MHz are a useful first-order approximation of performance, especially when comparing otherwise identical processors.
Performance ratings help no one but the marketers.
How did the military manage to get such a bad reputation in the private sector?
It's not fair to characterize the OP as representative of the private sector, considering that he's from a military family.
I think the officer ranks, which most people recognize from movies, still command respect.
A special skills draft, however, would likely land you at one of less familiar enlisted ranks, like specialist.
If I saw military experience on a resume, I would consider the candidate likely to be more mature and disciplined than your average college graduate.
As for work experience, I won't necessarily add points for knowing how to calculate a firing solution with a slide rule, but I certainly won't deduct any.
will nmap be removed / moved to non-free due to its exclusion of use by The SCO Group?
While I don't think Fyodor has made his case, he claims that SCO's public assault on the GPL constitutes a refusal to accept its terms, which is a prerequisite to enjoying its grants.
While I disagree with MySQL's decision to GPL the client libraries, I don't think it's a significant problem.
Libgda is LGPL, which is explicitly GPL compatible.
Maintain the GPLed MySQL backend separately (which is easy to do with libgda's modular back ends), so the user has the choice to build a GPLed libgda with MySQL support.
Incidentally, I agree with other posters that MySQL's FOSS exception is practically worthless, due to the aggregation clause.
I took a look at the Natural Language Toolkit for Python, which focuses primarily on statistical language processing.
For example, given a tagged training copora, you can build conditional frequency distributions that say "natural language" is usually followed by "processing."
I've wondered if this is easier or harder in a more heavily inflected language like Latin or Russian.
I would think a brute force approach would be complicated by the variety of endings, but that it would be easier to tag the parts of speech.
I've seen some posts on this topic stressing the "F" in IF, but the "I" is so much more important.
To that end, I'd like to define the story in terms of roles, which various NPCs will fill (the same character won't always be the bad guy, or the Judas, etc.).
To properly implement this, I need smarter NPCs that have personal agendas, can go off script a little (sort of like a customized Eliza), and can make basic inferences.
NPCs should talk behind the player's back and form opinions of each other and the player.
Trust, in particular, would weigh heavily.
Two games that do part of this are Siboot and The Sims.
Siboot, which I've never played, is described in Chris Crawford's On Game Design.
The Sims has the rudiments of a relationship model, but I would hide the NPC stats from the player.
If you insult an NPC, he may put on a happy face and exact his revenge at a later date.
the FSF should be able to build a licensing agreement that we can all live with
You may be interested to know that Trolltech seems to be letting the Q Public License die, in favor the GNU GPL.
The following is from the GPL Qt/Mac FAQ:
Q: Why isn't Qt/Mac released under QPL?
A: Fewer licenses make for easier understanding with the community and our customers.
Barring the annihilation of copyright, there will never be one license for everybody.
Copyleft has its place, but it's not for everyone.
I agree that it's a shame when a license that allows incorporation into proprietary software is not GPL compatible.
put the whole thing under a straightforward license instead of pussyfooting around the whole OSS issue
I don't know where you got the impression that Maya is, or will ever be, remotely open source.
It is thoroughly proprietary, right down to the FlexLM node locking.
Your choice of subject line certainly befits your handle.
Maya (along with LightWave) has dropped in price tremendously, bringing industrial strength software within the reach of so-called prosumers.
At the very low end, Maya PLE appeals to the aspiring artist who would otherwise beg, borrow, or steal, in order to put Maya on his resume.
Bruce retreated into the, 'but Qt isn't free' argument
When has he ever said Qt isn't free?
There were some ruffled feathers over the QPL and the "Open Patch" definition.
Richard Stallman sent a baffling message about "forgiving" KDE.
Otherwise, Qt/X11 has been as free as it ever will be since its GPL release in 2000.
Bruce doesn't like it that you can't use Qt in proprietary applications without paying Trolltech.
(After all, why should he be a Trolltech salesman?)
Richard Stallman isn't thrilled that you can use Qt in proprietary applications at all.
(See, also, Ghostscript.)
As an aside, I wonder whether Qt would ever qualify for the O/S exception of the GPL:
as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary
form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system
Microsoft argued that Internet Explorer is part of the operating system.
Why not Qt?
I daresay that SuSE Linux would suffer more from the removal of Qt than Windows would from the removal of IE.
If anyone successfully took advantage of this exception, I'd have a hard time seeing Trolltech continuing the GPL releases.
On the other hand, they may be beholden to the KDE Free Qt Foundation.
to exclude any piece of software would, at heart, be hypocritical
It should not be the responsibility of the distro to package every piece of software a user could conceivably want.
In fact, the more software a distro includes, the less confident I am that they can maintain it properly.
While a distro should include the libraries necessary to run KDE, GNOME, and Motif applications, it's fine for it to standardize on one desktop environment / window manager.
After all, one aspect of choice is choosing a distro in the first place.
While Groklaw's research in this matter is comendable, the comparatively recent allegation of purloined header files was never central to the dispute.
It started with RCU and JFS.
Most of the drama has been behind the scenes, as Novell has revealed how little of Unix SCO may actually own.
Indeed, Novell may be entitled to 95% of the money from Microsoft and Sun that has funded this suit thusfar.
The worst thing about these indemnification agreements is that they are conditioned on waiving the freedoms intrinsic to the software.
You can have your free software, but you're not free to modify it.
that product should be break the traditional distro paradigm of overwhelming choice
I would like to see more of the packaging responsibility shift from the Linux vendors to the application developers.
Given the variety of (and pace of development of) shipped applications, a distribution is out of date the day it ships.
The bulk of my recent experience is with Red Hat Linux 9 and SuSE Linux 8.2.
When I upgrade an application or library, my first strategy is to rebuild the vendor's source RPM with a new source tarball.
This has led to me learning more than I planned to about RPM, patch, diff, autoconf, automake, make, gcc, etc.
As a part-time developer, I should probably know this stuff, anyway, but it's far beyond the average user.
While most new applications work with Windows 98, there are few that I would venture to install on Red Hat Linux 5.2.
Somehow, that doesn't seem right.
Does it require ID3 tags to play and navigate directories of MP3s
The bundled software populates a database from ID3 tags in MP3s.
There is at least one freeware tool that will do the same for Ogg Vorbis files.
You can also navigate a folder hierarchy.
Give your customers crappy features like DRM, and they'll find a way to tel you they're not interested... like back-grading to your previous versions.
I took advantage of the Windows XP Pro downgrade rights to run Windows 2000:
PCs licensed for Windows XP Professional OEM are licensed to use identified previous versions of Windows Operating System Product(s) in lieu of Windows XP Professional (Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 or Microsoft Windows 98 (Second Edition).
I still think Windows 98 SE is preferable for games, but I don't miss it too much.
Dumping a live file system can result in bad backups.
Dump is best used on an unmounted file system.
It can also work well with snapshots or split mirrors.
can someone offer a nice comparison of ext3 versus XFS?
Ext3 can grow or shrink an unmounted file system.
XFS can grow a mounted file system.
Ext3 and XFS both have dump utilities, which many sys admins prefer for backup.
Ext3 supports three modes of journaling: writeback (risky metadata only), ordered (metadata only), and journal (all data).
I believe XFS is comparable to ordered ext3.
Ext3 has been widely deployed on Linux, and it trivially reverts to ext2.
The XFS design is mature, but its implementation on Linux is less proven.
Keep an eye on Techbargains. I've seen a couple of $25 off $250 coupons for the Apple Store, which also has free shipping and iPod engraving, for a limited time.
If you're stingy and patient, there may be a 10% sale after Christmas, as there was after Thanksgiving.
I make very few overseas calls, but I can only imagine that it gets worse from there
I had the misfortune of dealing with software tech. support recently.
After the third straight Irish accent, I discovered that all my calls were going to Dublin, although the company is based in the same state.
No noise, no noticeable delay.
while the joystick/button design for navigation isn't quite as intuitive (or cool) as the ipod's, it's definitely usable
I bought an iRiver iHP-120 for my wife.
We both hated the joystick, so we returned it and got an iPod (with free shipping, free personalization, and a $25 coupon).
I really wanted to like the iRiver, because of the features and battery life.
Besides the joystick, I was disappointed that the DB feature didn't support Ogg out of the box, effectively making it a second-class format.
(Check out iRipDB for a free third-party solution.)
If you're considering the iRiver, I encourage you spend some time with a display model.
If you like the user interface, it's a terrific device.
Otherwise, I don't see anything better than the iPod.
Apple's DRM was pretty easy to break, just write the songs to CD and rip them back, without DRM. But the RIAA will use this as an excuse to put more and more DRM, more and more legislation.
Remember, copyright is a (theoretically) temporary monopoly, granted for the purpose of advancing the arts.
DRM is an attempt to renege on that agreement.
Without hackers, there will be no public domain.
I saw a copy of Red Hat Professional Workstation at CompUSA this weekend.
It's not listed in bugzilla, and the web page all but says, "Don't buy this."
What is RHPW, and who should buy it?
Slashdot Mirror
MHz are a useful first-order approximation of performance, especially when comparing otherwise identical processors. Performance ratings help no one but the marketers.
It's not fair to characterize the OP as representative of the private sector, considering that he's from a military family. I think the officer ranks, which most people recognize from movies, still command respect. A special skills draft, however, would likely land you at one of less familiar enlisted ranks, like specialist.
If I saw military experience on a resume, I would consider the candidate likely to be more mature and disciplined than your average college graduate. As for work experience, I won't necessarily add points for knowing how to calculate a firing solution with a slide rule, but I certainly won't deduct any.
While I don't think Fyodor has made his case, he claims that SCO's public assault on the GPL constitutes a refusal to accept its terms, which is a prerequisite to enjoying its grants.
While I disagree with MySQL's decision to GPL the client libraries, I don't think it's a significant problem. Libgda is LGPL, which is explicitly GPL compatible. Maintain the GPLed MySQL backend separately (which is easy to do with libgda's modular back ends), so the user has the choice to build a GPLed libgda with MySQL support.
Incidentally, I agree with other posters that MySQL's FOSS exception is practically worthless, due to the aggregation clause.
I took a look at the Natural Language Toolkit for Python, which focuses primarily on statistical language processing. For example, given a tagged training copora, you can build conditional frequency distributions that say "natural language" is usually followed by "processing."
I've wondered if this is easier or harder in a more heavily inflected language like Latin or Russian. I would think a brute force approach would be complicated by the variety of endings, but that it would be easier to tag the parts of speech.
Two games that do part of this are Siboot and The Sims. Siboot, which I've never played, is described in Chris Crawford's On Game Design. The Sims has the rudiments of a relationship model, but I would hide the NPC stats from the player. If you insult an NPC, he may put on a happy face and exact his revenge at a later date.
You may be interested to know that Trolltech seems to be letting the Q Public License die, in favor the GNU GPL. The following is from the GPL Qt/Mac FAQ:
Barring the annihilation of copyright, there will never be one license for everybody. Copyleft has its place, but it's not for everyone. I agree that it's a shame when a license that allows incorporation into proprietary software is not GPL compatible.For that matter, what ever happened to Lotus?
I don't know where you got the impression that Maya is, or will ever be, remotely open source. It is thoroughly proprietary, right down to the FlexLM node locking. Your choice of subject line certainly befits your handle.
Maya (along with LightWave) has dropped in price tremendously, bringing industrial strength software within the reach of so-called prosumers. At the very low end, Maya PLE appeals to the aspiring artist who would otherwise beg, borrow, or steal, in order to put Maya on his resume.
When has he ever said Qt isn't free? There were some ruffled feathers over the QPL and the "Open Patch" definition. Richard Stallman sent a baffling message about "forgiving" KDE. Otherwise, Qt/X11 has been as free as it ever will be since its GPL release in 2000.
Bruce doesn't like it that you can't use Qt in proprietary applications without paying Trolltech. (After all, why should he be a Trolltech salesman?) Richard Stallman isn't thrilled that you can use Qt in proprietary applications at all. (See, also, Ghostscript.)
As an aside, I wonder whether Qt would ever qualify for the O/S exception of the GPL:
Microsoft argued that Internet Explorer is part of the operating system. Why not Qt? I daresay that SuSE Linux would suffer more from the removal of Qt than Windows would from the removal of IE. If anyone successfully took advantage of this exception, I'd have a hard time seeing Trolltech continuing the GPL releases. On the other hand, they may be beholden to the KDE Free Qt Foundation.It should not be the responsibility of the distro to package every piece of software a user could conceivably want. In fact, the more software a distro includes, the less confident I am that they can maintain it properly.
While a distro should include the libraries necessary to run KDE, GNOME, and Motif applications, it's fine for it to standardize on one desktop environment / window manager. After all, one aspect of choice is choosing a distro in the first place.
While Groklaw's research in this matter is comendable, the comparatively recent allegation of purloined header files was never central to the dispute. It started with RCU and JFS.
Most of the drama has been behind the scenes, as Novell has revealed how little of Unix SCO may actually own. Indeed, Novell may be entitled to 95% of the money from Microsoft and Sun that has funded this suit thusfar.
He should have just told them his last name rhymes with "owl," not "crow."
The worst thing about these indemnification agreements is that they are conditioned on waiving the freedoms intrinsic to the software. You can have your free software, but you're not free to modify it.
I would like to see more of the packaging responsibility shift from the Linux vendors to the application developers. Given the variety of (and pace of development of) shipped applications, a distribution is out of date the day it ships.
The bulk of my recent experience is with Red Hat Linux 9 and SuSE Linux 8.2. When I upgrade an application or library, my first strategy is to rebuild the vendor's source RPM with a new source tarball. This has led to me learning more than I planned to about RPM, patch, diff, autoconf, automake, make, gcc, etc. As a part-time developer, I should probably know this stuff, anyway, but it's far beyond the average user.
While most new applications work with Windows 98, there are few that I would venture to install on Red Hat Linux 5.2. Somehow, that doesn't seem right.
The bundled software populates a database from ID3 tags in MP3s. There is at least one freeware tool that will do the same for Ogg Vorbis files. You can also navigate a folder hierarchy.
I took advantage of the Windows XP Pro downgrade rights to run Windows 2000:
I still think Windows 98 SE is preferable for games, but I don't miss it too much.Dumping a live file system can result in bad backups. Dump is best used on an unmounted file system. It can also work well with snapshots or split mirrors.
Yes.
Ext3 can grow or shrink an unmounted file system. XFS can grow a mounted file system.
Ext3 and XFS both have dump utilities, which many sys admins prefer for backup.
Ext3 supports three modes of journaling: writeback (risky metadata only), ordered (metadata only), and journal (all data). I believe XFS is comparable to ordered ext3.
Ext3 has been widely deployed on Linux, and it trivially reverts to ext2. The XFS design is mature, but its implementation on Linux is less proven.
If you're stingy and patient, there may be a 10% sale after Christmas, as there was after Thanksgiving.
I had the misfortune of dealing with software tech. support recently. After the third straight Irish accent, I discovered that all my calls were going to Dublin, although the company is based in the same state. No noise, no noticeable delay.
I bought an iRiver iHP-120 for my wife. We both hated the joystick, so we returned it and got an iPod (with free shipping, free personalization, and a $25 coupon). I really wanted to like the iRiver, because of the features and battery life. Besides the joystick, I was disappointed that the DB feature didn't support Ogg out of the box, effectively making it a second-class format. (Check out iRipDB for a free third-party solution.)
If you're considering the iRiver, I encourage you spend some time with a display model. If you like the user interface, it's a terrific device. Otherwise, I don't see anything better than the iPod.
Remember, copyright is a (theoretically) temporary monopoly, granted for the purpose of advancing the arts. DRM is an attempt to renege on that agreement. Without hackers, there will be no public domain.
I saw a copy of Red Hat Professional Workstation at CompUSA this weekend. It's not listed in bugzilla, and the web page all but says, "Don't buy this." What is RHPW, and who should buy it?