It's much easier task to have good quality control if you only include old versions of all software. This is like cheating to me...
You are completely wrong. The reason why Debian includes so many "old versions" of all software is because of the principle that security fixes should never force you to upgrade to the latest version; rather the fixes should be backported to the old version of the software. Thus, you don't have to worry about an upgrade breaking the functionality of your application in an unexpected way. This approach it is much harder than just tracking the current release like other distributions do with the mindset that if the software is new, too new for there to be many meaningful bug reports, then the quality must be good!
Debian also has very stringent requirements on how many known bugs it can contain before a release can occur. Just because the software is older does not mean that it is automagically bug free. Enormous effort goes into squashing bugs, especially before a release. Don't forget that these bugs span eleven architectures too and fixing these obscure bugs which only appear on MIPS improve the software overall. I'd argue that Debian very likely does more to imporve the overall quality of Free Software than just about any other entity.
I interpret a scalable distro to mean a project that scales well as it grows in utility and number of people developing/using it.
A more apt interpretation might be something like, "a distro which can be installed on everything from small embedded systems to large NUMA machines with minimal hassle" or "a distro which which can install on eleven (11) architectures using the same installer and with virtually all packages installable on each."
debian:~> uname -a
Linux debian 2.4.26 #1 Sat May 1 18:58:40 EDT 2004 sparc64 GNU/Linux
debian:~> cat/proc/cpuinfo | head -n 1
cpu : TI UltraSparc IIi (Sabre)
I'm not saying that your problems aren't real, but Debian certainly supports Sparc and in my experience, it does so very well. I've had nothing but great success with Debian and Sparc, including the installer. Perhaps you should consider filing a bug report with the Debian Installer team. The architectures which have fewer users, receive fewer bug reports. How can you expect them to fix a bug they may not know exists?
As an aside, there is a good chance Sparc will be cut from Etch, so you may not have to worry about Debian "pretending to support SPARC hardware" in the future.
Just to nitpick the humor: copper connectors would be bad (the connectors are made of gold so that they don't corrode, not for its conductive properties; copper corrodes readily), and a wire made of silver would be far more reasonable (silver is much cheaper than gold and a better conductor).
You are probably aware of this, but just to be clear for everyone at home: Silver corrodes too, much more-so than copper.
Some software does does this... At least one app I've installed (I think the windows version of either the gimp or gaim) had a dialog box displaying the GPL with a button that said "that's great!"
(and tourists who don't understand the concept of sidewalks and walk all over the bicycle lanes --- a big problem in Amsterdam.)
Heh. Try to be sympathetic-- (American) tourists are not used to bike lanes. When they do exist in the US they tend to be on the same level as the motor traffic and generally separated from the pedestrian traffic by a grass strip (like this.)
Yes and yes. Just because you own a CD and could legally make an MP3 doesn't make it legal for you to download an equivalent MP3. People have been sued (and lost) on those exact grounds.
A few comments:
This does not sound right to me. Can you cite an example where someone lost a lawsuit over downloading a copy of a copyrighted work which they legally owned in another format?
Generally the infringing party is the one offing up the copyrighted work for downloading, not the downloader. (This, of course, may vary from country to country.)
Even if downloading copies of media that you outright own is illegal, and I can see why the RIAA/MPAA would wish it to be illegal, why should it be illegal? It makes no sense under any moral system I am familiar with.
Judging from my brief inspection of the SCI specifications, you can not get access to any of the Roomba's on-board memory or reprogram any of it's logic, but you can give it commands and read the state of the sensors-- so it should be possible to give the roomba mapping capability, provided that the logic was all external.
Something like a gumstix device would be an ideal platform-- it has linux, it has serial, and potentially wifi / bluetooth. You could even power the thing off of the roomba battery.
FYI, the windows AIM client and the MacOS iChat client at one point could do cross-platform video, but I haven't been able to get it to work recently and I'm not sure if that is due to firewall weirdness or if Apple or AOL broke the interoperability recently.
The only other option I know of is MSN using the cross-platform Mercury client. It's Java and buggy and the video quality is nothing compared to iChat, but it works.
Please ignore item 4; It was scratch work that I forgot to delete!
In any rate, with the 3 array LVM I outline above you get a total of 180+180+80 = 440 GB array with 40 and 90 GB left-over on two of your disks.
I hope you excuse me for intruding in the thread, but I find this to be a quite interesting optimization problem. You ultimately want to optimize, T, the total size of the LVM of arrays, where:
T = Sum_{j=1}^{m}[(N_{j}-1) * S_{j}]
where Sum_{j=1}^{m} is the sum over m arrays, N_{j} is the number of partitions in the jth array and S_{j} is the size of a partition in the jth array. One thing that this equation shows us, is that each array in the LVM does not need to be the same size!
The other constraint in this problem are:
N_{j} >= 3
which simply means that each array needs at least 3 partitions to be valid.
Now, there is another piece to this problem that I have not found a good way to express, which describes how to split a physical disk into partitions and then hand how to map each partition onto an array, j, since each disk does not have to contribute a partition to each array. This is needed to prove that a solution is optimal, but we should have enough intuition now to get a good solution.
For your specific example with 4 disks of 120, 160, 200 and 250 GB. I suggest an LVM made up of 3 arrays:
4 partitions of 60 GB coming from each disk for an 180 GB array. Free space is now 60, 100, 140 & 190 GB from disks 1 through 4 respectively.
4 partitions of 60 GB coming from each disk for an 180 GB array. 0, 40, 80 and 130 GB free.
3 partitions of 40 GB coming from disks 2, 3 and 4 for an 80 GB array. 0, 0, 40 and 90 GB left-over.
each array made up of 3 partitions. The first, second and third arrays have S_{j} = 50 GB and comes from disks 2, 3 and 4. This yields 100 GB in each array for a total of 300 GB. At this point there is 120 GB free in disk 1, 10 GB free in disk 2, 50 GB free in disk 3, and 100 GB free in disk 4. Now you can make another array with 3, 50 GB partitions coming from disks 1, 3 and 4, for a total of 400 GB in the LVM. Finally, you can take 10 GB from disks 1, 2, and 4 to add an additional 20 GB to the raid for a total of 420 GB. This leaves 60 GB free in disk 1, 0 GB free in disk 2, 0 GB free in disk 3 and 40 GB free in disk 4.
All these machines can test is for signs of nervousness, even an MRI machine. It's not some sort of magical probe where you can read what a person is thinking.
What else is an MRI machine other than a magical probe that reads what a person is thinking?;) Ok, ok: What else is an MRI machine other than a magical probe that detects levels of blood oxygenation correlated with their thoughts? I don't think it is at all unreasonable to think that MRI or some yet-uninvented brain imaging technology would yield remarkable predictive power for detecting lies.
Here is an excerptabstract from an article which asserts that fMRI can be used to detect lies:
The relative salience of the task cues affected the net activation associated with lie in the superior medial and inferolateral prefrontal cortices. Lie was discriminated from truth on a single-event level with an accuracy of 78%, while the predictive ability expressed as the area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operator characteristic curve (ROC) was 85%. Our findings confirm that fMRI, in conjunction with a carefully controlled query procedure, could be used to detect deception in individual subjects. Salience of the task cues is a potential confounding factor in the fMRI pattern attributed to deception in forced choice deception paradigms.
Prefrontal cortex is associated with planning complex tasks and with personality, so it seems reasonable to think that activity in this region could be used to detect lies.
I still contend that, in the event the US Attorney General actually brings charges against the Onion, there is quite a good chance they would win. The first ammendment must trump laws and executive orders except in very specific circumstances (eg clear and present danger.)
No, you're not paying attention. See TITLE 18, 713 (also referenced in another post.)
The Onion is not using the seal, "...for the purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States..." If the Onion went to court over this, there is a good chance they would win.
Even if we assume that the language bigotry you are espousing is entirely true, I'd argue that using "ruby-on-rails design principles" can make it possible to develop php apps more quickly and easily without having to relearn a language or hire different developers and that is a Good Thing.
Finally, when you're done, your Dad BLASTS the whole thing into space where they become a "star", presumably cathing on fire in a nuclear fission type reaction.(how else does it glow from light years away?)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, man that was a great song, and by the Pointer Sisters too, I believe. You can watch it here.
(-:
You are completely wrong. The reason why Debian includes so many "old versions" of all software is because of the principle that security fixes should never force you to upgrade to the latest version; rather the fixes should be backported to the old version of the software. Thus, you don't have to worry about an upgrade breaking the functionality of your application in an unexpected way. This approach it is much harder than just tracking the current release like other distributions do with the mindset that if the software is new, too new for there to be many meaningful bug reports, then the quality must be good!
Debian also has very stringent requirements on how many known bugs it can contain before a release can occur. Just because the software is older does not mean that it is automagically bug free. Enormous effort goes into squashing bugs, especially before a release. Don't forget that these bugs span eleven architectures too and fixing these obscure bugs which only appear on MIPS improve the software overall. I'd argue that Debian very likely does more to imporve the overall quality of Free Software than just about any other entity.
A more apt interpretation might be something like, "a distro which can be installed on everything from small embedded systems to large NUMA machines with minimal hassle" or "a distro which which can install on eleven (11) architectures using the same installer and with virtually all packages installable on each."
Linux debian 2.4.26 #1 Sat May 1 18:58:40 EDT 2004 sparc64 GNU/Linux
debian:~> cat
cpu : TI UltraSparc IIi (Sabre)
I'm not saying that your problems aren't real, but Debian certainly supports Sparc and in my experience, it does so very well. I've had nothing but great success with Debian and Sparc, including the installer. Perhaps you should consider filing a bug report with the Debian Installer team. The architectures which have fewer users, receive fewer bug reports. How can you expect them to fix a bug they may not know exists?
As an aside, there is a good chance Sparc will be cut from Etch, so you may not have to worry about Debian "pretending to support SPARC hardware" in the future.
You are probably aware of this, but just to be clear for everyone at home: Silver corrodes too, much more-so than copper.
Some software does does this... At least one app I've installed (I think the windows version of either the gimp or gaim) had a dialog box displaying the GPL with a button that said "that's great!"
Heh. Try to be sympathetic-- (American) tourists are not used to bike lanes. When they do exist in the US they tend to be on the same level as the motor traffic and generally separated from the pedestrian traffic by a grass strip (like this.)
A few comments:
Something like a gumstix device would be an ideal platform-- it has linux, it has serial, and potentially wifi / bluetooth. You could even power the thing off of the roomba battery.
Sure, but if OpenStandardA and OpenStandardB are both truly open standards, then both products could support both standards and naught is lost.
As do I, but it is not clear to me how tabbed email solves this problem...
The only other option I know of is MSN using the cross-platform Mercury client. It's Java and buggy and the video quality is nothing compared to iChat, but it works.
Please ignore item 4; It was scratch work that I forgot to delete! In any rate, with the 3 array LVM I outline above you get a total of 180+180+80 = 440 GB array with 40 and 90 GB left-over on two of your disks.
Now, there is another piece to this problem that I have not found a good way to express, which describes how to split a physical disk into partitions and then hand how to map each partition onto an array, j, since each disk does not have to contribute a partition to each array. This is needed to prove that a solution is optimal, but we should have enough intuition now to get a good solution.
For your specific example with 4 disks of 120, 160, 200 and 250 GB. I suggest an LVM made up of 3 arrays:
What else is an MRI machine other than a magical probe that reads what a person is thinking? ;) Ok, ok: What else is an MRI machine other than a magical probe that detects levels of blood oxygenation correlated with their thoughts? I don't think it is at all unreasonable to think that MRI or some yet-uninvented brain imaging technology would yield remarkable predictive power for detecting lies.
Here is an excerptabstract from an article which asserts that fMRI can be used to detect lies:
Prefrontal cortex is associated with planning complex tasks and with personality, so it seems reasonable to think that activity in this region could be used to detect lies.
FYI, Faraday cages do not need to be grounded. In fact, the inner surface of a Faraday cage works as a quite excellent ground.
and what exactly is the problem with google answers?
I still contend that, in the event the US Attorney General actually brings charges against the Onion, there is quite a good chance they would win. The first ammendment must trump laws and executive orders except in very specific circumstances (eg clear and present danger.)
The Onion is not using the seal, "...for the purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States..." If the Onion went to court over this, there is a good chance they would win.
At the risk of getting off-topic, why did your community college need Microsoft to teach C++?
Even if we assume that the language bigotry you are espousing is entirely true, I'd argue that using "ruby-on-rails design principles" can make it possible to develop php apps more quickly and easily without having to relearn a language or hire different developers and that is a Good Thing.
See php on trax.
is it THAT hard to do QOS? Many wifi routers will do it out of the box.