You're baffled because obviously you've never installed flash player 10 or current WMV codecs on Ubuntu before, which used to be a major hassle. Now it isn't. It was an even bigger hassle to get flash and java working on x86_64, and now that's no hassle at all either.
Actually I have an x64 ubuntu machine on my desktop, and I have experienced the horrible frustration of trying to get flash and java working on it. I know exactly what you're talking about. If that's gotten better in jaunty, that's great. What doesn't make sense to me is the author's description of what he thinks has been improved -- as if apt couldn't be used through a gui before, and as if apt didn't already take care of dependencies. As far as I can tell, the problem with java originated because of Sun's annoying license, and is now going away because Sun switched to a better license. It's not as though there was ever anything technically difficult about packaging java for debian/ubuntu. Similar deal with flash -- Adobe simply wasn't all that interested in providing good support for linux and x64 linux.
Anyway, what is the correct procedure in jaunty for installing java (compiler, runtime, and applet support) and flash 10 (including x64 support)?
What I would really love to see would be for gnash to become usable. I know Gnu made a big push to improve gnash, which seemed to culminate in the youtube video of RMS dancing & friends dancing, which could be played using gnash. The trouble was that it only actually worked if you had the right video card, you did it on a Tuesday under a full moon, and you sacrificed an unblemished calf in the temple of Zeus. I wonder if gnash has been making any progress since then. My experience, every time I've ever tried it, was that it was utterly impossible to use as a replacement for flash.
To most people the GUI is synonymous with the OS, but they're two separate things. By far the bulk of the review seems to be talking about how he likes this version of Gnome better. Well, that's fine, but Ubuntu isn't the same thing as Gnome. I run Ubuntu, but I don't use Gnome.
He also seems favorably impressed with the performance of the GUI, but again this mixes together a lot of stuff in a pretty uninformative way. He's got a particular nvidia card. I don't have that card, so his perception of "windows moving around without jerkiness" probably means nothing to me, even if I were to use Gnome.
Want Adobe Flash or other proprietary software like multimedia codecs on Ubuntu? Just search for them in the one location, under their own names. No downloading anything from any Web sites. No package management or dependencies. No apt-get. Point and click.
This part baffles me. "No package management or dependencies." Since when have you ever had to worry about package management or dependencies on an ubuntu machine? Dependencies are taken care of automatically by apt. "No apt-get. Point and click." Huh? For years and years now, you've been able to install packages on a debian/ubuntu box by clicking around on a gui, if that's what floats your boat. (Personally I prefer to use apt from the console, since, e.g., it lets me install fifty apps at once just by cutting and pasting a string of package names.) Why is he using apt-get in contradistinction to point and click, as if it was a new thing to be able to access apt via a gui?
Re:Read the release notes (whilst downloading torr
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Ubuntu 9.04 Released
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· Score: 1
Thanks for pointing that out, but I don't have an Intel mobo. However, it does sound like what happened to me, so maybe it's a similar issue, with a different mobo.
Have you verified that the CD you are using is defect free? There is a test CD option if you can get as far as the live CD menu.
Yes, I think I did verify it.
Anyone else having trouble booting?
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Ubuntu 9.04 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
I tested the waters a couple of weeks ago by downloading the prerelease version of Jaunty as an iso and burning it to a live cd. My machine wouldn't boot from the live cd (started to boot, didn't complete the process). I don't have any trouble booting from a live cd of other versions of Ubuntu, and this machine currently has intrepid, which works fine. It's an x64 box.
Is anyone else having problems like this? I'm definitely chicken to upgrade if there's a risk of making my system unbootable. I'm all in favor of shorter boot times, but it does have to boot.
The impression I generally get is that it's a good idea to wait at least a few weeks before upgrading to a newly released version of ubuntu.
Yeah, I tried to get my school to use foxit instead of AR. It didn't work out well at all. The pdfs they were using wouldn't display correctly in foxit. Unfortunately, Windows is a wasteland when it comes to open-source software. The best solution, if you have the choice, is to switch to ubuntu.
or would removing the DRM so that I can use them in a third party PDF viewer be a violation of my license with the college and publishers?
Who cares? You're in a situation where you're being horribly abused. The professor chose the book, the publisher chose to put DRM on it, and the publishing industry's lobbyists got Congress to pass the DMCA...just do whatever works for you. You paid for the book, after all.
I really don't want to lose my eBook library, but I don't want to get infected either.
Turn off javascript in AR: Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript".
For more information than you'll probably ever want about beer brewing, see How to Brew, by John Palmer (free online, also available in print).
Although the Palmer book is for homebrewers, apparently getting rid of haze is something that commercial breweries are extremely interested in, and they spend millions of dollars on research. As far as I can tell, it would mainly be an issue for American-style lagers (e.g., Budweiser), which are transparent enough that the haze would be noticeable. However, tannins and haze can also correlate with taste and shelf life (oxidation). As a homebrewer, I've never really worried about it much.
I'm not clear on why they want to use genetic modification to control when flocculation happens. There are tons of varieties of yeast that you can buy, and one of the criteria you apply when you're selecting a strain of yeast is how alcohol-tolerant it is. A less alcohol-tolerant strain will respond earlier to the stress of the alcohol by flocculating out. Since there are already so many different strains with different flocculation properties, I don't really see what the genetic modification gains you.
This seems like a good time to pump my own open source project: pHash. pHash is a perceptual hashing library that computes hashes for audio, video and image files, with text and PDF hashing coming soon.
Cool! The history of these algorithms, and of databases like CDDB, is kind of depressing to an open-source guy like me. It's great to see someone doing this as an open-source project. How stable is the algorithm? If I compute a pHash today, will it still be compatible with pHashes computed next year? Any plans to make a database of pHashes? I have a music collection that contains a lot of digitized LPs, and music that's sometimes one album per file but sometimes one track per file. It would be really convenient to be able to crank out pHashes for them and get useful data automatically.
The slashdot summary discusses two hypothetical solutions: (1) Send out thousands of DMCA takedown notices. (2) Negotiate with ad networks for a percentage of ad revenue. I'd suggest (3) fix broken search engines that send users to cut-and-paste sites. I'm really tired of doing searches on search engines and finding hundreds of hits that all turn out to be cut-and-paste pages taken from the same Wikipedia article.
They may be perfectly legal, if they comply with Wikipedia's license, and therefore solutions 1 and 2 won't work at all. Google already has various proprietary and secret algorithms for detecting which web sites are trying to game page rank. Shouldn't it be pretty straightforward to come up with a list of thousands of utterly legal, and yet utterly useless, domains that do nothing but cut and paste other people's contents?
David Wiley is a good guy. He's been working on applying the free information ethos to education for a long time. However, I think he's totally off base here. As the parent post notes, interaction is important. Also:
lectures are also available online to everyone anywhere for free
We already have a way of broadcasting information unidirectionally to a large number of people. It's called a book.
science labs are virtual
Totally wrongheaded. Are we going to go back to medieval scholasticism, where it didn't matter what really happened in real life, it only mattered what Aristotle said was supposed to happen? The whole point of a science lab is to make contact between the abstract ideas in a textbook and real life.
and digital textbooks are free.
I love free textbooks. I've written some. However, they aren't going to transform a college education into something you do in your bathrobe and slippers at a distance of 5000 miles from the campus. "Free" here presumably means both free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech. The free-as-in-beer part has absolutely no effect on colleges or professors. Most professors don't even consider price as a factor in textbook selection. Lowering the price to zero will have absolutely no effect on the way colleges work. The free-as-in-speech part can have a lot of good effects on individuals and society, but I don't see it fundamentally changing the way colleges work.
Okay, I'll make the argument to the contrary: that IBM currently has every reason to be giving their Evil Laugh a big workout right now.
The NY Times this morning has an article saying that basically this is all about Oracle wanting to get into the business of designing, selling, and maintaining integrated systems for businesses that don't want to have to deal with a zillion vendors and bake their own setups. This is essentially what IBM is already in the business of doing. IBM already has a thriving business model where they set up their customers with software and hardware, and a lot of the software they use is open-source.
By buying Sun, Oracle gets a bunch of software. But OpenSolaris, MySQL, Java, and OpenOffice were all already open-source. Well, nothing was stopping them from selling customers a setup that used MySQL, Java, and OpenOffice, even before they bought Sun. That's what IBM does already. You could argue that Oracle gets more control now over these things. Well, yeah, except that because they're open source, they can always be forked, and they'll always be in competition with other open-source projects. Suppose that Oracle, for example, lets MySQL languish for fear of making it compete too effectively with Oracle Database. Well, the OSS community could then fork MySQL, or simply switch to alternatives like Drizzle (low end) or Postgres (high end).
By buying Sun, Oracle also gets a hardware operation. But Oracle has no experience in the hardware business.
There's also the argument that buying your competitors is an easier way to grab market share than out-competing them or out-marketing them. That was a sane argument for buying PeopleSoft. But OpenSolaris, Java, and OpenOffice, and Sun's hardware weren't products that were competing with Oracle's products, and MySQL wasn't really competing in the same arena as Oracle Database either.
it was to ail a very real problem of people taking literature, translating it and selling it in foreign countries with no revenue going to the original artist or publisher. So I believe it was commonplace to accept distribution contracts to--ironically--protect your works from being distributed for free in foreign countries where you would have no chance of prosecuting.
This may be one of the historical reasons for the restrictions, but I don't think it has much to do with the present reasons for them.
To start off with, you have to understand that traditional-style print publishing is an extremely capital-intensive business. It costs a huge amount of money to set a traditional (not print-on-demand) printing setup for a run. Once you have it set up, the incremental cost of producing one more book is virtually zero. Then you have this huge inventory, which you have to hope you can sell. Because of this, magazines and book publishing houses want to make sure that their contract with the author is exclusive. I've sold some short fiction, and typically what happens is that they want first North American serial rights (FNASR) and exclusivity for a certain amount of time. Books are somewhat different, but it's still the same general concept either way. If they're going to spend the money to put you in print, they want to be damn sure that readers will be getting your writing through them. (By the way, most short fiction markets don't mind at all if you put your work up for free online after a certain amount of time has elapsed.)
However, it would be ridiculous for them to try to demand that kind of exclusivity worldwide. In many cases they simply don't have marketing, sales, and distribution in other countries, so demanding exclusivity would do them no good, and would do the author harm.
There are also all kinds of other things that the publisher doesn't want exclusivity for because they're not in a position to exercise the rights effectively. For instance, it's very common these days for people to publish short fiction in a magazine, and then afterward sell audio rights so that people can buy a recording to listed to on their iPod or in their car. In the case of short fiction, there's also the possibility that it will be anthologized, and that's something a book publisher is going to handle, not the magazine publisher. None of this is an evil plot. It's just common business sense.
By the way, in my opinion Fictionwise is very cool. As a writer, I need to be familiar with my genre (SF). If someone tells me, "You've got to read 'Out of All Them Bright Stars' by Nancy Kress," I want to read it. The library doesn't have it, and I don't particularly want to pay $10-20 for an anthology so that I can read that one story. Well, I can simply buy it on fictionwise for a buck. Best deal ever. It's like being able to buy one song on iTunes or Amazon rather than having to buy the whole album full of crappy filler that you didn't want.
So basically Manjoo is saying that copyright holders are obligated to make their works available to him in the format and timing he demands, or else he has the right to get them illegally?
I think we call can agree that current copyright is unreasonable and undemocratic (since it was bought for by the music/movie industry). But Manjoo's reasoning doesn't make a ton of sense either.
Okay, let me preface this by saying that I buy all my music legally, and I don't download movies or TV shows illegally (although that's partly because I'm not interested in TV). But:
He doesn't say he has a moral or legal right to do it. He just states that he does it.
I don't see how it's relevant whether copyright is or is not democratic. To the extent that copyright is a kind of property (and I know that's a contentious issue), it's valid to make analogies with other kinds of property. Should property rights be determined democratically? If so, then why did there have to be a specific provision in the U.S. constitution to protect property rights from being violated by the democratic government? Democratic!=good, undemocratic!=bad.
I happen to agree with you that current copyright laws are unreasonable. That leads to at least two possible moral stances: (a) one should comply with an unreasonable law, because without the rule of law, modern society couldn't exist; or (b) if a law is unreasonable, then complying with it isn't a moral necessity but simply a matter of convenience (if I drink whiskey in Yemen, will I get caught?). I lean toward b, and even if you like a better, that doesn't mean that it goes without saying that everyone has to agree with you.
Re "in the format and timing he demands," I think there's a problem with the article, and with most of the slashdot discussion, because it confounds a variety of situations. There's the situation where I want to sit at home today and watch (a) "Up" before it's released; (b) "Duplicity," while it's still only in theaters; (c) "The Wizard of Oz," which has been on TV at least once a year since before I was born. In case c, it's legal for me to tape the movie and watch it later, and to watch it as many times as I like. It seems to me like extreme hair-splitting to say that there ought to be something illegal or immoral about downloading a TV show when I could have legally and morally watched it for free on broadcast TV at some other time.
When it comes to TV, there seems to be an underlying technological shift that's creating all the tough issues. When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s, the bargain was that you got your TV for free, and in return you got shown commercials. Another part of that bargain was that big corporations got legal control over a huge and extremely valuable part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is a national resource. TV viewers could get up and turn down the volume knob, go in the kitchen for potato chips, or whatever, but basically most people ended up watching the commercials. Nowadays technology makes it trivially easy to eliminate the commercials, and the EM spectrum is slowly heading toward obsolescence as a way of transmitting TV signals. The original bargain was struck based on a particular set of material and technological circumstances. A different set of circumstances applies now, but because of the incremental nature of change in law, technology, and industry, we can't just rewrite the whole contract.
But seriously, research on readability isn't all that definitive. The conventional wisdom is that readability is maximized with serif fonts, ragged-right typesetting, and lines that are roughly 10-15 cm wide. However, the actual research does not consistently support those statements. The truth is that it's mainly a matter of taste.
That's because it's the only web safe font that comes close to looking like hand writing.
Not safe enough, apparently. I'm using Firefox on Ubuntu, and in my browser what gets displayed for Comic Sans on the page you linked to isn't even a sans serif font.
I teach physics at a community college, and I recently made a big push to get proper power management set up in the science division's computer labs. It ended up being orders of magnitude more work than I thought it would.
I had seemed like a total no-brainer to me. We had 42 desktop Windows machines in our student computer labs. They were running 24/7. They had CRT monitors, and they were configured so that when they weren't being used, they ran a waving flag animation on the screen, meaning that both the CPU and the monitor were drawing full power. Here we were teaching our students about global warming, but we had this ridiculously wasteful configuration.
The first issue was that, as the slashdot summary suggests is common, nobody really cared, because it was some other part of the organization that was paying the electric bills.
The second issue was that when I approached IT, they wanted to handle it using software called Deep Freeze, which not only handles power management but also automatically restores the computer's hard disk to a known state every so often. This is in principle a good idea, because it means that students can't screw up the machines, and it's another layer of defense against malware. However, it opened up a whole can of worms, because if they were going to make this new hard disk image, they wanted to make sure it was done right. They wanted to update the OS, and install all the apps from scratch. Well, we had a ton of apps dating back to ca. 1995 that were still being used for instruction, but nobody could find the licenses for them. So that became a huge issue. It was one that we would have had to deal with sooner or later anyway, but it was a clear example where the easiest thing to do is always to leave things the way they are.
So we finally got that done, after much interpersonal conflict and hurt feelings. Now we have the new issue, which seems to be that Deep Freeze doesn't play nicely with Windows updates. In one lab, for example, we have about 60 machines, roughly half belonging to the science division. Their hard disks get reimaged over the weekend by Deep Freeze. But wait, then on Monday morning people walk into the lab and power up all the machines. Now all 60 machines phone home and realize that they need an update from MS; they had the update before, but it got erased by the reimaging. So they all start downloading the same 100 Mb update at once, with predictable effects. A chemistry teacher brings in a whole class to do work on the computers, and the computers are completely unusable. Oops, time to come up with a new lesson plan. Hope he's good at thinking on his feet.
Of course there's no reason in principle that all of these different issues had to be coupled together. E.g., Faronics, which sells Deep Freeze, has another product that only does power management, not reimaging. But the thing is, in real life you're dealing with complex systems and complex human organizations, and lots of well-intentioned changes can have unintended effects.
The abstract does not suppose that this phenomenon results from a quantum physics effect, though I don't know if the research does. Rather, the abstract and the linked article are applying the mathematical models behind quantum theory to problems in cognition. The brain could very well compute these results using classical physics.
You're correct that the main thrust of the linked article is just the application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics to cognition and game theory. However, the end of the article does have some speculation about whether there could be some more literally quantum-mechanical basis for human cognition. Seems like complete B.S. to me, but it is there in the article.
There's a long history of people trying to apply quantum-mechanical concepts to all kinds of things outside physics, from religion to social science. Generally it's all nonsense. In this particular article, they observe some complex cognitive behavior that doesn't fit the kind of utility-optimizing model that's commonly assumed in economics. They (a) try to explain this using cognitive dissonance, and (b) come up with a novel application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics for modeling cognitive dissonance. IMO, the B.S. sets in at step a. There are lots of reasons the people in the study could be behaving in this particular way, and cognitive dissonance is only one of them.
In the prisoner's dilemma situation they describe, a long-term strategy that's often evolutionarily successful is tit-for-tat, in which you defect if your opponent's last choice was defection, and play honestly if their last choice was to play honestly. Tit-for-tat is arguably sort of programmed into the human psyche, as an evolved mechanism for making social animals succeed in groups. From that point of view, the question is why these people so often chose not to follow tit-for-tat, often choosing to defect even if their partner had played honestly in the first round.
I can think of at least two good reasons that are just as plausible (and probably just as impossible to test scientifically) as the authors'. One is that the people in this study go through the first round playing honestly, and then in the second round they tend to say, "Participating in this study is boring. I'm hungry for lunch. Maybe I'll make it more fun by doing the opposite choice the second time around. It would be less boring to try each choice at least once." Another possibility is that they imagine the psychodrama of the situation and find it emotionally rewarding. They imagine telling their friends afterwards, "Ha ha, that poor shmuck! I played him like a trout. First I lured him in by being honest in the first round, and then I dropped the bomb on him the second time around. He didn't even know what hit him."
Both of these explanations would be considered irrational by a classical economist, which means exactly nothing. Maybe it's perfectly rational to entertain yourself, or to set up a good story to entertain your friends with.
The power boost button is just offloading what the OS should be doing behind the scenes onto the user to rarely get used by most of its users.
Except that you didn't read the article, did you? The article describes this in considerably more detail than the slashdot summary, discussing several scenarios in which user involvement in power management makes sense.
We need a network where there is some way to ascertain the origin of any email/account.
We already have this. It's called dkim (formerly known as domainkeys). Unfortunately it's not all that widely implemented (mainly yahoo and gmail), and I think that's due to a combination of two things. One is that there are network effects that make it not very advantageous to be an early implementer. The other is that dkim is not a very mature implementation and is a PITA to set up, which creates a barrier for people running small domains.
I can not wait for Richard Stallman's report on commercial closed source software costing a record high price in 2008. I mean assuming he comes to that conclusion, of course.
The difference is that I can see why the RMS version would make it through the firehose, because slashdot users tend to be fans of free software. What I can't understand is why a slashvertizement for Symantec made it through. I wonder if companies like Symantec are astroturfing via the firehose system, using throwaway or suckpuppet accounts. There's a huge amount of slashvertizing making it through the firehose these days.
It's become very popular these days to bash string theory, yet noone has an alternative.
Actually, that's not true. There are alternatives, including loop quantum gravity. String theory has been kicking around for 20 years, and essentially no progress has been made. Therefore it makes sense to stop dumping funding into it that's wildly out of proportion to its level of promise relative to other avenues of attack.
People like sexconker want to remove grant money from research into any new theory until they have a theory that is complete. And yet it can't be completed with people actually working on it.
It's gone for 20 years without making a testable prediction. If it went for 50, would you support cutting off funding? 100? 200?
You wrote: It's sad how people don't understand how important ideology is.
On the contrary, I think it's very important. That's why I object to telling people that if they want to contribute to WP, they have to put their name behing a license with a particular ideology attached to it.
I wrote: Although GFDL can be a free license, it can also be a non-free license if you choose to use it with some of the optional parts like invariant subsections.
You wrote: This statement deliberately confuses what it means to be "free".
I'm not a big fan of every aspect of WP, but one thing I do like is that they say you should always assume good faith. If you want to disagree with me, you can do it on the merits of the argument, without accusing me of being dishonest.
Free doesn't mean "I can do anything I want."
I didn't say it did.
Free means "I have all the basic freedoms required to take advantage of this data, while at the same time it is guaranteed that others will have these freedoms as well."
Based on your post and mine, it seems to me that either (a) I don't understand the issue about invariant subsections correctly, or (b) you don't. If you think case a applies, you might want to respond with a post that would explain your point of view. It would be helpful, for example, if you could explain whether you think Debian should have, or should not have, excluded documentation that used GFDL with invariant subsections.
If you have a WP account with at least 25 edits before March 15, please vote yes on this. The only reason WP picked GFDL was that CC-BY-SA didn't exist when WP began. GFDL and CC-BY-SA are the same style of license; they're both GPL-ish as opposed to BSD-ish, because they both require derived works to be under the same license. GFDL sucks for a variety of reasons:
It's long.
It's got a windbaggy ideological preamble; people shouldn't be forced to put their support behind a particular politically loaded credo just because they want to contribute to WP.
Although GFDL can be a free license, it can also be a non-free license if you choose to use it with some of the optional parts like invariant subsections. This creates confusion, and has also caused lots of smart people to waste amazing amounts of time arguing and worrying about it, e.g., Debian wrangled for months before eventually deciding to exclude certain documentation that was under non-free versions of the GFDL.
CC-BY-SA is far more widely used at this point. Switching to CC-BY-SA eliminates legal hassles that would otherwise be involved in making derived workds using WP. As a concrete example, I wrote some CC-BY-SA-licensed books, and when I want to use a photo or something from WP, the GFDL licensing creates hassles. I ended up having to dual-license the books, and that shouldn't be necessary. If people want to use the commons (both putting in and taking out), there shouldn't be artificial barriers to doing so.
Plenty of people have already posted about the legal aspects of why relicensing is possible, but the long and the short of it is that relicensing complies with both the letter and the spirit of the law. It complies with the letter of the law because of the later version clause. It complies with it in spirit because GFDL and CC-BY-SA are similar types of licenses, just implemented badly in one case and well in the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I have an x64 ubuntu machine on my desktop, and I have experienced the horrible frustration of trying to get flash and java working on it. I know exactly what you're talking about. If that's gotten better in jaunty, that's great. What doesn't make sense to me is the author's description of what he thinks has been improved -- as if apt couldn't be used through a gui before, and as if apt didn't already take care of dependencies. As far as I can tell, the problem with java originated because of Sun's annoying license, and is now going away because Sun switched to a better license. It's not as though there was ever anything technically difficult about packaging java for debian/ubuntu. Similar deal with flash -- Adobe simply wasn't all that interested in providing good support for linux and x64 linux.
Anyway, what is the correct procedure in jaunty for installing java (compiler, runtime, and applet support) and flash 10 (including x64 support)?
What I would really love to see would be for gnash to become usable. I know Gnu made a big push to improve gnash, which seemed to culminate in the youtube video of RMS dancing & friends dancing, which could be played using gnash. The trouble was that it only actually worked if you had the right video card, you did it on a Tuesday under a full moon, and you sacrificed an unblemished calf in the temple of Zeus. I wonder if gnash has been making any progress since then. My experience, every time I've ever tried it, was that it was utterly impossible to use as a replacement for flash.
To most people the GUI is synonymous with the OS, but they're two separate things. By far the bulk of the review seems to be talking about how he likes this version of Gnome better. Well, that's fine, but Ubuntu isn't the same thing as Gnome. I run Ubuntu, but I don't use Gnome.
He also seems favorably impressed with the performance of the GUI, but again this mixes together a lot of stuff in a pretty uninformative way. He's got a particular nvidia card. I don't have that card, so his perception of "windows moving around without jerkiness" probably means nothing to me, even if I were to use Gnome.
This part baffles me. "No package management or dependencies." Since when have you ever had to worry about package management or dependencies on an ubuntu machine? Dependencies are taken care of automatically by apt. "No apt-get. Point and click." Huh? For years and years now, you've been able to install packages on a debian/ubuntu box by clicking around on a gui, if that's what floats your boat. (Personally I prefer to use apt from the console, since, e.g., it lets me install fifty apps at once just by cutting and pasting a string of package names.) Why is he using apt-get in contradistinction to point and click, as if it was a new thing to be able to access apt via a gui?
Thanks for pointing that out, but I don't have an Intel mobo. However, it does sound like what happened to me, so maybe it's a similar issue, with a different mobo.
Yes, I think I did verify it.
I tested the waters a couple of weeks ago by downloading the prerelease version of Jaunty as an iso and burning it to a live cd. My machine wouldn't boot from the live cd (started to boot, didn't complete the process). I don't have any trouble booting from a live cd of other versions of Ubuntu, and this machine currently has intrepid, which works fine. It's an x64 box.
Is anyone else having problems like this? I'm definitely chicken to upgrade if there's a risk of making my system unbootable. I'm all in favor of shorter boot times, but it does have to boot.
The impression I generally get is that it's a good idea to wait at least a few weeks before upgrading to a newly released version of ubuntu.
Yeah, I tried to get my school to use foxit instead of AR. It didn't work out well at all. The pdfs they were using wouldn't display correctly in foxit. Unfortunately, Windows is a wasteland when it comes to open-source software. The best solution, if you have the choice, is to switch to ubuntu.
On linux: gs -q -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=b.pdf a.pdf -c '.setpdfwrite'
Who cares? You're in a situation where you're being horribly abused. The professor chose the book, the publisher chose to put DRM on it, and the publishing industry's lobbyists got Congress to pass the DMCA...just do whatever works for you. You paid for the book, after all.
Turn off javascript in AR: Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript".
For more information than you'll probably ever want about beer brewing, see How to Brew, by John Palmer (free online, also available in print).
Although the Palmer book is for homebrewers, apparently getting rid of haze is something that commercial breweries are extremely interested in, and they spend millions of dollars on research. As far as I can tell, it would mainly be an issue for American-style lagers (e.g., Budweiser), which are transparent enough that the haze would be noticeable. However, tannins and haze can also correlate with taste and shelf life (oxidation). As a homebrewer, I've never really worried about it much.
I'm not clear on why they want to use genetic modification to control when flocculation happens. There are tons of varieties of yeast that you can buy, and one of the criteria you apply when you're selecting a strain of yeast is how alcohol-tolerant it is. A less alcohol-tolerant strain will respond earlier to the stress of the alcohol by flocculating out. Since there are already so many different strains with different flocculation properties, I don't really see what the genetic modification gains you.
Cool! The history of these algorithms, and of databases like CDDB, is kind of depressing to an open-source guy like me. It's great to see someone doing this as an open-source project. How stable is the algorithm? If I compute a pHash today, will it still be compatible with pHashes computed next year? Any plans to make a database of pHashes? I have a music collection that contains a lot of digitized LPs, and music that's sometimes one album per file but sometimes one track per file. It would be really convenient to be able to crank out pHashes for them and get useful data automatically.
The slashdot summary discusses two hypothetical solutions: (1) Send out thousands of DMCA takedown notices. (2) Negotiate with ad networks for a percentage of ad revenue. I'd suggest (3) fix broken search engines that send users to cut-and-paste sites. I'm really tired of doing searches on search engines and finding hundreds of hits that all turn out to be cut-and-paste pages taken from the same Wikipedia article. They may be perfectly legal, if they comply with Wikipedia's license, and therefore solutions 1 and 2 won't work at all. Google already has various proprietary and secret algorithms for detecting which web sites are trying to game page rank. Shouldn't it be pretty straightforward to come up with a list of thousands of utterly legal, and yet utterly useless, domains that do nothing but cut and paste other people's contents?
David Wiley is a good guy. He's been working on applying the free information ethos to education for a long time. However, I think he's totally off base here. As the parent post notes, interaction is important. Also:
We already have a way of broadcasting information unidirectionally to a large number of people. It's called a book.
Totally wrongheaded. Are we going to go back to medieval scholasticism, where it didn't matter what really happened in real life, it only mattered what Aristotle said was supposed to happen? The whole point of a science lab is to make contact between the abstract ideas in a textbook and real life.
I love free textbooks. I've written some. However, they aren't going to transform a college education into something you do in your bathrobe and slippers at a distance of 5000 miles from the campus. "Free" here presumably means both free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech. The free-as-in-beer part has absolutely no effect on colleges or professors. Most professors don't even consider price as a factor in textbook selection. Lowering the price to zero will have absolutely no effect on the way colleges work. The free-as-in-speech part can have a lot of good effects on individuals and society, but I don't see it fundamentally changing the way colleges work.
Okay, I'll make the argument to the contrary: that IBM currently has every reason to be giving their Evil Laugh a big workout right now.
The NY Times this morning has an article saying that basically this is all about Oracle wanting to get into the business of designing, selling, and maintaining integrated systems for businesses that don't want to have to deal with a zillion vendors and bake their own setups. This is essentially what IBM is already in the business of doing. IBM already has a thriving business model where they set up their customers with software and hardware, and a lot of the software they use is open-source.
By buying Sun, Oracle gets a bunch of software. But OpenSolaris, MySQL, Java, and OpenOffice were all already open-source. Well, nothing was stopping them from selling customers a setup that used MySQL, Java, and OpenOffice, even before they bought Sun. That's what IBM does already. You could argue that Oracle gets more control now over these things. Well, yeah, except that because they're open source, they can always be forked, and they'll always be in competition with other open-source projects. Suppose that Oracle, for example, lets MySQL languish for fear of making it compete too effectively with Oracle Database. Well, the OSS community could then fork MySQL, or simply switch to alternatives like Drizzle (low end) or Postgres (high end).
By buying Sun, Oracle also gets a hardware operation. But Oracle has no experience in the hardware business.
There's also the argument that buying your competitors is an easier way to grab market share than out-competing them or out-marketing them. That was a sane argument for buying PeopleSoft. But OpenSolaris, Java, and OpenOffice, and Sun's hardware weren't products that were competing with Oracle's products, and MySQL wasn't really competing in the same arena as Oracle Database either.
This may be one of the historical reasons for the restrictions, but I don't think it has much to do with the present reasons for them.
To start off with, you have to understand that traditional-style print publishing is an extremely capital-intensive business. It costs a huge amount of money to set a traditional (not print-on-demand) printing setup for a run. Once you have it set up, the incremental cost of producing one more book is virtually zero. Then you have this huge inventory, which you have to hope you can sell. Because of this, magazines and book publishing houses want to make sure that their contract with the author is exclusive. I've sold some short fiction, and typically what happens is that they want first North American serial rights (FNASR) and exclusivity for a certain amount of time. Books are somewhat different, but it's still the same general concept either way. If they're going to spend the money to put you in print, they want to be damn sure that readers will be getting your writing through them. (By the way, most short fiction markets don't mind at all if you put your work up for free online after a certain amount of time has elapsed.)
However, it would be ridiculous for them to try to demand that kind of exclusivity worldwide. In many cases they simply don't have marketing, sales, and distribution in other countries, so demanding exclusivity would do them no good, and would do the author harm.
There are also all kinds of other things that the publisher doesn't want exclusivity for because they're not in a position to exercise the rights effectively. For instance, it's very common these days for people to publish short fiction in a magazine, and then afterward sell audio rights so that people can buy a recording to listed to on their iPod or in their car. In the case of short fiction, there's also the possibility that it will be anthologized, and that's something a book publisher is going to handle, not the magazine publisher. None of this is an evil plot. It's just common business sense.
By the way, in my opinion Fictionwise is very cool. As a writer, I need to be familiar with my genre (SF). If someone tells me, "You've got to read 'Out of All Them Bright Stars' by Nancy Kress," I want to read it. The library doesn't have it, and I don't particularly want to pay $10-20 for an anthology so that I can read that one story. Well, I can simply buy it on fictionwise for a buck. Best deal ever. It's like being able to buy one song on iTunes or Amazon rather than having to buy the whole album full of crappy filler that you didn't want.
Okay, let me preface this by saying that I buy all my music legally, and I don't download movies or TV shows illegally (although that's partly because I'm not interested in TV). But:
But seriously, research on readability isn't all that definitive. The conventional wisdom is that readability is maximized with serif fonts, ragged-right typesetting, and lines that are roughly 10-15 cm wide. However, the actual research does not consistently support those statements. The truth is that it's mainly a matter of taste.
Not safe enough, apparently. I'm using Firefox on Ubuntu, and in my browser what gets displayed for Comic Sans on the page you linked to isn't even a sans serif font.
The names and version numbers are really confusing. The following is my understanding, which may be wrong -- if so, please correct me.
ecmascript 4==javascript 2==actionscript 3 ... If I'm understanding correctly, this was overambitious, turned out to be a dead end, won't happen.
ecmascript 3.1==ECMAScript, Fifth Edition ... This seems to be the more modest thing that they backed off and got a consensus for instead.
I teach physics at a community college, and I recently made a big push to get proper power management set up in the science division's computer labs. It ended up being orders of magnitude more work than I thought it would.
I had seemed like a total no-brainer to me. We had 42 desktop Windows machines in our student computer labs. They were running 24/7. They had CRT monitors, and they were configured so that when they weren't being used, they ran a waving flag animation on the screen, meaning that both the CPU and the monitor were drawing full power. Here we were teaching our students about global warming, but we had this ridiculously wasteful configuration.
The first issue was that, as the slashdot summary suggests is common, nobody really cared, because it was some other part of the organization that was paying the electric bills.
The second issue was that when I approached IT, they wanted to handle it using software called Deep Freeze, which not only handles power management but also automatically restores the computer's hard disk to a known state every so often. This is in principle a good idea, because it means that students can't screw up the machines, and it's another layer of defense against malware. However, it opened up a whole can of worms, because if they were going to make this new hard disk image, they wanted to make sure it was done right. They wanted to update the OS, and install all the apps from scratch. Well, we had a ton of apps dating back to ca. 1995 that were still being used for instruction, but nobody could find the licenses for them. So that became a huge issue. It was one that we would have had to deal with sooner or later anyway, but it was a clear example where the easiest thing to do is always to leave things the way they are.
So we finally got that done, after much interpersonal conflict and hurt feelings. Now we have the new issue, which seems to be that Deep Freeze doesn't play nicely with Windows updates. In one lab, for example, we have about 60 machines, roughly half belonging to the science division. Their hard disks get reimaged over the weekend by Deep Freeze. But wait, then on Monday morning people walk into the lab and power up all the machines. Now all 60 machines phone home and realize that they need an update from MS; they had the update before, but it got erased by the reimaging. So they all start downloading the same 100 Mb update at once, with predictable effects. A chemistry teacher brings in a whole class to do work on the computers, and the computers are completely unusable. Oops, time to come up with a new lesson plan. Hope he's good at thinking on his feet.
Of course there's no reason in principle that all of these different issues had to be coupled together. E.g., Faronics, which sells Deep Freeze, has another product that only does power management, not reimaging. But the thing is, in real life you're dealing with complex systems and complex human organizations, and lots of well-intentioned changes can have unintended effects.
You're correct that the main thrust of the linked article is just the application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics to cognition and game theory. However, the end of the article does have some speculation about whether there could be some more literally quantum-mechanical basis for human cognition. Seems like complete B.S. to me, but it is there in the article.
There's a long history of people trying to apply quantum-mechanical concepts to all kinds of things outside physics, from religion to social science. Generally it's all nonsense. In this particular article, they observe some complex cognitive behavior that doesn't fit the kind of utility-optimizing model that's commonly assumed in economics. They (a) try to explain this using cognitive dissonance, and (b) come up with a novel application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics for modeling cognitive dissonance. IMO, the B.S. sets in at step a. There are lots of reasons the people in the study could be behaving in this particular way, and cognitive dissonance is only one of them.
In the prisoner's dilemma situation they describe, a long-term strategy that's often evolutionarily successful is tit-for-tat, in which you defect if your opponent's last choice was defection, and play honestly if their last choice was to play honestly. Tit-for-tat is arguably sort of programmed into the human psyche, as an evolved mechanism for making social animals succeed in groups. From that point of view, the question is why these people so often chose not to follow tit-for-tat, often choosing to defect even if their partner had played honestly in the first round.
I can think of at least two good reasons that are just as plausible (and probably just as impossible to test scientifically) as the authors'. One is that the people in this study go through the first round playing honestly, and then in the second round they tend to say, "Participating in this study is boring. I'm hungry for lunch. Maybe I'll make it more fun by doing the opposite choice the second time around. It would be less boring to try each choice at least once." Another possibility is that they imagine the psychodrama of the situation and find it emotionally rewarding. They imagine telling their friends afterwards, "Ha ha, that poor shmuck! I played him like a trout. First I lured him in by being honest in the first round, and then I dropped the bomb on him the second time around. He didn't even know what hit him."
Both of these explanations would be considered irrational by a classical economist, which means exactly nothing. Maybe it's perfectly rational to entertain yourself, or to set up a good story to entertain your friends with.
Except that you didn't read the article, did you? The article describes this in considerably more detail than the slashdot summary, discussing several scenarios in which user involvement in power management makes sense.
We need a network where there is some way to ascertain the origin of any email/account.
We already have this. It's called dkim (formerly known as domainkeys). Unfortunately it's not all that widely implemented (mainly yahoo and gmail), and I think that's due to a combination of two things. One is that there are network effects that make it not very advantageous to be an early implementer. The other is that dkim is not a very mature implementation and is a PITA to set up, which creates a barrier for people running small domains.
The difference is that I can see why the RMS version would make it through the firehose, because slashdot users tend to be fans of free software. What I can't understand is why a slashvertizement for Symantec made it through. I wonder if companies like Symantec are astroturfing via the firehose system, using throwaway or suckpuppet accounts. There's a huge amount of slashvertizing making it through the firehose these days.
Actually, that's not true. There are alternatives, including loop quantum gravity. String theory has been kicking around for 20 years, and essentially no progress has been made. Therefore it makes sense to stop dumping funding into it that's wildly out of proportion to its level of promise relative to other avenues of attack.
It's gone for 20 years without making a testable prediction. If it went for 50, would you support cutting off funding? 100? 200?
You wrote: It's sad how people don't understand how important ideology is.
On the contrary, I think it's very important. That's why I object to telling people that if they want to contribute to WP, they have to put their name behing a license with a particular ideology attached to it.
You wrote: This statement deliberately confuses what it means to be "free".
I'm not a big fan of every aspect of WP, but one thing I do like is that they say you should always assume good faith. If you want to disagree with me, you can do it on the merits of the argument, without accusing me of being dishonest.
Free doesn't mean "I can do anything I want."
I didn't say it did.
Free means "I have all the basic freedoms required to take advantage of this data, while at the same time it is guaranteed that others will have these freedoms as well."
Based on your post and mine, it seems to me that either (a) I don't understand the issue about invariant subsections correctly, or (b) you don't. If you think case a applies, you might want to respond with a post that would explain your point of view. It would be helpful, for example, if you could explain whether you think Debian should have, or should not have, excluded documentation that used GFDL with invariant subsections.
If you have a WP account with at least 25 edits before March 15, please vote yes on this. The only reason WP picked GFDL was that CC-BY-SA didn't exist when WP began. GFDL and CC-BY-SA are the same style of license; they're both GPL-ish as opposed to BSD-ish, because they both require derived works to be under the same license. GFDL sucks for a variety of reasons:
CC-BY-SA is far more widely used at this point. Switching to CC-BY-SA eliminates legal hassles that would otherwise be involved in making derived workds using WP. As a concrete example, I wrote some CC-BY-SA-licensed books, and when I want to use a photo or something from WP, the GFDL licensing creates hassles. I ended up having to dual-license the books, and that shouldn't be necessary. If people want to use the commons (both putting in and taking out), there shouldn't be artificial barriers to doing so.
Plenty of people have already posted about the legal aspects of why relicensing is possible, but the long and the short of it is that relicensing complies with both the letter and the spirit of the law. It complies with the letter of the law because of the later version clause. It complies with it in spirit because GFDL and CC-BY-SA are similar types of licenses, just implemented badly in one case and well in the other.