I have a 20" widescreen Dell display, and I fear that the RAM in the Mac Mini wouldn't support that very well.
Your fears are unfounded, as long as you're not attempting to do things like play games. I have a Mac Mini running at 1600x1200 @ 32bpp, and it hums along quite nicely.
but then science was never the GOP's strong point.
The first half of your post was pretty good, but the fact of the matter is that the Republican party does not deny global warming exists. Republicans in general simply disagree that humanity is the leading cause of global warming; instead, they point to changes in solar output and other types of non-human environmental changes. Where you're getting confused is that the environmental crowd has turned the phrase "global warming" into a euphamism for "humans are the sole entity responsible for screwing up the planet."
The fact that 5,200 years ago we were having an extremely similar climate change, when humans were unable to play any significant role in atmospheric change, certainly contradicts the claim that humanity is the sole cause of radical climate change on Earth. Not to mention the fact that Mars is undergoing global warming at the same time Earth, and Mars has a notable lack of polluters.
I haven't set my main page prefs to filter any articles out, so it should be displayed.
Don't worry, that doesn't work either. I have my homepage set to filter out several categories of stories, and to my knowledge, not a single story that fits the criteria has been filtered.
In the real world, "Production software" is software being used in production. Not software that the authors think is ready for production.
Well, you're arguing two different things. I'll agree with your production software summary, but that's not what Firefox and Gaim are doing. They're using the pre-1.0 numbering scheme to indicate that functionality is missing and/or bugs in the initial functionality are still being worked out. In other words, the authors had a firm conclusion when they started out as to what would constitute a baseline minimal set of features and functionality, and are unwilling to call it 1.0 until it fits those original specification.
The fact that you can use it before it's officially hit 1.0 is more of a perk of the development process than it is any indication that the authors have set unrealistic goals. And the fact that it meets some of your needs, or even all of your needs, doesn't mean that (a) it meets everybody elses needs, and (b) it's meets the authors expectations about what a baseline program of that type should provide to and for the user.
What exactly does this mean? This is one of the reasons why windows guys get so damned confused. Obviously they want to learn about Linux, else they wouldn't be asking what distro to use. What is slakware going to teach them about Linux that they couldn't learn under Suse? How difficult things can be to setup configure?
Well, actually, yes.
When a Windows person says, "I want to know how to use Linux," it could mean one of two things. It could mean that they want to learn all about Linux. This means learning how to manually edit a configuration file, how to recompile their kernel to take advantage of drivers, where their desktop environment stores its information and how it stores it, how to automate procedures with shell scripts, and so forth. To this type of person, "learning Linux" means learning about all aspects of Linux, including those aspects that are manual and aren't hidden by a shiny GUI tool.
Or, it could simply mean they want to "learn" Linux in the same way that one "learns" Windows. They want to use a native Linux GUI, with native Linux GUI apps, with native Linux file formats. It doesn't mean they want to learn how to drop to a command line, determine a list of modules loaded into their kernel, check the process list, do a quick bit of bash scripting, punch up Apache's config in vi, and then restart the service. To this person, "learning Linux" means having to get comfortable with Open Office instead of Microsoft Office, bitch when the macros in their Excel spreadsheets don't get ported over correctly, and marvel at how Evolution "looks just like Exchange!"
In other words, it's the difference between the guy who changes his oil and air filter himself, and the guy who takes his car to the mechanic because he doesn't want to worry about those things himself. One person doesn't worry about getting under the hood, the other has zero interest in it.
Which is why I said that you need to tailor the recommendation to the type of person. For the guy who doesn't mind getting having to manually hunt down a config file, post in a newsgroup, or go to the local LUG to find out the answer because he wants to know how Linux works, Slackware is a great solution. For the guy who just wants to punch up his porn sites in a browser or send an email to his buddies about the bad day he's having, Slackware is a poor recommendation.
Insofar as why the "technical guy" can't use SuSE instead, there's not really any reason. Theoretically, he can learn everything using SuSE that he can using Slackware. The difference is, SuSE automates everything by default, meaning there's less opportunities to experience problems (which is where much of the actual Linux learning comes in -- by having a problem and being forced to find the solution). For the exact same reason you claim you're recommending SuSE -- it's automatic graceful handling of everything -- SuSE is a second-hand choice for somebody who wants to get his hands dirty. Unless he goes out of his way to actively make problems, by deleting config files or plugging in the most eclectic hardware he can dig up, SuSE will just quietly take care of everything for him -- and give him a fancy GUI configuration program to do it with.
Yes, I do know what I'm saying: Slackware is apparently better because it's more problematic. And if you approach this from the "it should be easy to use by default!" angle, then you're right. But if that's your approach, then you weren't the type of person Slackware is suited for in the first place.
People need to stop recommending this distro to Joe-windows user as a good distro to try. Personally, I agree with him.
I think the problem here is one of mismatching recommendations to desires.
When "people" recommend Slackware, they recommend it because it's a good distribution for people to learn about Linux. It's a pretty good mix of manual and automatic, where there are fewer automatic tools to do things for you, but where there are enough conveniences provided that you aren't effectively pulling an LFS. For a recomendee who can "change the oil," but who doesn't want to break down and rebuild the entire car from scratch, Slackware is aptly suited.
What you (and the parent poster) are talking about are people recommending it to people who just want to use Linux, and have zero interest in learning about it. In that case, Slackware is not the best distribution, and the recomendee needs to be directed towards something that is more automatic and encapsulating, like Fedora, Mandrake, or SuSE. Even with Slackware's limited manual requirements, it's still going to be too difficult or too intimidating for a "I need to be coddled by my distro" recomendee (not intended to be snobby, but some people want their machines to take care of them, not the other way around).
So I think the complaint is only partially legitimate: for people who truly have no interest in knowing how Linux works and have simply bought into the "it's-not-Microsoft" rhetoric, then Slackware shouldn't be a recommendation. But claiming that Slackware should never be a recommendation is equally wrong: there are some people coming from Windows for whom Slackware is a perfect fit.
As I understand it, they made an astonishing scientific claim. That claim, while it might be absolutely true, was not substantiated by the experiment they describe.
If you read the article (I know, this is Slashdot...), you'd note that some of the problems in reproducing the effect have been discovered. One problem turned out to be the "density" of deuterium atoms in the palladium electrodes. Above a certain threshold, you'd see the excess heat every time. Below that, even by only 10%, you'd only see excess heat in one out of every six trials.
From this, it seems like the problem wasn't that the experiment was made up, but that the problem was the researchers had no precise concept of what steps and requirements were necessary to repeat it accurately.
That is hardly a catch. Congress always has the ability to change laws, that is the purpose of the Congress.
It's a "catch" in the sense that even if the legal avenue turns up all roses for the P2P companies, the legislative avenue can completely obliterate any and all successes. It's a catch like EULAs are a catch. No matter how much you obey the restrictions of the EULA, the licenser can -- at their whim -- decide to terminate your rights to the software.
The biggest catch is that the decision explicitly notes that Congress has the ability to render the decision moot by passing more restrictive copyright legislation (e.g., the INDUCE act).
So even in the "best case" scenario for the companies, where this goes all the way to the US Supreme Court and is affirmed, all Congress has to do is pass the INDUCE act. The decision is overturned, Grokster and company get new lawsuits filed against them, and given how ridiculously broad the INDUCE act is, they will almost certainly lose.
The GPL is very clear that if someone tries to use the GPL on software that they have no right to use the GPL on, then they can't use the GPL for it. This means, if someone GPL's someone elses code, it is considered NOT GPLed at all, and it never was, regardless of any claim. In order to license any software, you must first possess the RIGHT to do so.
Which is what the original poster was saying. If SCO took GPLed code and placed that code into their UNIX products, then distributed those products to their customers, SCO could (potentially) be forced to distribute the source code to their UNIX products that contained the GPL'ed code.
In this case, SCO would have the right to use both their code and the GPLed code; it would simply be a matter of SCO living up to their responsibilities under the GPL.
Now, if SCO put GPLed code into their commerical products, and only later discovered the clause about redistribution, then it would be one plausible reason why they feel the need to attack the GPL: it puts them in the unfortunate position of being obligated to release their source.
It was a joke. Hence the "obligatory complaint." Whenever there is an announcement of a new distribution, somebody always complains that they had just installed the last version.
They aren't, any more than monolithic kernels are a bad idea. The general whine against microkernels goes something along the lines of, "Any performance increases that result from a microkernel can be matched by simply tweaking a monolithic kernel, therefore why bother with the complexity of a microkernel?"
Hey, you do realize we are a representative republic, not a democracy, right?
Yes. It's more of a comment for those people who scream that [insert name] political party is preventing or impeding democracy. The United States never was intended to _be_ a democracy in the first place!
Is this really an issue with airbags? I thought that the payload was designed so that it opened up like a flower, and thus any "petal" touching the ground would force the payload to right itself.
"Liebeck placed the cup between her knees and attempted to remove the plastic lid from the cup. As she removed the lid, the entire contents of the cup spilled into her lap."
I know that I frequently hold cups of hot liquid between my leg in order to pry off the only thing maintaining the form of the cup, and the only thing keeping the cup from being squished between my legs.
Driving or not, moving or not, this woman was clearly more than the 20% responsible that the trial found. The coffee may have been too hot, and McDonalds may have been covering it up, but goddamn it, TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR BEING STUPID.
The problem I've found is that nobody makes a gamer-oriented card with dual DVI outputs. Tyan was supposed to make a 9600 variant, but cancelled it. Hello, I have two LCDs, and they look sucky when connected to VGA outputs!
Anybody know of a good gaming card that has dual DVI outputs?
Slashdot Mirror
> and works fine in legacy apps
Regarding legacy applications, I think the point was that he can't go back through the app and rewrite everything to use smart_ptr.
Does Xgl have very specific video card requirements, i.e. nothing higher than a Radeon 9500-level card?
I have a 20" widescreen Dell display, and I fear that the RAM in the Mac Mini wouldn't support that very well.
Your fears are unfounded, as long as you're not attempting to do things like play games. I have a Mac Mini running at 1600x1200 @ 32bpp, and it hums along quite nicely.
Shouldn't preventing pollution of the environment be quite important to missions to other planets?
You mean like retrieving our rovers after they've exhausted their batteries and become inert pieces of refuse?
Why does God have to control anything at all?
The first half of your post was pretty good, but the fact of the matter is that the Republican party does not deny global warming exists. Republicans in general simply disagree that humanity is the leading cause of global warming; instead, they point to changes in solar output and other types of non-human environmental changes. Where you're getting confused is that the environmental crowd has turned the phrase "global warming" into a euphamism for "humans are the sole entity responsible for screwing up the planet."
The fact that 5,200 years ago we were having an extremely similar climate change, when humans were unable to play any significant role in atmospheric change, certainly contradicts the claim that humanity is the sole cause of radical climate change on Earth. Not to mention the fact that Mars is undergoing global warming at the same time Earth, and Mars has a notable lack of polluters.
I haven't set my main page prefs to filter any articles out, so it should be displayed.
Don't worry, that doesn't work either. I have my homepage set to filter out several categories of stories, and to my knowledge, not a single story that fits the criteria has been filtered.
In the real world, "Production software" is software being used in production.
Not software that the authors think is ready for production.
Well, you're arguing two different things. I'll agree with your production software summary, but that's not what Firefox and Gaim are doing. They're using the pre-1.0 numbering scheme to indicate that functionality is missing and/or bugs in the initial functionality are still being worked out. In other words, the authors had a firm conclusion when they started out as to what would constitute a baseline minimal set of features and functionality, and are unwilling to call it 1.0 until it fits those original specification.
The fact that you can use it before it's officially hit 1.0 is more of a perk of the development process than it is any indication that the authors have set unrealistic goals. And the fact that it meets some of your needs, or even all of your needs, doesn't mean that (a) it meets everybody elses needs, and (b) it's meets the authors expectations about what a baseline program of that type should provide to and for the user.
What exactly does this mean? This is one of the reasons why windows guys get so damned confused. Obviously they want to learn about Linux, else they wouldn't be asking what distro to use. What is slakware going to teach them about Linux that they couldn't learn under Suse? How difficult things can be to setup configure?
Well, actually, yes.
When a Windows person says, "I want to know how to use Linux," it could mean one of two things. It could mean that they want to learn all about Linux. This means learning how to manually edit a configuration file, how to recompile their kernel to take advantage of drivers, where their desktop environment stores its information and how it stores it, how to automate procedures with shell scripts, and so forth. To this type of person, "learning Linux" means learning about all aspects of Linux, including those aspects that are manual and aren't hidden by a shiny GUI tool.
Or, it could simply mean they want to "learn" Linux in the same way that one "learns" Windows. They want to use a native Linux GUI, with native Linux GUI apps, with native Linux file formats. It doesn't mean they want to learn how to drop to a command line, determine a list of modules loaded into their kernel, check the process list, do a quick bit of bash scripting, punch up Apache's config in vi, and then restart the service. To this person, "learning Linux" means having to get comfortable with Open Office instead of Microsoft Office, bitch when the macros in their Excel spreadsheets don't get ported over correctly, and marvel at how Evolution "looks just like Exchange!"
In other words, it's the difference between the guy who changes his oil and air filter himself, and the guy who takes his car to the mechanic because he doesn't want to worry about those things himself. One person doesn't worry about getting under the hood, the other has zero interest in it.
Which is why I said that you need to tailor the recommendation to the type of person. For the guy who doesn't mind getting having to manually hunt down a config file, post in a newsgroup, or go to the local LUG to find out the answer because he wants to know how Linux works, Slackware is a great solution. For the guy who just wants to punch up his porn sites in a browser or send an email to his buddies about the bad day he's having, Slackware is a poor recommendation.
Insofar as why the "technical guy" can't use SuSE instead, there's not really any reason. Theoretically, he can learn everything using SuSE that he can using Slackware. The difference is, SuSE automates everything by default, meaning there's less opportunities to experience problems (which is where much of the actual Linux learning comes in -- by having a problem and being forced to find the solution). For the exact same reason you claim you're recommending SuSE -- it's automatic graceful handling of everything -- SuSE is a second-hand choice for somebody who wants to get his hands dirty. Unless he goes out of his way to actively make problems, by deleting config files or plugging in the most eclectic hardware he can dig up, SuSE will just quietly take care of everything for him -- and give him a fancy GUI configuration program to do it with.
Yes, I do know what I'm saying: Slackware is apparently better because it's more problematic. And if you approach this from the "it should be easy to use by default!" angle, then you're right. But if that's your approach, then you weren't the type of person Slackware is suited for in the first place.
People need to stop recommending this distro to Joe-windows user as a good distro to try. Personally, I agree with him.
I think the problem here is one of mismatching recommendations to desires.
When "people" recommend Slackware, they recommend it because it's a good distribution for people to learn about Linux. It's a pretty good mix of manual and automatic, where there are fewer automatic tools to do things for you, but where there are enough conveniences provided that you aren't effectively pulling an LFS. For a recomendee who can "change the oil," but who doesn't want to break down and rebuild the entire car from scratch, Slackware is aptly suited.
What you (and the parent poster) are talking about are people recommending it to people who just want to use Linux, and have zero interest in learning about it. In that case, Slackware is not the best distribution, and the recomendee needs to be directed towards something that is more automatic and encapsulating, like Fedora, Mandrake, or SuSE. Even with Slackware's limited manual requirements, it's still going to be too difficult or too intimidating for a "I need to be coddled by my distro" recomendee (not intended to be snobby, but some people want their machines to take care of them, not the other way around).
So I think the complaint is only partially legitimate: for people who truly have no interest in knowing how Linux works and have simply bought into the "it's-not-Microsoft" rhetoric, then Slackware shouldn't be a recommendation. But claiming that Slackware should never be a recommendation is equally wrong: there are some people coming from Windows for whom Slackware is a perfect fit.
Even including all the world's porn.
I dunno, man. I've got a lot of porn...
As I understand it, they made an astonishing scientific claim. That claim, while it might be absolutely true, was not substantiated by the experiment they describe.
If you read the article (I know, this is Slashdot...), you'd note that some of the problems in reproducing the effect have been discovered. One problem turned out to be the "density" of deuterium atoms in the palladium electrodes. Above a certain threshold, you'd see the excess heat every time. Below that, even by only 10%, you'd only see excess heat in one out of every six trials.
From this, it seems like the problem wasn't that the experiment was made up, but that the problem was the researchers had no precise concept of what steps and requirements were necessary to repeat it accurately.
That is hardly a catch. Congress always has the ability to change laws, that is the purpose of the Congress.
It's a "catch" in the sense that even if the legal avenue turns up all roses for the P2P companies, the legislative avenue can completely obliterate any and all successes. It's a catch like EULAs are a catch. No matter how much you obey the restrictions of the EULA, the licenser can -- at their whim -- decide to terminate your rights to the software.
There has to be some kind of a catch.
The biggest catch is that the decision explicitly notes that Congress has the ability to render the decision moot by passing more restrictive copyright legislation (e.g., the INDUCE act).
So even in the "best case" scenario for the companies, where this goes all the way to the US Supreme Court and is affirmed, all Congress has to do is pass the INDUCE act. The decision is overturned, Grokster and company get new lawsuits filed against them, and given how ridiculously broad the INDUCE act is, they will almost certainly lose.
There's your catch.
The GPL is very clear that if someone tries to use the GPL on software that they have no right to use the GPL on, then they can't use the GPL for it. This means, if someone GPL's someone elses code, it is considered NOT GPLed at all, and it never was, regardless of any claim. In order to license any software, you must first possess the RIGHT to do so.
Which is what the original poster was saying. If SCO took GPLed code and placed that code into their UNIX products, then distributed those products to their customers, SCO could (potentially) be forced to distribute the source code to their UNIX products that contained the GPL'ed code.
In this case, SCO would have the right to use both their code and the GPLed code; it would simply be a matter of SCO living up to their responsibilities under the GPL.
Now, if SCO put GPLed code into their commerical products, and only later discovered the clause about redistribution, then it would be one plausible reason why they feel the need to attack the GPL: it puts them in the unfortunate position of being obligated to release their source.
It was a joke. Hence the "obligatory complaint." Whenever there is an announcement of a new distribution, somebody always complains that they had just installed the last version.
Yeesh. Have a sense of humor, will you?
Have you tried LinuxISO.org? They have both of the install ISOs for Slack 9.1.
And I just installed 9.1... *grumble*
Why are microkernels a bad idea?
They aren't, any more than monolithic kernels are a bad idea. The general whine against microkernels goes something along the lines of, "Any performance increases that result from a microkernel can be matched by simply tweaking a monolithic kernel, therefore why bother with the complexity of a microkernel?"
Can anybody recommend some good books on learning OpenGL?
Hey, you do realize we are a representative republic, not a democracy, right?
Yes. It's more of a comment for those people who scream that [insert name] political party is preventing or impeding democracy. The United States never was intended to _be_ a democracy in the first place!
I for one welcome consumer 32-bit audio
I, for one, welcome our consumer 32-bit audio overlords...
(Sorry, had to do it.)
"this side up ^" payloads,
Is this really an issue with airbags? I thought that the payload was designed so that it opened up like a flower, and thus any "petal" touching the ground would force the payload to right itself.
"Liebeck placed the cup between her knees and attempted to remove the plastic lid from the cup. As she removed the lid, the entire contents of the cup spilled into her lap."
I know that I frequently hold cups of hot liquid between my leg in order to pry off the only thing maintaining the form of the cup, and the only thing keeping the cup from being squished between my legs.
Driving or not, moving or not, this woman was clearly more than the 20% responsible that the trial found. The coffee may have been too hot, and McDonalds may have been covering it up, but goddamn it, TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR BEING STUPID.
The problem I've found is that nobody makes a gamer-oriented card with dual DVI outputs. Tyan was supposed to make a 9600 variant, but cancelled it. Hello, I have two LCDs, and they look sucky when connected to VGA outputs!
Anybody know of a good gaming card that has dual DVI outputs?