I've been running Mandrake 8.0 for a week now, and I'm more than
impressed. The installation provided X4.0.3, kernel 2.4.3 and ReiserFS
root partition, something that I could not find in oher major distros. The
only annoying thing was that I had to use the slow and cumbersome
graphical installer because it offered the most flexibility. It is
strange, because I would imagine the people inclined to play around with
new filesystems and the like, would prefer a text mode.
I know most of the navigation in the installer could be done by keyboard,
but it was a bit slow: moving up/down to another package on a list had an
annoying delay while the description text appeared. Dunno if this had to
do with the framebuffer X or something else. On a text mode menu you would
very quickly scroll around with up/down keys and press space to [un]select
a package.
But hey, no distro is perfect and Mandrake 8.0 is the best I've used so
far.
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
What really freaks me out is, why does Earth have exactly one moon? Some
planets have none, some have several, but there is something magical about
one because it gives the 'dipole' of Sun & Moon - day & night.
(Even though the moon can often be seen during daytime.)
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
The earth's gravity pulling on the
moon as it orbits will slow it down over time, until it eventually reaches
a stable resonance point (in this case 1:1)
In fact, gravity simply pulling on Moon would have no effect, if there
were no complications from tidal forces. This is easier to understand in
the case of Earth:
The gravitational attraction of Sun on Earth is stronger on the side
closer to Sun. Therefore, the oceans bulge towards Sun. (The same
thing happens due to Moon even more notably.) Because Earth
rotates at a rate different from its orbiting around Sun, the bulge moves
relative to Earth. But there are dissipative forces, i.e. viscosity of the
water, which gradually slows down this relative motion. Hence in a very
distant future, Earth will have permanent dark and light sides.
The same effect can occur even when there is no ocean (there may have been
some on Moon), because planets are not made of infinitely rigid/elastic
material. (Elastic meaning that there are no viscous, dissipative forces.)
It is generally believed that this process has slowed down the rotation of
Moon to match its orbiting around Earth.
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
Human memory? Any form of information transfer between people?
Consider this: If a person has an excellent memory and a diverse musical
talent, s/he can to some extent reproduce a piece of music to someone else
without violating any copyright laws (not considering public performance,
of course). Well, most of us are not that talented, so why cannot we use
technology to augment our limited physical and mental capacity? I know
it's not exactly like Braille terminals for the blind, but where do you
draw the line?
As to the outlawing of TCP/IP, there will be other ways. New protocols,
new physical systems for communication. The geeks will find their way
somehow.. By the time this happens, let us hope that the law regains
its original idea as something organized by the people, for the
people. Until then, let's really screw RIAA and practice our Jedi skills
in the telepathic trading of mp3z.
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
Can't remember any links now, but in a lecture by Duncan Campbell he mentioned a new method by which the lower-frequency electromagnetic radiation (i.e. not light) from CRTs and even LCDs can be monitored from behind walls, and most of the information can be retrieved.
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
If someone reports a hit, cant they just re-check that data?
They do. What the client programs do is something of a preliminary
analysis, filtering the most interesting packets of data from the usual
junk. In the further analysis it often turns out that lots of interesting
signals originated on Earth, while many others are inconclusive.
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
Is it a bloated 'office package' with too many features and virtually
compulsory upgrades every few years?
Is it a dumbed-down "one desktop
is enough for everyone"?
Well, if by a desktop we mean a
Windows/MacOS clone, then I'm happy to admit there has never been a
serious Linux desktop. I wonder why the idea of a desktop should be
defined by winblows, but then again it's no real surprise.
Think of a
real desktop. Some people have one desk and they keep the 'tools' neatly
organized on the back edge, for example (I'm thinking of a Windows
analogy). Others, however, like to have several desks for different types
of work, and they like to keep the desk as a clean workspace, so they keep
the pens and stuff hidden in drawers. This is kind of like my
Enlightenment. I'm infinitely more productive with tools like Emacs in
this environment than with any graphical toys.
Anyway. If people want
something like Windows, let them use Windows. There's no point in us
copying the same desktop look and feel. I imagine if I had a windows
interface to my machine, it would be as limiting as real winblows. We can
do better than that. Oh, wait, I think we already have.:-))
Come to
think of it, just one problem. Or maybe not really. I just remembered the
first experiences with Linux, I used Gnome in a rather Windows-like
configuration. I wanted to change my thinking, but it was quite impossible
to just jump into the cold water of command line. There is still need for
a (buzzword alert) migration path. But I'm glad Gnome made it quite
obvious that there were a lot more choices, at some point realizing that E
can be run without the Gnome-panel that was getting more and more useless
to me.
[OT] "They call open source communism, while they promote a Soviet-style
central planning of software. The closed source is collapsing under its
inherent inconsistencies. All the signs are there. 'Yeah, right, and
penguins fly' you may say, but hey, penguins do fly underwater."
(me, it just looked better in quotes;-)
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
Nope, I didn't read throught the article to see that this only applies to
the 64-bit version of XP. Nevertheless, I was trying to address the
problem of booting independently of MBR in a more general way, which might
be of use to the pathetic losers like me who do not yet have an IA-64
laptop.
I'm a 'one OS, one disk' man, especially
since disks are so cheap, but what about those who aren't handy with a
screwdriver (and an IDE cable)?
..and those with a laptop as their main computer? I've just switched to a
bigger HD, and left a 2GB partition for testing alternative OSes. This is
bad news, although I don't have plans to run any version of Windoze.
Even so, I know I have to be ready for the other OS screwing up MBR, so
I've got a boot disk ready. This is a perfectly working option for trying
out Linux, albeit slower to boot. But it may take time to convince a
typical Windows user that floppies still exist and are actively used by
many of us... which reminds me, there's always Loadlin.
just as you suggest. In fact this should be slightly bigger because of
additional data such as timestamps and titles (Audio CDs use 1/4 of the
data capacity for time codes and such). But you'll get some errors
because of the lossy
compression. I did this calculation back in '93 or so when I first heard
of MD. 150MB on something smaller than a floppy would have been pretty
cool at that time.
My humble impression is that $a is way more
important to $person than $b, which is just a tool for them to $a. Now, it could be said that
many open source guys honestly have $a == "make good software" and $b = "". We're not
completely sure, of course; my impression/experience is that actually $a = "have fun" and $b =
"making good software". In principle we don't know if having fun is a greater incentive for
doing $b well, than making money, but it looks like it is.
Also, I'm quite certain that there are businesses for which $b = "making money". There is some
$a these people love to do, but the only way they can afford it is to make business out of it.
I would argue this is the idea behind many open source businesses, whose main goals are to
promote OSS and/or make more/better software.
Anyway, my points: (a) Not all businesses are driven solely by the craving for $$$. (b) Not
all opensource projects are driven solely by the craving for good software.
This looks exactly like the idea of holographic storage. What is stored in
the memory material is the interference pattern of the data and the
address beams. Then you can either light it with an address beam (the
address can be either a direction, or frequency, or maybe something else)
and out comes the data content, or vice versa (grep). This is excellent
for database and memory technology, but I see no connection to quantum
computing here.
Disclaimer/shameless plug: I've recently compiled a semi-technical paper on some of the
theory behind quantum computing, as a project in our undergraduate
physics course.
Fair enough, not everyone likes Perl. It sounds like you should try out Python, because it was designed to have
a more readable syntax without all that $%#{}; confusion.
IMHO the two languages focus on different things. Perl vs. Python is like
poetry vs. technical docs: the former has a lot of artistic freedom, and
some things can be made more powerful/compact, but it is difficult to use
properly, more so in larger projects. Or you could even say they are like
Gimp vs. LaTeX as writing tools. Usually I prefer the latter, when I want
to focus on content and not worry about formatting, but sometimes you just
need that creative freedom.
For a photon, it was proved long ago that its energy = h * its frequency and momentum = h /
its wavelength (h = Planck's constant). Some people (Louis de Broglie was one of the first,
IIRC) asked: what if we could use those same relations for all particles including material?
And that was one of the most important creative leaps that led to quantum mechanics that gave
us electronics, computing, and hence Slashdot. Almost as if my miracle, the equations worked!
After some eighty years, we still don't admit that particles are waves, but it is one heck of
a model. In principle, physics is not about what is real, it is about models of the nature.
(Insert your favourite definition of reality from the Matrix here.) Physics does a lot of
things purely systematically, but new theories like wave mechanics require those what-if ideas
that may seem stupid at the first glance. The validity of a model can usually be tested by
experiment, and if it fails then we can be certain that the idea was 'stupid' indeed. We can
only let Nature judge which models are better.
I agree that ultimately physics should be about particles - or rather whatever the fundamental
objects turn out to be (strings? a very elegant _model_ but maybe nothing more). The problem
is, before we get there, we want to be able to model the larger scales as well. We can quite
safely model the largest scale of the universe without worrying about the underlying forces
between individual particles. Maybe that model (i.e. General Relativity for now) isn't
absolutely accurate, but it's better than having to wait for a theory of everything - which
BTW may never come up.
Remember that Nokia got really big in the cellphone business. They
don't
sell many phones directly to the consumers, instead they sell them to
phonecompanies, which then sell them to the enduser for a fraction of the
price. The enduser has to sign a contract to use their services for a
minimum time, like 6 months or a year.
My impression is that after paying for the connection for a year, the
consumer has effectively paid the price of the phone. In Finland the
bondage between buying a cellphone and buying a connection for that is
forbidden by law, so people pay the real price of phones but on the other
hand the calls and monthly charges are cheaper.
Finland has the
highest number of mobile phones per capita (about 60 per 100) in the
world, so you cannot explain the success of Nokia (Finland based:-)
simply with the contract schemes. Personally I can't stand those systems,
with SIM locking and all that. People like being able to _own_ a phone and
use it for anything, such as changing the provider every month for the
cheapest deal:-).. and hacking it, of course.
Office is worth as much as the market will allow. if people still buy
it at
that price then microsoft has no reason to lower it. it sucks but *shrug*
thats the way it works
"The fool is not the one who sets the price, but the one who pays."
-- Finnish proverb
This won't answer your question - it's probably the 128 bit thing. Just
wanted to mention that there's even a text mode access to banking with W3M.
It's like lynx with tables, frames, SSL and steroids:-). Joe AOLer would
probably find it revolutionary that you can actually retrieve textual
information (banking stuff) via a text-mode interface.;-)
I remember this was suggested a couple of years ago. It would make a lot
of sense - for once there would be a centralized email directory, not
unlike the phone book. If only this had been done before the introduction
of Internet to the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
I know most of the navigation in the installer could be done by keyboard, but it was a bit slow: moving up/down to another package on a list had an annoying delay while the description text appeared. Dunno if this had to do with the framebuffer X or something else. On a text mode menu you would very quickly scroll around with up/down keys and press space to [un]select a package.
But hey, no distro is perfect and Mandrake 8.0 is the best I've used so far.
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
Somebody does.
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
What really freaks me out is, why does Earth have exactly one moon? Some planets have none, some have several, but there is something magical about one because it gives the 'dipole' of Sun & Moon - day & night. (Even though the moon can often be seen during daytime.)
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
In fact, gravity simply pulling on Moon would have no effect, if there were no complications from tidal forces. This is easier to understand in the case of Earth:
The gravitational attraction of Sun on Earth is stronger on the side closer to Sun. Therefore, the oceans bulge towards Sun. (The same thing happens due to Moon even more notably.) Because Earth rotates at a rate different from its orbiting around Sun, the bulge moves relative to Earth. But there are dissipative forces, i.e. viscosity of the water, which gradually slows down this relative motion. Hence in a very distant future, Earth will have permanent dark and light sides.
The same effect can occur even when there is no ocean (there may have been some on Moon), because planets are not made of infinitely rigid/elastic material. (Elastic meaning that there are no viscous, dissipative forces.) It is generally believed that this process has slowed down the rotation of Moon to match its orbiting around Earth.
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
Consider this: If a person has an excellent memory and a diverse musical talent, s/he can to some extent reproduce a piece of music to someone else without violating any copyright laws (not considering public performance, of course). Well, most of us are not that talented, so why cannot we use technology to augment our limited physical and mental capacity? I know it's not exactly like Braille terminals for the blind, but where do you draw the line?
As to the outlawing of TCP/IP, there will be other ways. New protocols, new physical systems for communication. The geeks will find their way somehow.. By the time this happens, let us hope that the law regains its original idea as something organized by the people, for the people. Until then, let's really screw RIAA and practice our Jedi skills in the telepathic trading of mp3z.
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
Can't remember any links now, but in a lecture by Duncan Campbell he mentioned a new method by which the lower-frequency electromagnetic radiation (i.e. not light) from CRTs and even LCDs can be monitored from behind walls, and most of the information can be retrieved.
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
They do. What the client programs do is something of a preliminary analysis, filtering the most interesting packets of data from the usual junk. In the further analysis it often turns out that lots of interesting signals originated on Earth, while many others are inconclusive.
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
Is it a dumbed-down "one desktop is enough for everyone"?
Well, if by a desktop we mean a Windows/MacOS clone, then I'm happy to admit there has never been a serious Linux desktop. I wonder why the idea of a desktop should be defined by winblows, but then again it's no real surprise.
Think of a real desktop. Some people have one desk and they keep the 'tools' neatly organized on the back edge, for example (I'm thinking of a Windows analogy). Others, however, like to have several desks for different types of work, and they like to keep the desk as a clean workspace, so they keep the pens and stuff hidden in drawers. This is kind of like my Enlightenment. I'm infinitely more productive with tools like Emacs in this environment than with any graphical toys.
Anyway. If people want something like Windows, let them use Windows. There's no point in us copying the same desktop look and feel. I imagine if I had a windows interface to my machine, it would be as limiting as real winblows. We can do better than that. Oh, wait, I think we already have. :-))
Come to think of it, just one problem. Or maybe not really. I just remembered the first experiences with Linux, I used Gnome in a rather Windows-like configuration. I wanted to change my thinking, but it was quite impossible to just jump into the cold water of command line. There is still need for a (buzzword alert) migration path. But I'm glad Gnome made it quite obvious that there were a lot more choices, at some point realizing that E can be run without the Gnome-panel that was getting more and more useless to me.
[OT] "They call open source communism, while they promote a Soviet-style central planning of software. The closed source is collapsing under its inherent inconsistencies. All the signs are there. 'Yeah, right, and penguins fly' you may say, but hey, penguins do fly underwater." ;-)
(me, it just looked better in quotes
--
I hit the karma cap, now do I gain enlightenment?
Nope, I didn't read throught the article to see that this only applies to the 64-bit version of XP. Nevertheless, I was trying to address the problem of booting independently of MBR in a more general way, which might be of use to the pathetic losers like me who do not yet have an IA-64 laptop.
--
Even so, I know I have to be ready for the other OS screwing up MBR, so I've got a boot disk ready. This is a perfectly working option for trying out Linux, albeit slower to boot. But it may take time to convince a typical Windows user that floppies still exist and are actively used by many of us... which reminds me, there's always Loadlin.
--
74 min * 60 s/min * 44100 samples/s * 2 bytes/sample * 2 channels * 1/5 = 150MB
just as you suggest. In fact this should be slightly bigger because of additional data such as timestamps and titles (Audio CDs use 1/4 of the data capacity for time codes and such). But you'll get some errors because of the lossy compression. I did this calculation back in '93 or so when I first heard of MD. 150MB on something smaller than a floppy would have been pretty cool at that time.
--
My humble impression is that $a is way more important to $person than $b, which is just a tool for them to $a. Now, it could be said that many open source guys honestly have $a == "make good software" and $b = "". We're not completely sure, of course; my impression/experience is that actually $a = "have fun" and $b = "making good software". In principle we don't know if having fun is a greater incentive for doing $b well, than making money, but it looks like it is.
Also, I'm quite certain that there are businesses for which $b = "making money". There is some $a these people love to do, but the only way they can afford it is to make business out of it. I would argue this is the idea behind many open source businesses, whose main goals are to promote OSS and/or make more/better software.
Anyway, my points: (a) Not all businesses are driven solely by the craving for $$$. (b) Not all opensource projects are driven solely by the craving for good software.
--
Disclaimer/shameless plug: I've recently compiled a semi-technical paper on some of the theory behind quantum computing, as a project in our undergraduate physics course.
--
IMHO the two languages focus on different things. Perl vs. Python is like poetry vs. technical docs: the former has a lot of artistic freedom, and some things can be made more powerful/compact, but it is difficult to use properly, more so in larger projects. Or you could even say they are like Gimp vs. LaTeX as writing tools. Usually I prefer the latter, when I want to focus on content and not worry about formatting, but sometimes you just need that creative freedom.
--
And that was one of the most important creative leaps that led to quantum mechanics that gave us electronics, computing, and hence Slashdot. Almost as if my miracle, the equations worked! After some eighty years, we still don't admit that particles are waves, but it is one heck of a model. In principle, physics is not about what is real, it is about models of the nature. (Insert your favourite definition of reality from the Matrix here.) Physics does a lot of things purely systematically, but new theories like wave mechanics require those what-if ideas that may seem stupid at the first glance. The validity of a model can usually be tested by experiment, and if it fails then we can be certain that the idea was 'stupid' indeed. We can only let Nature judge which models are better.
I agree that ultimately physics should be about particles - or rather whatever the fundamental objects turn out to be (strings? a very elegant _model_ but maybe nothing more). The problem is, before we get there, we want to be able to model the larger scales as well. We can quite safely model the largest scale of the universe without worrying about the underlying forces between individual particles. Maybe that model (i.e. General Relativity for now) isn't absolutely accurate, but it's better than having to wait for a theory of everything - which BTW may never come up.
--
In honour of the original lyrics, wouldn't this be more appropriate:
"99 IIS servers online, 99 IIS servers / take one down, hack around, 98 IIS servers online."
--
My impression is that after paying for the connection for a year, the consumer has effectively paid the price of the phone. In Finland the bondage between buying a cellphone and buying a connection for that is forbidden by law, so people pay the real price of phones but on the other hand the calls and monthly charges are cheaper.
Finland has the highest number of mobile phones per capita (about 60 per 100) in the world, so you cannot explain the success of Nokia (Finland based :-)
simply with the contract schemes. Personally I can't stand those systems,
with SIM locking and all that. People like being able to _own_ a phone and
use it for anything, such as changing the provider every month for the
cheapest deal :-) .. and hacking it, of course.
--
Sure this should be "All your base pair are belong to us" ?
--
( Read more... )
--
"The fool is not the one who sets the price, but the one who pays."
-- Finnish proverb
--
Guess what browser was used to post this comment?
--
(I know somebody said this on /. ages ago :-)
--
Every container of alcohol that appeared in the season when they were doing this was redone to make it symbollically linked to its role in the plot.
$ ln -s alcohol plot ;-)
--
I remember this was suggested a couple of years ago. It would make a lot of sense - for once there would be a centralized email directory, not unlike the phone book. If only this had been done before the introduction of Internet to the masses.
--
"My son went all the way to Cambridge and all he got was this lousy email address!"
--