Why would I want Debian over Ubuntu? Stability and quality control.
Ubuntu is to Debian what Fedora is to Red Hat. It moves fast with the best new versions. It has all the bugs in the best new versions and deprecates old interfaces and configurations with that same speed.
Here's what I want from a server: It should be rock solid with an absolute minimum of bugs. It should run with essentially no attention for several years. Routine security updates should should be prompt and complete but require little or no operator attention. In particular, no routine update should result in an old configuration file becoming incompatible. Barring exceptional circumstances, it should run itself without my attention.
And when it does finally come time to upgrade to the next major release there should be a minimum negative impact on the server's existing configuration. If a piece of software drops a feature I'm using then it shouldn't automatically upgrade to the next version. Instead, the old version should remain available with security updates for a good long while.
Debian delivers on this. Ubuntu, as fine a system as it is, does not.
I suppose I can't speak for what's common outside the DC radio market where listen. And I won't argue with your assertion that its common for PARTICIPANTS in a talk show to join in via telephone. I listen to NPR now and then and its quite obvious. Nor is it particularly uncommon for one of the DJ's to hit the field on some humorous assignment, communicating back by cell phone.
But none of that is what the original poster asked for. He asked for a way to connect a co-host in another city such that it sounded as if they were in the same studio. I'm no radio expert, but I know telephony and that ain't happening with a POTS line.
Re-read TFGeditor's question. He specifically said, "[M]y radio CO-HOST and I are in different cities [...] I want it to sound as if we were both in the SAME STUDIO." Emphasis mine.
A POTS line (or VoIP equivalent) doesn't do that. For that requirement, you need a link operating with roughly the same encoding parameters as the resulting combined program, likely something stereo and around 22 khz.
And by the way, that ad hominem was unnecessary you ignorant buffoon.;)
Incorrect. Viacom says YouTube failed to prevent infringing material from being posted and therefore contributed to the infrigement. That's a whole different animal.
The DMCA says that YouTube has no legal duty whatsoever to prevent its users from posting infriging material. Instead, their duty is to follow the prescribed take-down proceedures upon receiving notice from Viacomm or others that a particular posting infringes.
Viacomm is trying to make an end run around the law here but there aren't any good precedents in the case law to head them off. In other words, no one noticeable has sued and lost. Google faces the same vulnerability with its web and book search engines.
Google needs a behemoth like Viacomm to sue, lose, appeal, lose again and by doing so validate the DMCA's safe harbor provision for service providers.
What I realize is that when the DJ on the morning show does a contest where he broadcasts all day from in front of a retail store, he's not sending the signal back to broadcast house via a monoral 4khz channel. If he's close enough to base, he's using microwave with a telescoping van-mounted antenna. Otherwise he's often using a fractional T1.
Perhaps its that T1 that confuses you. To the uninitated, the plug looks an awful lot like a phone jack.
Google has been spoiling for a fight over the DMCA safe-harbor provisions for some time now. Their book search and regular search business depends heavily on that part of the DMCA's enforceability. Without it, the Prodigy and Napster decisions could be used to annihilate Google and every other modern search engine.
Its far better for Google to explore the ramifications via a subsidiary company that can be cut loose to die if need be.
a clear-cut list of factors from a group would be welcome.
Indeed. I've said this in discussions on the subject before, but it bears repeating: If vehicle emissions are 30% of the problem and power plant emissions are another 30% then its worth the investment to switch to nuclear power and electric cars. But what if they're 3% each and the solar wind interactions due to the Earth's falling magnetic field is responsible for 60% of the warming? If that was the case then changing our driving habits wouldn't make a whit of difference; we'd need to find some way to counteract the sun-related heating instead.
We owe it to ourselves and to the people we're asking to change their lifestyles to narrow down the possible causes in to the specific causes with their respective rates so that we ENGINEERS can develop reasonable solutions.
Let me put it another way. I accept the theory if evolution. Its not particularly good science but its the only science that explains where we came from; every other explanation is either untestable or has been disproven.
Nevertheless, if you told me that we needed to invest a trillion dollars in changes to prevent the evolution of the superbug that must be coming, I'd laugh you right out of the room. It doesn't warrant serious consideration. You want a hundred million to set up the CDC, okay, but don't sit there and tell me with a straight face that we have to reinvent society because something as flimsy as the theory of evolution predicts the emergence of a superbug.
I should hope they can at least get a basic trend analysis right. This is the curve we've been following and now we draw it into the future. That's swell and all, but of very limited utility.
What I haven't seen yet (and if you have useful material, feel free to enlighten me) is a consensus list of significant warming and cooling factors in with their percentage impact on global warming in, oh lets pick 2003 for example.
It's basic science. CO2 absorbs infrared radiation. Absorbing infrared radiation leads to an increased thermal equilibrium. We have increased the CO2 concentration by 100 ppmv.
I'm inclined to agree that human factors contribute to global warming. But which ones contribute how much? And what contributing factors from non-human sources need to be taken in to account and in what quantities?
Here's the problem with the science currently on the table: If you add up all of the peer-reviewed human causes in the quantities that they're alleged to contribute to global warming, you end up with far more global warming as has actually happened. That's before you even consider non-human factors like cycles and the sun.
If the numbers don't add up then the science that claims to explain them is wrong. That's how we measure science: by its ability to accurately predict the numbers. If the numbers don't add up then however plausible and believable it is, its incorrect. Before we spend trillions of dollars on a solution, and make no mistake about the price tag, don't you think we owe it to each other to actually get the science right?
Besides, whatever country you live in, you're not the only place in the world. To have any meaningful impact you will at a minimum need the US, China, India and Brazil on board with your solution. How do you expect to get these countries to invest a sizeable fraction of their GNPs in solving global warming when your numbers don't add up?
When I worked for an ISP one of the tasks I had to deal with was, "Assign a/28 to customer X." That's a deceptively simple request.
First, some of my routers had as little as 16 megs of ram. Route aggregation is essential. So its not just assign it to customer X, its "Assign a/28 to customer X in network area A." That of course means that I first have to assign a superblock, say a/22 to network area A and install the/22 route at the borders of network area A. So now its, "Assign a/28 to customer X in network area A. Assign and route a new superblock to area A if necessary."
Second, there is the question of conservation. Today its assign a/28 but tomorrow it could be assign a/24. If I want to actually have a/24 tomorrow then I need to assign a/28 ideally from an available block in area A that's exactly a/28 long. If none are availale, I'd prefer to break a/27 (still in area A) rather than a/26 or a/25. So now its, "Assign a/28 from the smallest available block in network area A to customer X. Assign and route a new superblock to area A if necessary."
But, see, I've been doing this for years now and customers come and go. Quite a few of the blocks assigned in my list may be dead; no longer associated with active customers. I don't want to go breaking larger blocks if there's an assigned but dead/28 I can grab. So now its, "Clean dead assignments from the list. Then assign a/28 from the smallest available block in network area A to customer X. Assign and route a new superblock to area A if necessary."
And lets not forget reverse-DNS. Ideally I want the customer to have some sort of control over it. So now its, "Clean dead assignments from the list. Then assign a/28 from the smallest available block in network area A to customer X. Assign and route a new superblock to area A if necessary. Delegate the reverse DNS for those IP addresses to the customer."
Needless to say, a spreadsheet is not very helpful for any of this. Finding that optimal/28 from network area A is like searching for a needle in a haystack. What I really need a system that:
A. Processes the cancelled customer list so it knows which assigned blocks are dead, B. Find's the optimal/28 for me from area A for me, and C. Sets up an appropriate delegation so the customer will be able to manage the reverse-DNS for his IP addresses but no others.
And no, I never did find a good system to do this. I used a flat file that could be used to generate a graphic representation of the assigned addresses and tagged all blocks to customer ids so I could automatically check them against the accounting system. It was better than excel but it wasn't good.
it's always good to have qualified math people around, at any level.
Indeed. I'm just wondering what the guy who has taken number theory in college thinks about correcting students' long division errors day after day after day.
I'm a CS grad. I tried to teach computer literacy once and it felt like a trip to the dentist. I'm sure I did the students a disservice; I had no right to be frustrated with how long it took them to grasp trivial concepts and its impossible to hide that frustration.
Those students would have been much better served by someone who was closer in skill to them. Someone to whom the students' mistakes weren't grating or trivial.
I'm curious, what exactly are the math qualifications to teach the subject at a grade 1-8 level? Its pretty much add, subtract and some basic algrebra right?
Pardon me; I assumed the goal was to include software patents in the mix with the same goals and spirit as GPLv2. If GNU's goals have changed since GPLv2, that's another matter entirely.
The correct language in GPL v3 would be something like, "This agreement is void in its entirety if the covered software is found to implement a current, valid patent whose owner has not offered the patent for use for free in any manner comperable to how it is used in the covered software." They keep trying to skirt the issue, which is that you can't have free, open-source software if it implements non-free patents or if the patent license materially impacts what you would otherwise be able to do with the software or change the software in to.
Unfortunately, these are useless. I can get more than adequate air-cooling in a case that these would fit in. Where water cooling would be useful is inside a 1U server case and these are too tall.
The basic problem here is not source control... Its the sheer volume of text. If a congressman did nothing but read bills that had reached their final form before a vote there still wouldn't be enough hours in the day. And of course, he can't do that; he has to craft bills, participate in committees, interact with citizens and actually spend some time asleep at night too.
The solution would be to limit congress to something like one typewritten page per day for anything that spends money or has a binding effect. Also have a 24-hour cooling period between when the last amendment was voted on and when the finished bill can be voted on. Go home for the weekend and on monday you can do complicated bills that take 3 pages. And if a problem is more complex than a few pages then you give the federal bureaucrats their direction in a few pages and then let them do their jobs without micromanaging everything.
The bureaucracy could use a similar rule limiting the length of regulatory texts. Did you know that nobody in the federal government actually follows the hiring rules? That's because the texts which contains the rules are so long that virtually none of the hiring managers have ever read them completely. Instead they get a high-level overview in a workshop and nobody ever actually looks at the rules except when there is a lawsuit.
Actually, sweat works because the evaporation process is endothermic. When water turns from liquid to gas it consumes heat. That's why you can cool down to 98.6F even when its 105F outside. That's also why a room with a "cool mist" humidifier consisting of a fan and a sponge-like filter will cool down several degrees.
does the source of global warming actually matter much?
That depends on whether you want to complain about it or fix it. If you just want to complain then it doesn't much matter what the causative factors are or in what proportion. If you want to do something about it without breaking things even worse, it helps to understand what's actually going on.
Not an acronym
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Why would/etc be an acronym when every other directory off root is an abreviation?/bin - binaries/boot - bootstrap files/dev - devices/home - user home directories/lib - libraries/mnt - temporary mounts/proc - processes/sbin - static binaries/tmp - temporary files/usr - user programs (not boot critical)/var - variable data
Slashdot Mirror
Why would I want Debian over Ubuntu? Stability and quality control.
Ubuntu is to Debian what Fedora is to Red Hat. It moves fast with the best new versions. It has all the bugs in the best new versions and deprecates old interfaces and configurations with that same speed.
Here's what I want from a server: It should be rock solid with an absolute minimum of bugs. It should run with essentially no attention for several years. Routine security updates should should be prompt and complete but require little or no operator attention. In particular, no routine update should result in an old configuration file becoming incompatible. Barring exceptional circumstances, it should run itself without my attention.
And when it does finally come time to upgrade to the next major release there should be a minimum negative impact on the server's existing configuration. If a piece of software drops a feature I'm using then it shouldn't automatically upgrade to the next version. Instead, the old version should remain available with security updates for a good long while.
Debian delivers on this. Ubuntu, as fine a system as it is, does not.
Nix that; they hid it well.
The cases may be pretty but from the looks of the pictures, they've resurrected Commodore's legendary problems with trapped heat as well.
I suppose I can't speak for what's common outside the DC radio market where listen. And I won't argue with your assertion that its common for PARTICIPANTS in a talk show to join in via telephone. I listen to NPR now and then and its quite obvious. Nor is it particularly uncommon for one of the DJ's to hit the field on some humorous assignment, communicating back by cell phone.
But none of that is what the original poster asked for. He asked for a way to connect a co-host in another city such that it sounded as if they were in the same studio. I'm no radio expert, but I know telephony and that ain't happening with a POTS line.
Re-read TFGeditor's question. He specifically said, "[M]y radio CO-HOST and I are in different cities [...] I want it to sound as if we were both in the SAME STUDIO." Emphasis mine.
;)
A POTS line (or VoIP equivalent) doesn't do that. For that requirement, you need a link operating with roughly the same encoding parameters as the resulting combined program, likely something stereo and around 22 khz.
And by the way, that ad hominem was unnecessary you ignorant buffoon.
Incorrect. Viacom says YouTube failed to prevent infringing material from being posted and therefore contributed to the infrigement. That's a whole different animal.
The DMCA says that YouTube has no legal duty whatsoever to prevent its users from posting infriging material. Instead, their duty is to follow the prescribed take-down proceedures upon receiving notice from Viacomm or others that a particular posting infringes.
Viacomm is trying to make an end run around the law here but there aren't any good precedents in the case law to head them off. In other words, no one noticeable has sued and lost. Google faces the same vulnerability with its web and book search engines.
Google needs a behemoth like Viacomm to sue, lose, appeal, lose again and by doing so validate the DMCA's safe harbor provision for service providers.
What I realize is that when the DJ on the morning show does a contest where he broadcasts all day from in front of a retail store, he's not sending the signal back to broadcast house via a monoral 4khz channel. If he's close enough to base, he's using microwave with a telescoping van-mounted antenna. Otherwise he's often using a fractional T1.
Perhaps its that T1 that confuses you. To the uninitated, the plug looks an awful lot like a phone jack.
Sure, because a 4khz bandpass filter sounds fantastic.
And protects them from liability for infringement so long as they do so.
Google has been spoiling for a fight over the DMCA safe-harbor provisions for some time now. Their book search and regular search business depends heavily on that part of the DMCA's enforceability. Without it, the Prodigy and Napster decisions could be used to annihilate Google and every other modern search engine.
Its far better for Google to explore the ramifications via a subsidiary company that can be cut loose to die if need be.
a clear-cut list of factors from a group would be welcome.
Indeed. I've said this in discussions on the subject before, but it bears repeating: If vehicle emissions are 30% of the problem and power plant emissions are another 30% then its worth the investment to switch to nuclear power and electric cars. But what if they're 3% each and the solar wind interactions due to the Earth's falling magnetic field is responsible for 60% of the warming? If that was the case then changing our driving habits wouldn't make a whit of difference; we'd need to find some way to counteract the sun-related heating instead.
We owe it to ourselves and to the people we're asking to change their lifestyles to narrow down the possible causes in to the specific causes with their respective rates so that we ENGINEERS can develop reasonable solutions.
Let me put it another way. I accept the theory if evolution. Its not particularly good science but its the only science that explains where we came from; every other explanation is either untestable or has been disproven.
Nevertheless, if you told me that we needed to invest a trillion dollars in changes to prevent the evolution of the superbug that must be coming, I'd laugh you right out of the room. It doesn't warrant serious consideration. You want a hundred million to set up the CDC, okay, but don't sit there and tell me with a straight face that we have to reinvent society because something as flimsy as the theory of evolution predicts the emergence of a superbug.
I should hope they can at least get a basic trend analysis right. This is the curve we've been following and now we draw it into the future. That's swell and all, but of very limited utility.
What I haven't seen yet (and if you have useful material, feel free to enlighten me) is a consensus list of significant warming and cooling factors in with their percentage impact on global warming in, oh lets pick 2003 for example.
It's basic science. CO2 absorbs infrared radiation. Absorbing infrared radiation leads to an increased thermal equilibrium. We have increased the CO2 concentration by 100 ppmv.
I'm inclined to agree that human factors contribute to global warming. But which ones contribute how much? And what contributing factors from non-human sources need to be taken in to account and in what quantities?
Here's the problem with the science currently on the table: If you add up all of the peer-reviewed human causes in the quantities that they're alleged to contribute to global warming, you end up with far more global warming as has actually happened. That's before you even consider non-human factors like cycles and the sun.
If the numbers don't add up then the science that claims to explain them is wrong. That's how we measure science: by its ability to accurately predict the numbers. If the numbers don't add up then however plausible and believable it is, its incorrect. Before we spend trillions of dollars on a solution, and make no mistake about the price tag, don't you think we owe it to each other to actually get the science right?
Besides, whatever country you live in, you're not the only place in the world. To have any meaningful impact you will at a minimum need the US, China, India and Brazil on board with your solution. How do you expect to get these countries to invest a sizeable fraction of their GNPs in solving global warming when your numbers don't add up?
Sure they can. In fact, its especially amusing when a particularly anti-microsoft piece hosted on a Linux web server gets slashdotted.
What's good for the goose...
When I worked for an ISP one of the tasks I had to deal with was, "Assign a /28 to customer X." That's a deceptively simple request.
/28 to customer X in network area A." That of course means that I first have to assign a superblock, say a /22 to network area A and install the /22 route at the borders of network area A. So now its, "Assign a /28 to customer X in network area A. Assign and route a new superblock to area A if necessary."
/28 but tomorrow it could be assign a /24. If I want to actually have a /24 tomorrow then I need to assign a /28 ideally from an available block in area A that's exactly a /28 long. If none are availale, I'd prefer to break a /27 (still in area A) rather than a /26 or a /25. So now its, "Assign a /28 from the smallest available block in network area A to customer X. Assign and route a new superblock to area A if necessary."
/28 I can grab. So now its, "Clean dead assignments from the list. Then assign a /28 from the smallest available block in network area A to customer X. Assign and route a new superblock to area A if necessary."
/28 from the smallest available block in network area A to customer X. Assign and route a new superblock to area A if necessary. Delegate the reverse DNS for those IP addresses to the customer."
/28 from network area A is like searching for a needle in a haystack. What I really need a system that:
/28 for me from area A for me, and
First, some of my routers had as little as 16 megs of ram. Route aggregation is essential. So its not just assign it to customer X, its "Assign a
Second, there is the question of conservation. Today its assign a
But, see, I've been doing this for years now and customers come and go. Quite a few of the blocks assigned in my list may be dead; no longer associated with active customers. I don't want to go breaking larger blocks if there's an assigned but dead
And lets not forget reverse-DNS. Ideally I want the customer to have some sort of control over it. So now its, "Clean dead assignments from the list. Then assign a
Needless to say, a spreadsheet is not very helpful for any of this. Finding that optimal
A. Processes the cancelled customer list so it knows which assigned blocks are dead,
B. Find's the optimal
C. Sets up an appropriate delegation so the customer will be able to manage the reverse-DNS for his IP addresses but no others.
And no, I never did find a good system to do this. I used a flat file that could be used to generate a graphic representation of the assigned addresses and tagged all blocks to customer ids so I could automatically check them against the accounting system. It was better than excel but it wasn't good.
it's always good to have qualified math people around, at any level.
Indeed. I'm just wondering what the guy who has taken number theory in college thinks about correcting students' long division errors day after day after day.
I'm a CS grad. I tried to teach computer literacy once and it felt like a trip to the dentist. I'm sure I did the students a disservice; I had no right to be frustrated with how long it took them to grasp trivial concepts and its impossible to hide that frustration.
Those students would have been much better served by someone who was closer in skill to them. Someone to whom the students' mistakes weren't grating or trivial.
I'm curious, what exactly are the math qualifications to teach the subject at a grade 1-8 level? Its pretty much add, subtract and some basic algrebra right?
Pardon me; I assumed the goal was to include software patents in the mix with the same goals and spirit as GPLv2. If GNU's goals have changed since GPLv2, that's another matter entirely.
The correct language in GPL v3 would be something like, "This agreement is void in its entirety if the covered software is found to implement a current, valid patent whose owner has not offered the patent for use for free in any manner comperable to how it is used in the covered software." They keep trying to skirt the issue, which is that you can't have free, open-source software if it implements non-free patents or if the patent license materially impacts what you would otherwise be able to do with the software or change the software in to.
Unfortunately, these are useless. I can get more than adequate air-cooling in a case that these would fit in. Where water cooling would be useful is inside a 1U server case and these are too tall.
The basic problem here is not source control... Its the sheer volume of text. If a congressman did nothing but read bills that had reached their final form before a vote there still wouldn't be enough hours in the day. And of course, he can't do that; he has to craft bills, participate in committees, interact with citizens and actually spend some time asleep at night too.
The solution would be to limit congress to something like one typewritten page per day for anything that spends money or has a binding effect. Also have a 24-hour cooling period between when the last amendment was voted on and when the finished bill can be voted on. Go home for the weekend and on monday you can do complicated bills that take 3 pages. And if a problem is more complex than a few pages then you give the federal bureaucrats their direction in a few pages and then let them do their jobs without micromanaging everything.
The bureaucracy could use a similar rule limiting the length of regulatory texts. Did you know that nobody in the federal government actually follows the hiring rules? That's because the texts which contains the rules are so long that virtually none of the hiring managers have ever read them completely. Instead they get a high-level overview in a workshop and nobody ever actually looks at the rules except when there is a lawsuit.
Actually, sweat works because the evaporation process is endothermic. When water turns from liquid to gas it consumes heat. That's why you can cool down to 98.6F even when its 105F outside. That's also why a room with a "cool mist" humidifier consisting of a fan and a sponge-like filter will cool down several degrees.
does the source of global warming actually matter much?
That depends on whether you want to complain about it or fix it. If you just want to complain then it doesn't much matter what the causative factors are or in what proportion. If you want to do something about it without breaking things even worse, it helps to understand what's actually going on.
Why would /etc be an acronym when every other directory off root is an abreviation? /bin - binaries /boot - bootstrap files /dev - devices /home - user home directories /lib - libraries /mnt - temporary mounts /proc - processes /sbin - static binaries /tmp - temporary files /usr - user programs (not boot critical) /var - variable data
My 10 year old drives are still working great too. Its my 1 to 4 year old drives that are failing with alacrity.