- when I'm not even looking at the damned thing (it's on a different virtual desktop) -- BOOM! , no more Netscape, and a Bus error in my .xsession-errors file.
And you can't try to convince me it's a glibc 2.1 issue. Look again, really hard:
jekyll:~$ lddThe Debian/potato Netscape switched back to libc5 in version 4.61-11. The maintainer claims that this is less unstable than the libc6 versions, because they were built for glibc 2.0 instead of 2.1. Maybe he's right; I don't know. But the libc5 version is pretty pathetic.
But with no static IP address, how can you reasonably run a web server or a mail server? (Yeah, I know about some of the dyn-DNS services. But unless I'm seriously misinterpreting the current state of the art here, they suck...?)
Plus, there's just something wrong about having to violate the terms of service in order to get fair use out of something I've paid for. I can run IP masq with my dial-up line right now -- why does Adelphia think that I should give that up just to use their cable modem? Just because the rules aren't enforced doesn't really make me feel secure -- they could start enforcing at any time.
(And in my area, Adelphia's cable service has not been stellar. I've seen more outages than I thought were reasonable, especially the short ones that aren't during any sort of inclement weather. It could be worse, but they're not on par with the local phone company when it comes to uptime.)
In my area, DSL is out of my budget ($100 per month for 128kbit, to $500 per month(!!) for 768kbit).
Slight correction: the $100 buys me 192 kbits/s, and the $500 (actually $505.95) gets me only 704 kbits/s.
lor.net DSL
It's never an argument about the technology, always about the providers
The technology is not relevant to the consumer -- only to the implementer. As an implementer yourself, your perspective is different from that of the consumer, and you're not seeing the same issues that we're seeing.
In my area, DSL is out of my budget ($100 per month for 128kbit, to $500 per month(!!) for 768kbit). And Adelphia hasn't quite got around to offering their PowerLink service in my area -- but from a quick glance at their FAQ I don't want these people anywhere near my computers when they're ready. (Yes, that's computers you evil bastards.)