I very sincerely doubt that human implementation will be permitted unless specifically requested by the individual.
This is assuming that the government will be our friend in the future. If the government, in the future, becomes the enemy of law abiding citizens, this all changes.
[Music mode on] ...Big Brother is coming, to town..... He knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been "bad" or "good"... [Music mode off]
The problem isn't are the major countries prepared. The real concern is with Thrid World nations that we depend on, that are somewhat computerized.
If small country that sells a widget that is critical for a bigger product manufactured in the US (or other nation) has serious problems with it's order processing system, causing that widget to not be shipped, it causes major problems for our manufacturing. Same thing with things like oil, coal and food from 3rd world nations. It wouldn't take much of a slight screw up to throw the whole system off.
Is this serious? I'm not sure. This may not be that big of problem, but it's certainly a possibility. So while our computers are more or less fine, other countries might not be so lucky. If this is a serious problem, keeping some extra food supplies isn't so silly. As always, the devil is in the details.
When a user accidently shuts down Word, autosave doesn't do anything. I believe Word automatically deletes the autosave files (which are saved in the TEMP directory! A really good place). As for X crashing, it does happen with XF86, but fairly rarely. It's an unusual occurance, whereas with windows... *cough*.
Well written applications? There are several office suites w/o a paperclip (can't speak much for them as I've never used them). Let's not forget the Gimp, either.
It's not like Gnome or KDE are any better. The first time I ever booted into Linux, I had to click around for a while till I saw the logoff button when I clicked the foot in Gnome.
You can't be serious! So you were completely unfamilar with the GUI and you had to click around...Big Deal! Try teaching a newbie that to turn off the computer you have to click on "Start." ("But I don't want to "start" anything else.") This was my point.
It sounds like you've hardly given *nix a chance. I've lived in both worlds, and let me tell you, the grass is greener on the other side. (Thanks to some Penguin fertalizer:-)
I don't believe "standardized" user interfaces are all they're cracked up to be, especially when the standard interface is un-intuitive. This has been on slashdot many times before. I mean, please, click Start to shutdown your machine? When someone sends you a zip file, when was the last time you attempted to use the "intuitive" Winzip interface? Give me a break. As for what the middle mouse button does, first of all, MS windows doesn't even support that, and second of all, the only time you need the middle button is for pasting in X-terms. The average luser wouldn't be interested in x-terms.
If you spend all your time in Word with auto-save set to every five minutes -- what can Linux offer you?
With a *nix, so long as the application is well written, you don't need autosave!
I believe you're drinking the Micro$oft Kool-aide(TM), my friend.
I worked for a retailer of questionable integrity a few years ago. I don't think they would ever go this far, but I wouldn't put it past them.
I was one of 2 techs working there. I would always attempt to fix the problems that customers were having. The other tech usually replaced whatever hardware he couldn't figure out in 5 minutes with a new piece of Acer garbage. Sound Blaster Sound card doesn't work? Here's a new Acer that works fine! Bad blocks on your hard drive? Here's a brand new Maxtor!
Needless to say, that shop went out of business a year after I left. I was replaced with someone with 1/10 of my experience, since the owner made more money off of unexperineced employees. (Could charge the customer for their flub-ups.) They deserved to go out of business.
Any shop that's still open and their only source of income is h/w sales and repairs, probabbily isn't honest, since the market has changed such that you can't make a living off of h/w sales alone. You need to add some other sort of value to make it. I'm sure there are some mom and pop type computer shops around that are honest...I've just never found one. So watch out.
I saw some sort of device in a Radio Shack catalogue that is said to circumvent this sort of nasty protection (which, BTW, I've noticed makes for really lousy legitimate playback). Has anyone had any experience with such devices?
I have a Dell Optiplex 133 that I use as my main machine. (Normally this would be way too slow for this day in age, but not with linux...but that's another story.) It's named "farmer". (as in, in the dell) The really sick thing is, I'm pround of this name.
As for group names, the best I've come up with are Statler, Waldorf, Gonzo, Piggy, Sam...Tons of names to choose from and you get to call them "The Muppet Machines.":-)
Technics weren't around then and, quite frankly, most of the functionality you talk about could be gained by using a combination of the hinged nuts, and the full, half, and quater sized pieces. And their's still ease of use, and speed of construction. And, I believe that (and I could be wrong about this), per piece, Technics are considerably more expensive then Construx were (can you even buy them anymore), even when factoring in inflation.
I remember having fun with my Legos as a child, but they weren't nearly as fun as Construx.
With Construx, you could build things faster, and the end result was much sturdier then what you got with legos. You could actually play with it (which wasn't nearly as fun as building it). Legos always have the weakness in that all the pieces attach in the same direction, and makes the end result quite fragile (at least on the edges). It was possible to build things with Construx that could survive a trip down the stairs, w/o falling apart!
I recall making an R2D2 out of them, with motor and all. Those were the days.
It would appear that PC week didn't even bother to download all the errata rpm's into a directory and do a "rpm -Uvh *rpm".
In order for this to be a fair comparison, the NT box should have been installed w/o Service Packs.
Something tells me it wouldn't take 20 hours to crack an NT box without Service Packs applied.:-)
--------------- When a program can crack a *nix box, it's called an exploit. When a program can crack a windows box...it's called a "malicious program".
Assuming evolution is fact (which, despite arguments to the contrary can only be "proven" by mangling the Scientific Method(and I'm not talking about "Survival of the Fittest" or evolution of very simple orginisims)) why aren't the overwhelming majority of large species hermaphrodites? I'm not a biologist, but it would seem to me that finding mates in order to reproduce would me much easier for such a species. Easier reproduction would lead to faster evolution, which would in turn lead to domination over other species.
Just as all of an artist's works share some similarities, couldn't this "genetic progression" you refer to be that the species were created by the same intelligence?
As far as I understand it, the belief that a "big bang" created the universe is similar to shaking a puzzle in it's box, throwing the pieces on the table, and having them all fall perfectly into place. From an mathematical standpoint, this is impossible.
It seems that it's easier to not even consider the possibility that a far greater intelligence created us. It's much easier to stick with a questionable theory which cannot be proven, and in my view seems highly implausible.
In order to believe evolution you have to have more faith than I do. You prefer to go out on a limb to explain the universe, rather then consider the possiblity that man is not the most intelligent being in the universe.
As recently as a year and a half ago I had nearly expiring 2 year subscriptions to PC Magizine, Computer Shopper (for the ads--I did a lot of purchasing), and *choke* PC Computing (only one year).
Once in a while Dvorak would write something witty and worthwhile, but by and large these magazines were written by English majors that wanted jobs. The hardware reviews had nothing to do with stability and usefullness...the only factors were ease of use for complete morons and questionable benchmarks based on speed (having very little to do with reality).
And lets not even talk about the overpriced, expensive toilet paper known as PC Computing. I think they should re-name it "PC-Computing for Dummies."
That's why I let them all lapse.
I only get Computer Reseller News (because it's free), and Linux Journal (which has ethics about quality) these days.
This isn't entirely a "good thing." I live in the state of New York. Now that VA has a presence in my state, I would have to pay sales tax on anything I purchase from them. At 7.25% this really hurts. Lately I prefer to "roll my own" systems, but this just eliminated any chance of me buying from them.
I just looked into internal IDE 2.5" HD's at Dirt Cheap Drives. $150 seems like an awful lot for only 4 gigs.
I figure I could get one of these puppies to boot over my home network with a floppy drive and a few megs of parity memory (~$37 for 16MB). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would assume these devices use regular floppy drives.
There seems to be some interesting info here: http://www.multimania.com/multia/ According to google there once was information on digital's website, but it would appear that digital has finally become one with that evil, unsupportive hardware empire, aka Compaq.
There have been rumors for some time now floating around Slashdot suggesting that the Evil Empire may decide to sell "MS Linux."
Wouldn't it be convienent for MS to purchase a company that has a product that has a nice GUI install already, integrates with Novell and NT, is already proprietary, and will compete directly with companies such as Red-Hat (with "MS" support of course). Best of all it will make the lawsuit go away.
The only flaw with this theory is that I can't see MS buying a product that will directly compete with their "vision", that can also be freely distributed (of course w/o the proprietary code). Then again, this proprietary code may be something worth building on to make it part of "the Empire" and therefore a reason that people would be willing to spend $200 ish for it plus licenses. Besides, many IT people won't touch Linux with a forty foot pole because it isn't sanctioned by MS (and because they're braindead). They would be willing to shell out the bucks if it was sanctioned by The Empire. MS has done this sort of thing before in the database market (ex: FoxPro vs. Access).
I visited the show on Wednesday. There really wasn't anything new from last year's show.
While I didn't have much time to visit the BeOS booth (I was at the show with my boss) what I did see wasn't flattering. They had some video playing on BeOS and quite frankly, the quality stunk. The framerate didn't seem very high, and it seemed quite jumpy. This wasn't the BeOS I remembered seeing last year at this show.
I haven't seen anyone mention it before, but Castlewood was there in a big way (for a small startup). They had some corny comedian handing out plastic noisemakers and getting people to make lots of noise. (They were located in the very back of the first floor and needed something to draw crowds.) I got to hold the Orb (SCSI external). The drive itself seemed sturdy as well as the cartridges. I think I'll purchase one as soon as I'm sure they're not going to break after a month or two like SyQuest's 135MB and 230MB drives did.
The Compaq booth was just plain stupid. They had some dancers doing a jazzy routine singing about "e-biz city." They also had this corny guy they called "Dr C." (I think) talking about how Compaq invented everything from the first firewall to who knows what else. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Compaq hasn't done anything extraordinary since they produced the first IBM compatible machine. Since then they've just purchased companies which have done extraordinary things. (And lets not forget their valuable input into debacles such as EISA!:-) However, the Compaq booth wasn't all bad--you could sit for a few minutes, and they handed out Compaq chocolate bars.
Perhaps the most amusing portion of the show was watching the herds of people going crazy at the Iomega booth. Here is a company who is raping its customers by charging $10 for 100MB. They make it up with colorful marketing, and people love it. Most of the rest of the world uses MO drives. I guess, and I can say this because I am one, most Americans are idiots. (I'm American, not an idiot:-)
And yes the Linux Pavilion was a sorry sight. RedHat had a guy and a girl running a very tiny booth. Both of them looked like they wanted to run out of there quickly and get away from the crowds hording around their tiny space. Caldera had a much more professional offering, but still wasn't all that impressive.
I belive this show is dying. Last year the lower floor was full. This year it was half empty. Companies like Dell didn't even attend. Perhaps Miller Freeman (the company that runs the show) has been charging too much. Perhaps companies who already do plenty of marketing (like Dell) can't be bothered with the expense? Does anyone have any better reasons?
The only thing Linux needs the BIOS for, in terms of hard drives, is for booting the kernel. After you have the kernel in memory, it takes over and doesn't bother to use the (often cruddy) code in the BIOS.
At home I've been running an old Digital 386DX/16 workstation, as a server for a while. It initially came with an Adaptec SCSI controller and a 40MB Scsi hard drive. It used the SCSI BIOS to boot the HD. The system bios itself could only select a floppy and the SCSI drive as an option to boot. Right now, I don't have any scsi hard drives in it at all. It has 2 small IDE drives and a Hardcard, with a copy of the kernel in the floppy drive. It boots off the floppy, and then uses the IDE drives, despite the fact that the BIOS doesn't support them.
This only thing IMHO that could prevent you from having eight IDE controllers is a lack of IRQ's or some other possible limitation, that I don't know of, placed by the PCI bus.
In the changes file for 2.2.7 there was something about this: "DHCP clients for 2.0 do not work with the new networking code in the 2.2 kernel. You will need to upgrade your dhcpcd / dhcpclient." It's usually a good idea to look through all that stuff in the Documentation directory that comes with the kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
I very sincerely doubt that human implementation will be permitted unless specifically requested by the individual.
This is assuming that the government will be our friend in the future. If the government, in the future, becomes the enemy of law abiding citizens, this all changes.
[Music mode on]
...Big Brother is coming, to town.....
He knows when you are sleeping.
He knows when you're awake.
He knows if you've been "bad" or "good"...
[Music mode off]
Scary, eh?
The problem isn't are the major countries prepared. The real concern is with Thrid World nations that we depend on, that are somewhat computerized.
If small country that sells a widget that is critical for a bigger product manufactured in the US (or other nation) has serious problems with it's order processing system, causing that widget to not be shipped, it causes major problems for our manufacturing. Same thing with things like oil, coal and food from 3rd world nations. It wouldn't take much of a slight screw up to throw the whole system off.
Is this serious? I'm not sure. This may not be that big of problem, but it's certainly a possibility. So while our computers are more or less fine, other countries might not be so lucky. If this is a serious problem, keeping some extra food supplies isn't so silly. As always, the devil is in the details.
I'm currently wearing a pair of Bugle Boys. This pair's zipper says BBC, not YKK.
When a user accidently shuts down Word, autosave doesn't do anything. I believe Word automatically deletes the autosave files (which are saved in the TEMP directory! A really good place). As for X crashing, it does happen with XF86, but fairly rarely. It's an unusual occurance, whereas with windows... *cough*.
:-)
Well written applications? There are several office suites w/o a paperclip (can't speak much for them as I've never used them). Let's not forget the Gimp, either.
It's not like Gnome or KDE are any better. The first time I ever booted into Linux, I had to click around for a while till I saw the logoff button when I clicked the foot in Gnome.
You can't be serious! So you were completely unfamilar with the GUI and you had to click around...Big Deal! Try teaching a newbie that to turn off the computer you have to click on "Start." ("But I don't want to "start" anything else.") This was my point.
It sounds like you've hardly given *nix a chance. I've lived in both worlds, and let me tell you, the grass is greener on the other side. (Thanks to some Penguin fertalizer
I don't believe "standardized" user interfaces are all they're cracked up to be, especially when the standard interface is un-intuitive.
This has been on slashdot many times before. I mean, please, click Start to shutdown your machine? When someone sends you a zip file, when was the last time you attempted to use the "intuitive" Winzip interface? Give me a break. As for what the middle mouse button does, first of all, MS windows doesn't even support that, and second of all, the only time you need the middle button is for pasting in X-terms. The average luser wouldn't be interested in x-terms.
If you spend all your time in Word with auto-save set to every five minutes -- what can Linux offer you?
With a *nix, so long as the application is well written, you don't need autosave!
I believe you're drinking the Micro$oft Kool-aide(TM), my friend.
I worked for a retailer of questionable integrity a few years ago. I don't think they would ever go this far, but I wouldn't put it past them.
I was one of 2 techs working there. I would always attempt to fix the problems that customers were having. The other tech usually replaced whatever hardware he couldn't figure out in 5 minutes with a new piece of Acer garbage. Sound Blaster Sound card doesn't work? Here's a new Acer that works fine! Bad blocks on your hard drive? Here's a brand new Maxtor!
Needless to say, that shop went out of business a year after I left. I was replaced with someone with 1/10 of my experience, since the owner made more money off of unexperineced employees. (Could charge the customer for their flub-ups.) They deserved to go out of business.
Any shop that's still open and their only source of income is h/w sales and repairs, probabbily isn't honest, since the market has changed such that you can't make a living off of h/w sales alone. You need to add some other sort of value to make it. I'm sure there are some mom and pop type computer shops around that are honest...I've just never found one. So watch out.
I saw some sort of device in a Radio Shack catalogue that is said to circumvent this sort of nasty protection (which, BTW, I've noticed makes for really lousy legitimate playback). Has anyone had any experience with such devices?
Computer naming is truly an art.
:-)
I have a Dell Optiplex 133 that I use as my main machine. (Normally this would be way too slow for this day in age, but not with linux...but that's another story.) It's named "farmer". (as in, in the dell) The really sick thing is, I'm pround of this name.
As for group names, the best I've come up with are Statler, Waldorf, Gonzo, Piggy, Sam...Tons of names to choose from and you get to call them "The Muppet Machines."
Technics weren't around then and, quite frankly, most of the functionality you talk about could be gained by using a combination of the hinged nuts, and the full, half, and quater sized pieces. And their's still ease of use, and speed of construction. And, I believe that (and I could be wrong about this), per piece, Technics are considerably more expensive then Construx were (can you even buy them anymore), even when factoring in inflation.
I remember having fun with my Legos as a child, but they weren't nearly as fun as Construx.
With Construx, you could build things faster, and the end result was much sturdier then what you got with legos. You could actually play with it (which wasn't nearly as fun as building it). Legos always have the weakness in that all the pieces attach in the same direction, and makes the end result quite fragile (at least on the edges). It was possible to build things with Construx that could survive a trip down the stairs, w/o falling apart!
I recall making an R2D2 out of them, with motor and all. Those were the days.
It would appear that PC week didn't even bother to download all the errata rpm's into a directory and do a "rpm -Uvh *rpm".
:-)
In order for this to be a fair comparison, the NT box should have been installed w/o Service Packs.
Something tells me it wouldn't take 20 hours to crack an NT box without Service Packs applied.
---------------
When a program can crack a *nix box, it's called an exploit.
When a program can crack a windows box...it's called a "malicious program".
It would appear that PC week didn't even bother to download all the errata rpm's into a directory and do a "rpm -Uvh *rpm".
:-)
In order for this to be a fair comparison, the NT box should have been installed w/o Service Packs.
Something tells me it wouldn't take 20 hours to crack an NT box without Service Packs applied.
---------------
When a program can crack a *nix box, it's called an exploit.
When a program can crack a windows box...it's called a "malicious program".
Assuming evolution is fact (which, despite arguments to the contrary can only be "proven" by mangling the Scientific Method(and I'm not talking about "Survival of the Fittest" or evolution of very simple orginisims)) why aren't the overwhelming majority of large species hermaphrodites? I'm not a biologist, but it would seem to me that finding mates in order to reproduce would me much easier for such a species. Easier reproduction would lead to faster evolution, which would in turn lead to domination over other species.
Just as all of an artist's works share some similarities, couldn't this "genetic progression" you refer to be that the species were created by the same intelligence?
As far as I understand it, the belief that a "big bang" created the universe is similar to shaking a puzzle in it's box, throwing the pieces on the table, and having them all fall perfectly into place. From an mathematical standpoint, this is impossible.
It seems that it's easier to not even consider the possibility that a far greater intelligence created us. It's much easier to stick with a questionable theory which cannot be proven, and in my view seems highly implausible.
In order to believe evolution you have to have more faith than I do. You prefer to go out on a limb to explain the universe, rather then consider the possiblity that man is not the most intelligent being in the universe.
As recently as a year and a half ago I had nearly expiring 2 year subscriptions to PC Magizine, Computer Shopper (for the ads--I did a lot of purchasing), and *choke* PC Computing (only one year).
Once in a while Dvorak would write something witty and worthwhile, but by and large these magazines were written by English majors that wanted jobs. The hardware reviews had nothing to do with stability and usefullness...the only factors were ease of use for complete morons and questionable benchmarks based on speed (having very little to do with reality).
And lets not even talk about the overpriced, expensive toilet paper known as PC Computing. I think they should re-name it "PC-Computing for Dummies."
That's why I let them all lapse.
I only get Computer Reseller News (because it's free), and Linux Journal (which has ethics about quality) these days.
This isn't entirely a "good thing." I live in the state of New York. Now that VA has a presence in my state, I would have to pay sales tax on anything I purchase from them. At 7.25% this really hurts. Lately I prefer to "roll my own" systems, but this just eliminated any chance of me buying from them.
I just looked into internal IDE 2.5" HD's at Dirt Cheap Drives. $150 seems like an awful lot for only 4 gigs.
:-)
I figure I could get one of these puppies to boot over my home network with a floppy drive and a few megs of parity memory (~$37 for 16MB). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would assume these devices use regular floppy drives.
There seems to be some interesting info here:
http://www.multimania.com/multia/
According to google there once was information on digital's website, but it would appear that digital has finally become one with that evil, unsupportive hardware empire, aka Compaq.
Compaq can make monitors (and that's about it
If legislation like this is passed, all the dead people in Chicago will be voting. :-)
I think this is a horrible idea.
There have been rumors for some time now floating around Slashdot suggesting that the Evil Empire may decide to sell "MS Linux."
Wouldn't it be convienent for MS to purchase a company that has a product that has a nice GUI install already, integrates with Novell and NT, is already proprietary, and will compete directly with companies such as Red-Hat (with "MS" support of course). Best of all it will make the lawsuit go away.
The only flaw with this theory is that I can't see MS buying a product that will directly compete with their "vision", that can also be freely distributed (of course w/o the proprietary code). Then again, this proprietary code may be something worth building on to make it part of "the Empire" and therefore a reason that people would be willing to spend $200 ish for it plus licenses. Besides, many IT people won't touch Linux with a forty foot pole because it isn't sanctioned by MS (and because they're braindead). They would be willing to shell out the bucks if it was sanctioned by The Empire. MS has done this sort of thing before in the database market (ex: FoxPro vs. Access).
Just a thought.
I visited the show on Wednesday. There really wasn't anything new from last year's show.
:-) However, the Compaq booth wasn't all bad--you could sit for a few minutes, and they handed out Compaq chocolate bars.
:-)
While I didn't have much time to visit the BeOS booth (I was at the show with my boss) what I did see wasn't flattering. They had some video playing on BeOS and quite frankly, the quality stunk. The framerate didn't seem very high, and it seemed quite jumpy. This wasn't the BeOS I remembered seeing last year at this show.
I haven't seen anyone mention it before, but Castlewood was there in a big way (for a small startup). They had some corny comedian handing out plastic noisemakers and getting people to make lots of noise. (They were located in the very back of the first floor and needed something to draw crowds.) I got to hold the Orb (SCSI external). The drive itself seemed sturdy as well as the cartridges. I think I'll purchase one as soon as I'm sure they're not going to break after a month or two like SyQuest's 135MB and 230MB drives did.
The Compaq booth was just plain stupid. They had some dancers doing a jazzy routine singing about "e-biz city." They also had this corny guy they called "Dr C." (I think) talking about how Compaq invented everything from the first firewall to who knows what else. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Compaq hasn't done anything extraordinary since they produced the first IBM compatible machine. Since then they've just purchased companies which have done extraordinary things. (And lets not forget their valuable input into debacles such as EISA!
Perhaps the most amusing portion of the show was watching the herds of people going crazy at the Iomega booth. Here is a company who is raping its customers by charging $10 for 100MB. They make it up with colorful marketing, and people love it. Most of the rest of the world uses MO drives. I guess, and I can say this because I am one, most Americans are idiots. (I'm American, not an idiot
And yes the Linux Pavilion was a sorry sight. RedHat had a guy and a girl running a very tiny booth. Both of them looked like they wanted to run out of there quickly and get away from the crowds hording around their tiny space. Caldera had a much more professional offering, but still wasn't all that impressive.
I belive this show is dying. Last year the lower floor was full. This year it was half empty. Companies like Dell didn't even attend. Perhaps Miller Freeman (the company that runs the show) has been charging too much. Perhaps companies who already do plenty of marketing (like Dell) can't be bothered with the expense? Does anyone have any better reasons?
At home I've been running an old Digital 386DX/16 workstation, as a server for a while. It initially came with an Adaptec SCSI controller and a 40MB Scsi hard drive. It used the SCSI BIOS to boot the HD. The system bios itself could only select a floppy and the SCSI drive as an option to boot. Right now, I don't have any scsi hard drives in it at all. It has 2 small IDE drives and a Hardcard, with a copy of the kernel in the floppy drive. It boots off the floppy, and then uses the IDE drives, despite the fact that the BIOS doesn't support them.
This only thing IMHO that could prevent you from having eight IDE controllers is a lack of IRQ's or some other possible limitation, that I don't know of, placed by the PCI bus.
This is explained in more detail in the Large-Disk mini-HOWTO
In the changes file for 2.2.7 there was something about this:
"DHCP clients for 2.0 do not work with the new networking code in the 2.2 kernel. You will need to upgrade your dhcpcd / dhcpclient."
It's usually a good idea to look through all that stuff in the Documentation directory that comes with the kernel.