Personally, I would recommend using a CD:). I know you said you don't want to hear that, but the USB drive approach is completely new and probably will have a lot more snags than just burning an ISO image (which, if you use the netinst images, is just as small a download as the USB image). I also don't know of any way to create the USB image from Windows -- which isn't to say there isn't one; I just don't know how to do it.
Well, the new installer is superficially similar to the old one (it looks the same: it's a sequence of text-based menus), but it's a lot slicker behind the scenes and does stuff like hardware detection for you. For instance, if you were asked to manually insert modules into the kernel, then you probably didn't use this installer.
...not to mention the fact that the policies promoted by parties change over time. You might as well say that the Republicans are for civil rights because Lincoln was, or that the Democrats favor segregation because Strom Thurmond did.
I used an older build to install a system the other day, and I hardly even had to hit the Enter key. (ok, the system didn't work once it was set up, but that turned out to be my fault, not the installer's:) )
If you scan through some of those screens, you'll discover that the reason there are so many is that you can take branches in the installer: for instance, if you choose to set up RAID, you get a bunch of screens about the RAID configuration; if the network can't be set up via DHCP, you get screens about setting up the network. A fair number of the screenshots are also screenshots of progress bars, which are noninteractive. (and a huge improvement over the old installer, where you just watched a message like "Setting up the base system..." while the hard drive churned)
I doubt it would be hard to come up with a statistical technique for separating random data from the sound of people talking (or from sound data generally).
Article claims it would be good for National Security... I dunno
What you fail to realize is that it's spelled "National Security", but it's pronounced "GRANT FUNDING".
Daniel
Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap
on
Bash 3.0 Released
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· Score: 1
If you're stuck on a proprietary Unix, especially one that's set up poorly (or at least without many development tools), installing bash in your home directory is not trivial. The situation is even worse if you're subject to a quota (been there done that).
when you run your mouse over and then off the link, the link that it would've gone to is shown in the status bar.
No, the status bar doesn't change at all. That's worrying in itself: I would hope that my browser would not be so stupid as to let web pages lie in the status bar about where links go...but apparently it is. [0]
Daniel
[0] explanation: obviously those links do *something*, and the status bar should say "javascript:disabledMessage()" or something.
That's a nice thought, but the settlement email very specifically states that you have to swear under penalty of perjury that you were harmed in some way by PayPal (that you experienced an unauthorized money transfer, denial of access to your account, etc).
Sure -- just the other day cnn.com ran a front-page article explaining how people are scared of buying open-source software because users can be sued over copyright infringement.
Or, um, is that not what you meant?
Daniel
Re:That "interesting", but what about...
on
3D Mouse
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· Score: 1
I had sawfish configured something like this for years: scroll the mouse up to raise a window, scroll it down to lower the window. Unfortunately, I've been trying out KDE lately and its window manager doesn't seem to know about the scroll wheel:-(
I worked for NASA over the summer once. While I was there, an edict went out that employees were to avoid using the CD drives in their computers. The reason? Apparently there was a risk that the CD would shatter in the drive, sending deadly shards of metal/plastic in all directions. The memo went on to advise us that if we absolutely had to use a CD, we should turn our computers to face the wall (presumably because walls don't sue for workplace injury).
The best way to influence the PTO is probably through Congress.
The only leverage I, as a citizen, have over Congress is my ability to (a) vote against my incumbent Congressman, or (b) send him a letter in which I threaten to vote for another candidate if he doesn't change his ways. Neither is particularly effective when all the serious candidates have identical positions on an issue: say, for instance, the question of how software patents should be handled...
This sounds like it could throw off any hopes of Linux getting more market share. I know the author is framing it as a bad thing for Microsoft...but at least part of the reason people think about moving to Linux is that Windows is so rickety. I've always suspected that this is because of the need to be compatible back to DOS 1.0, and I think this pretty well proves it:
[SimCity] used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. (emphasis added)
Now, I'm sure there were fairly talented people working on this....but if, as the author goes on to state, this was not an unusual practice at Microsoft, I'm frankly amazed they even got Windows to stay up for a few minutes at a time. It certainly explains the bizarre and inexplicable behavior and crashes Windows is known for.
Of course, fixing Windows wouldn't help Microsoft's reputation for hardball tactics or for overpriced licenses, but it does make it that much harder to suggest that people try an alternative.
This actually is a bad analogy: you might not have bought the car, but *someone* probably would have. Since only one person can be in possession of a particular car, your (hopefully hypothetical) theft IS a lost sale: not only does the owner lose the potential sale to you, they also lose the potential sale to every other customer on the planet.
This is analogous to walking into a CD store, taking a CD off the shelf, and walking out without paying. The difference between shoplifting and making an extra copy of a CD is left as an exercise for the reader.
Last time I voted (in '02), in one of the races on the ballot, I got to choose between Rick Santorum and...um, Rick Santorum. Fat lot of good voting does then! [0]
Maybe praying will get something accomplished -- I doubt it, but it can't have worse odds.
Daniel
[0] note: Santorum may actually have been opposed, but most of the races on the ballot were unopposed and I can't remember which were which two years later...
Personally, I don't care much about the extra features -- if I had a large VHS collection, I'd rather just be able to record it to DVDs if I felt like and skip the hours of interviews with obscure cast members.
Can you imagine a graphics course without combinatorics? There goes region-coloring.
Graphics courses generally require more linear algebra (to do coordinate transforms and so on) than combinatorics. Neither of the courses I'm familiar with (ie: the one I took or the one I was a TA for) even included region coloring as a topic, and I doubt they're unusual in that regard.
On the other hand, region coloring (or rather, 3-coloring) is one of the standard examples of an NP-complete problem, and combinatorics *are* important for complexity theory:)
Math isn't about math; it's about [logical] thinking.
Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to make it through school without learning either skill. I think the primary/secondary curriculum could really use a larger dose of informal (ie, non-mathematical) and formal logic, so more people can at least be prepared to spot obvious fallacies that come up again and again.
Slashdot Mirror
Mine doesn't have an (internal) CD drive either.
If you have an external USB CD/floppy drive that you can boot from, that should work just as well.
Daniel
non-destructive resizing
Note, however, that this resizing does not work with NTFS, so you can't use it to split the hard drive on any computer sold in the last 3 years or so.
Daniel
Personally, I would recommend using a CD :). I know you said you don't want to hear that, but the USB drive approach is completely new and probably will have a lot more snags than just burning an ISO image (which, if you use the netinst images, is just as small a download as the USB image). I also don't know of any way to create the USB image from Windows -- which isn't to say there isn't one; I just don't know how to do it.
Daniel
Well, the new installer is superficially similar to the old one (it looks the same: it's a sequence of text-based menus), but it's a lot slicker behind the scenes and does stuff like hardware detection for you. For instance, if you were asked to manually insert modules into the kernel, then you probably didn't use this installer.
Daniel
...not to mention the fact that the policies promoted by parties change over time. You might as well say that the Republicans are for civil rights because Lincoln was, or that the Democrats favor segregation because Strom Thurmond did.
Daniel
I used an older build to install a system the other day, and I hardly even had to hit the Enter key. (ok, the system didn't work once it was set up, but that turned out to be my fault, not the installer's :) )
If you scan through some of those screens, you'll discover that the reason there are so many is that you can take branches in the installer: for instance, if you choose to set up RAID, you get a bunch of screens about the RAID configuration; if the network can't be set up via DHCP, you get screens about setting up the network. A fair number of the screenshots are also screenshots of progress bars, which are noninteractive. (and a huge improvement over the old installer, where you just watched a message like "Setting up the base system..." while the hard drive churned)
Daniel
I doubt it would be hard to come up with a statistical technique for separating random data from the sound of people talking (or from sound data generally).
Daniel
Article claims it would be good for National Security... I dunno
What you fail to realize is that it's spelled "National Security", but it's pronounced "GRANT FUNDING".
Daniel
If you're stuck on a proprietary Unix, especially one that's set up poorly (or at least without many development tools), installing bash in your home directory is not trivial. The situation is even worse if you're subject to a quota (been there done that).
Daniel
when you run your mouse over and then off the link, the link that it would've gone to is shown in the status bar.
No, the status bar doesn't change at all. That's worrying in itself: I would hope that my browser would not be so stupid as to let web pages lie in the status bar about where links go...but apparently it is. [0]
Daniel
[0] explanation: obviously those links do *something*, and the status bar should say "javascript:disabledMessage()" or something.
That's a nice thought, but the settlement email very specifically states that you have to swear under penalty of perjury that you were harmed in some way by PayPal (that you experienced an unauthorized money transfer, denial of access to your account, etc).
Daniel
Is any of this getting press in the media,
Sure -- just the other day cnn.com ran a front-page article explaining how people are scared of buying open-source software because users can be sued over copyright infringement.
Or, um, is that not what you meant?
Daniel
I had sawfish configured something like this for years: scroll the mouse up to raise a window, scroll it down to lower the window. Unfortunately, I've been trying out KDE lately and its window manager doesn't seem to know about the scroll wheel :-(
Daniel
I worked for NASA over the summer once. While I was there, an edict went out that employees were to avoid using the CD drives in their computers. The reason? Apparently there was a risk that the CD would shatter in the drive, sending deadly shards of metal/plastic in all directions. The memo went on to advise us that if we absolutely had to use a CD, we should turn our computers to face the wall (presumably because walls don't sue for workplace injury).
Daniel
The best way to influence the PTO is probably through Congress.
The only leverage I, as a citizen, have over Congress is my ability to (a) vote against my incumbent Congressman, or (b) send him a letter in which I threaten to vote for another candidate if he doesn't change his ways. Neither is particularly effective when all the serious candidates have identical positions on an issue: say, for instance, the question of how software patents should be handled...
Daniel
You can't "verb" something
Sure you can, but verbing weirds language.
Daniel
This sounds like it could throw off any hopes of Linux getting more market share. I know the author is framing it as a bad thing for Microsoft...but at least part of the reason people think about moving to Linux is that Windows is so rickety. I've always suspected that this is because of the need to be compatible back to DOS 1.0, and I think this pretty well proves it:
[SimCity] used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. (emphasis added)
Now, I'm sure there were fairly talented people working on this....but if, as the author goes on to state, this was not an unusual practice at Microsoft, I'm frankly amazed they even got Windows to stay up for a few minutes at a time. It certainly explains the bizarre and inexplicable behavior and crashes Windows is known for.
Of course, fixing Windows wouldn't help Microsoft's reputation for hardball tactics or for overpriced licenses, but it does make it that much harder to suggest that people try an alternative.
Daniel
It's the truth of this kind of cynicism that makes things suck.
I hope you don't mind if I take the liberty of correcting a slight editorial error...
Daniel
Is the company running out of money? Why do they need to go public?
Supposedly there's an SEC regulation that requires them to go public once they reach a certain profit level. At least, that's their excuse.
Daniel
This actually is a bad analogy: you might not have bought the car, but *someone* probably would have. Since only one person can be in possession of a particular car, your (hopefully hypothetical) theft IS a lost sale: not only does the owner lose the potential sale to you, they also lose the potential sale to every other customer on the planet.
This is analogous to walking into a CD store, taking a CD off the shelf, and walking out without paying. The difference between shoplifting and making an extra copy of a CD is left as an exercise for the reader.
Daniel
Last time I voted (in '02), in one of the races on the ballot, I got to choose between Rick Santorum and...um, Rick Santorum. Fat lot of good voting does then! [0]
Maybe praying will get something accomplished -- I doubt it, but it can't have worse odds.
Daniel
[0] note: Santorum may actually have been opposed, but most of the races on the ballot were unopposed and I can't remember which were which two years later...
Personally, I don't care much about the extra features -- if I had a large VHS collection, I'd rather just be able to record it to DVDs if I felt like and skip the hours of interviews with obscure cast members.
Daniel
I just have to finish the last book or two of the series.
If I may give you some advice: don't waste your time; the last two books are far below the bar set by the first three.
Daniel
Can you imagine a graphics course without combinatorics? There goes region-coloring.
:)
Graphics courses generally require more linear algebra (to do coordinate transforms and so on) than combinatorics. Neither of the courses I'm familiar with (ie: the one I took or the one I was a TA for) even included region coloring as a topic, and I doubt they're unusual in that regard.
On the other hand, region coloring (or rather, 3-coloring) is one of the standard examples of an NP-complete problem, and combinatorics *are* important for complexity theory
Daniel
Math isn't about math; it's about [logical] thinking.
Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to make it through school without learning either skill. I think the primary/secondary curriculum could really use a larger dose of informal (ie, non-mathematical) and formal logic, so more people can at least be prepared to spot obvious fallacies that come up again and again.
Daniel