Base sixty is especially nice, because things are now divisible by 2,3,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30. Did I miss any? Talk about flexible! That's why it's so great that a circle has 360 degrees, it is divisible by so many numbers cleanly. I think this number stems from the Babylonian calendar, which had 360 days.
Why not switch to base 360 then, and get even more flexibility? Never mind that it's hard to find 60 unused and visually distinctive symbols which are easy to read and write, and that it's harder to mentally perform arithmetic in base 60 than base 10.
The best, then, would be base infinity. It would be divisible by anything, and it would greatly simplify calculus.:)
Except that: A) Linux driver hackers aren't just going to give up and jump ship. B) The odds of Solaris making a serious commitment to an open source development model are even smaller than the odds of them giving away Solaris.
The author seems to dismiss the possibility that Linux can do some things better than Solaris. If Solaris were free beer, it might replace Linux on some servers, but would it really be useful on the desktop? Would Sun try to make money off of support? Would other companies be allowed commercial exploitation rights (ISVs, resellers, etc.)? Is Solaris's i386 hardware support as good as Linux's?
These articles ("Linux would die if foo happened") all seem to miss an important point: Linux is not a finished product. It never will be. Linux is continuing to improve, and it will continually improve. There's no single critical company that can drop their support of the product when they want it to die. Linux will remain FS/OSS and it's hardly going to disappear overnight because a closed-source, closed-development OS from Sun is made freely availalbe.
No one is complaining that people want to take pictures with penguins. (AFAIK anyway.) The problem is that the penguins are brought into a huge bustling conference hall full of light and noise, housed in tiny sparse cages, and generally not treated with the respect they deserve as cute creatures. Besides, if they have enough money to help environmental causes, more power to them.
Contribute to K-rad, a KDE frontend to the GNU/rad utility to calculate radiation exposure.
Check/. to see if the major backbone providers are doing ok.
Run traceroutes to guess which places weren't hit. (Whoa, the Maldives are doing well. Doh! DC! It was all in vain!.)
Try to avoid the BSoD (Brown Smoke of Death).
Assist local disaster-relief organizations by migrating their proprietary birth/taxes/death-certificate database to an open one running Linux and MySQL, with a Perl/Tk frontend on X clients.
Don't miss the opportunity to plug FS/OSS: the cathedral is centralized/vaporized, but the bazaar keeps moving forward.
Reload/. incessantly in your hope to get a First Roast.
Help out any hurt penguins you find while on the beach.
Never forget the importance of an off-site backup!
Let's suppose that a nuclear exchange destroys the US. (We can also suppose it destroys Russia or China, but they're insignificant because they don't have much bandwidth to begin with.:)) If you're going to nitpick the nuclear war example, let's just suppose that for some generic reason, the available bandwidth decreased significantly and rapidly.
Now, we can't count on the users cutting down on their bandwidth use conscientiously. How, then, can we keep the critical services running? For a start, we need to define "critical services". I'll say that the greater the ratio of content to bytes, the higher the priority of a service. The only practical way to filter packets by service is to filter by port. You can run a filtered service on any old port you want, but the goal is not to prohibit services so much as drastically reduce the bandwidth used so that the network remains usable.
DNS, for example, would have a very high priority, and be one of the last services to drop. Without DNS, the network becomes significantly less usable. The services designed for text communication also would have a high priority: smtp and the assorted email services (no attachments), nntp (again, no attachments), finger, time services, gopher, and the like. Even http might be allowed through, but filtered by mime type (text/plain, text/html, x-www-form-unencoded, etc.).
Still, there would be a significant drop in the usefulness of the network. We need more bandwidth than we need to ensure reliability. Make bandwidth, not war!:)
Slashdot needs a system of comment pointers. You should be able to reply to a message with a special pointer to a cid within the same story. Of course, you can always provide that cid link now, but that's at least 5 lines of text for what could be accomplished in 2.
"I was unable to do something new without effort!"
on
CNN Installs Linux
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· Score: 4
He might have had more success if he read the documentation and installer help before screwing around.
As to his inability to identify his video card... Let's say I'm installing a new widget for my Thingamajig. Knowing nothing about Thingamajigs beyond how to use them, I first read up on them, particularly on the new widget I'm installing. What if I want to know what widget is currently installed, but I don't know enough about my Thingamajig to find out? I could ask a friend who is knowledgeable about Thingamajigs. I could contact the manufacturer or distributor of my Thingamajig and ask. Or, I could throw my hands up in the air, give up, and despair that "Thingamajigs are so hard to use!".
Linux is not drool-proof by any stretch of the imagination. Linus, Caldera, and the like may talk of the desktop market, but outside of IT-supported corporate networks, only users with at least some technical bent will install Linux. Microsoft isn't going to lose their market for a drool-proof OS any time soon. The fact that the users of said family of OSs don't know that with a little bit of effort they wouldn't be so Blue is irrelevant: if they aren't interested, they won't make the effort.
I'll be surprised if Linux ever penetrates the drool-proof market. It's an OS built by its users, for its users. OSS will tend to be designed for the people by which it is designed. Forget it, non-technical journalist, you aren't going to run Linux well unless you're willing to make some effort; if you aren't, Windows may be better for you.
Actually, it's a way to run any application for any processor and any OS, straight from Emacs. Unrelated planned features for Emacs include improved SMB support, an extremely light-weight httpd, and preliminary support for USB child-rearing devices.
Or rather, that Transmeta is developing processors. They might be produced by a different company. I don't know how large Transmeta is or whether it's capable of producing its own chips.
Don't forget Asterix, Obelix, Getafix, Vitalstatistix, Cacophonix, and the rest of the indomitable warriors.
I know I'm taking this too seriously, but...
on
Jesux is a Bad Pun
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· Score: 2
Sure, this is a fun joke thread, but let's assume for a minute that this is a serious micro-distro instead of a funny hoax that fooled ZDNet.
When I refer to a micro-distribution, I mean one of the many little "distributions" floating around that are really just a set of patches to a major (macro?) distribution. These micro-distros generally serve to make an existing distro more useful to a particular group of people: for example, the blind, Russians, Christians, Windows refugees, etc. What's wrong with that? Isn't Linux all about having choices? If there's demand for a particular (serious) micro-distro, then let it be. Not every distro aims at every user.
Disclaimer for the humor-impaired: the hoax in question is not what I consider a serious micro-distro. But it's the idea that counts here. Bah, I really need a sense of humor.
Hoax? As I wrote in the article, I wasn't sure. I'm still not. I've been given 'proofs' that it's a hoax, but none of them stand up.
This guy lists his occupation as "Cyber Cynic".
I feel really stupid for this, but... can someone please explain the humor in chmod accepting hex modes? I just don't get it, and that's frustrating me. Maybe I'll find some caffeine and think about it again.
Without disputing your overall assertion of security, I would like to take issue with your claim that "most of the cracker tools refused to compile/run properly due to its 64-bit architecture". To me, this sounds like "NT is secure because Unix cracking tools don't work". You're assuming that no one is capable of doing anything more than compiling sources that they don't understand. They can port the cracking tools, or write their own.
Correct me if I'm seriously misunderstanding this, but I don't see how buying commercial software gives companies someone to sue if something goes wrong. Most commercial software (say, NT) comes with a EULA that denies the licensee a right to sue. (OSS licenses also generally come with a clause stating that they are distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY and without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.) Sure, you can buy support contracts for commercial software, but you can also buy support contracts for OSS.
I suppose I could sue Andover because Rob links to Microsoft.
Seriously, what are the limits? If I create a Geocities site and put some "illegal" content on there, and link to it from my site, I think most people would realize that it's part of the same logical site. But what if I link to a site run by someone else?
Remember that in most countries it's illegal to give someone help in breaking the law. If I link to a site where someone can break the law, isn't that the same as helping them break the law?
The real issue here is that the courts don't understand the technology, and as such will make stupid rulings.
Zaman added that Microsoft has been considering making some of its software products open source for two years.
Open source is a very innovative way to develop software," Zaman said. "The issue is how much of our own code we should put out in the open source environment."
He is, I assume, talking about the IIS Sample Site and VB Examples. I remember Microsoft's commitment going back as far as gorillas.bas and other QBasic example programs, which were freely available when you bought QBasic.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not switch to base 360 then, and get even more flexibility? Never mind that it's hard to find 60 unused and visually distinctive symbols which are easy to read and write, and that it's harder to mentally perform arithmetic in base 60 than base 10.
The best, then, would be base infinity. It would be divisible by anything, and it would greatly simplify calculus. :)
Except that:
A) Linux driver hackers aren't just going to give up and jump ship.
B) The odds of Solaris making a serious commitment to an open source development model are even smaller than the odds of them giving away Solaris.
These articles ("Linux would die if foo happened") all seem to miss an important point: Linux is not a finished product. It never will be. Linux is continuing to improve, and it will continually improve. There's no single critical company that can drop their support of the product when they want it to die. Linux will remain FS/OSS and it's hardly going to disappear overnight because a closed-source, closed-development OS from Sun is made freely availalbe.
No one is complaining that people want to take pictures with penguins. (AFAIK anyway.) The problem is that the penguins are brought into a huge bustling conference hall full of light and noise, housed in tiny sparse cages, and generally not treated with the respect they deserve as cute creatures. Besides, if they have enough money to help environmental causes, more power to them.
Of course, if a web page crashes your browser, you have a problem with Netscape. And if it crashes your OS, you have a problem with IE. :)
Now, we can't count on the users cutting down on their bandwidth use conscientiously. How, then, can we keep the critical services running? For a start, we need to define "critical services". I'll say that the greater the ratio of content to bytes, the higher the priority of a service. The only practical way to filter packets by service is to filter by port. You can run a filtered service on any old port you want, but the goal is not to prohibit services so much as drastically reduce the bandwidth used so that the network remains usable.
DNS, for example, would have a very high priority, and be one of the last services to drop. Without DNS, the network becomes significantly less usable. The services designed for text communication also would have a high priority: smtp and the assorted email services (no attachments), nntp (again, no attachments), finger, time services, gopher, and the like. Even http might be allowed through, but filtered by mime type (text/plain, text/html, x-www-form-unencoded, etc.).
Still, there would be a significant drop in the usefulness of the network. We need more bandwidth than we need to ensure reliability. Make bandwidth, not war! :)
Slashdot needs a system of comment pointers. You should be able to reply to a message with a special pointer to a cid within the same story. Of course, you can always provide that cid link now, but that's at least 5 lines of text for what could be accomplished in 2.
As to his inability to identify his video card...
Let's say I'm installing a new widget for my Thingamajig. Knowing nothing about Thingamajigs beyond how to use them, I first read up on them, particularly on the new widget I'm installing. What if I want to know what widget is currently installed, but I don't know enough about my Thingamajig to find out? I could ask a friend who is knowledgeable about Thingamajigs. I could contact the manufacturer or distributor of my Thingamajig and ask. Or, I could throw my hands up in the air, give up, and despair that "Thingamajigs are so hard to use!".
Linux is not drool-proof by any stretch of the imagination. Linus, Caldera, and the like may talk of the desktop market, but outside of IT-supported corporate networks, only users with at least some technical bent will install Linux. Microsoft isn't going to lose their market for a drool-proof OS any time soon. The fact that the users of said family of OSs don't know that with a little bit of effort they wouldn't be so Blue is irrelevant: if they aren't interested, they won't make the effort.
I'll be surprised if Linux ever penetrates the drool-proof market. It's an OS built by its users, for its users. OSS will tend to be designed for the people by which it is designed.
Forget it, non-technical journalist, you aren't going to run Linux well unless you're willing to make some effort; if you aren't, Windows may be better for you.
Um, hello? The original poster never said he was running Linux or any flavor of Unix. Not everyone here runs Linux.
Actually, it's a way to run any application for any processor and any OS, straight from Emacs. Unrelated planned features for Emacs include improved SMB support, an extremely light-weight httpd, and preliminary support for USB child-rearing devices.
Actually, their real innovation is storing the sentence in memory until they're sure it's not understandable.
Or rather, that Transmeta is developing processors. They might be produced by a different company. I don't know how large Transmeta is or whether it's capable of producing its own chips.
Debian is already the Universal OS. Whatever that means, I'm sure it would please Taoists (get your Zen and Tao straight, BTW).
It's funny. If you haven't seen it yet, take a look.
Don't forget Asterix, Obelix, Getafix, Vitalstatistix, Cacophonix, and the rest of the indomitable warriors.
When I refer to a micro-distribution, I mean one of the many little "distributions" floating around that are really just a set of patches to a major (macro?) distribution. These micro-distros generally serve to make an existing distro more useful to a particular group of people: for example, the blind, Russians, Christians, Windows refugees, etc. What's wrong with that? Isn't Linux all about having choices? If there's demand for a particular (serious) micro-distro, then let it be. Not every distro aims at every user.
Disclaimer for the humor-impaired: the hoax in question is not what I consider a serious micro-distro. But it's the idea that counts here.
Bah, I really need a sense of humor.
kernel periodically sends GOSPEL messages, which appear on all ttys by default
alias burn-at-stake='rpm -e --force --nodeps'
functions of root now split into 3 accounts
Biblical quotes in /etc/issue, /etc/issue.net, /etc/motd, and similar places
xearth replaced by xheaven and xhell
random numbers a a form of gambling, so /dev/random and /dev/urandom are symlinked to /dev/zero
CGAN -- Christian Gospel Anti-heretic Network
serpents are sinful; python will not ship default with distribution, neither will anaconda be used as the installer
Hoax? As I wrote in the article, I wasn't sure. I'm still not. I've been given 'proofs' that it's a hoax, but none of them stand up.
This guy lists his occupation as "Cyber Cynic".
I feel really stupid for this, but... can someone please explain the humor in chmod accepting hex modes? I just don't get it, and that's frustrating me. Maybe I'll find some caffeine and think about it again.
Without disputing your overall assertion of security, I would like to take issue with your claim that "most of the cracker tools refused to compile/run properly due to its 64-bit architecture". To me, this sounds like "NT is secure because Unix cracking tools don't work". You're assuming that no one is capable of doing anything more than compiling sources that they don't understand. They can port the cracking tools, or write their own.
Correct me if I'm seriously misunderstanding this, but I don't see how buying commercial software gives companies someone to sue if something goes wrong. Most commercial software (say, NT) comes with a EULA that denies the licensee a right to sue. (OSS licenses also generally come with a clause stating that they are distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY and without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.) Sure, you can buy support contracts for commercial software, but you can also buy support contracts for OSS.
I found "tea rodent" to be amusing.
Seriously, what are the limits? If I create a Geocities site and put some "illegal" content on there, and link to it from my site, I think most people would realize that it's part of the same logical site. But what if I link to a site run by someone else?
Remember that in most countries it's illegal to give someone help in breaking the law. If I link to a site where someone can break the law, isn't that the same as helping them break the law?
The real issue here is that the courts don't understand the technology, and as such will make stupid rulings.
But has Microsoft considered making their products open source for two years? How long ago was Halloween?
Open source is a very innovative way to develop software," Zaman said. "The issue is how much of our own code we should put out in the open source environment."
He is, I assume, talking about the IIS Sample Site and VB Examples. I remember Microsoft's commitment going back as far as gorillas.bas and other QBasic example programs, which were freely available when you bought QBasic.