I don't think it would be that huge. I'm running Debian.. The apt-tools does the same thing as Windows Update - only much better, IMO (it can do quite a lot - advanced version management and distribution-side upgrade to name a few). The Debian distribution is rather large, and consists of over 12 000 packages, wich includes all sorts of applications.
Apt never sends any information to any servers - it just downloads the package definitions. Granted, the package definitions are a few megabytes, but when it updates them, it does so incrementally - an "apt-get update" (to update the definitions) rarely downloads more than a couple of hundred kilobytes a week. Keep in mind that this accounts for the whole system, not just the key applications (as Windows Update does - only Windows core, IE and Office, IIRC). I've even set my sources to be from two different distributions - sarge and sid.
To help leave the burden on specific servers, I'm using my local mirror, of course.
Some basic statistics from my computer: Total Package Names : 15453 (618k)
Normal Packages: 12176
Pure Virtual Packages: 489
Single Virtual Packages: 292
Mixed Virtual Packages: 213
Missing: 2283 Total Distinct Versions: 16876 (810k) Total Dependencies: 92578 (2592k) Total Ver/File relations: 23283 (373k) Total Provides Mappings: 2998 (60.0k) Total Globbed Strings: 97 (1111) Total Dependency Version space: 419k Total Slack space: 89.2k Total Space Accounted for: 4543k
I'm fairly sure there's better ways of doing Windows Update than the ones in use right now.
Careful with the "American Tunnel Vision Syndrome." The verb xerox is in my experience rarely used outside the US. I Norway, where I live, we copy stuff. Or, if you're kind of old, photocopy it.
I don't see the point in making you "a beleiver." As long as people love and use mouse gestures, there's a market for it. Nobody forces you to make use of them (-8
Opera's mouse gestures are really great. I open a link in the background as a new window by holding mouse2, and move my mouse down and up. I close a window by drawing and L (still with mouse2 pressed). I can open new, blank windows, reload and then some. Some of these gestures are performed just as fast with a keyboard, but not all (like the link-clicking stuff). As the mouse is the primary input device for web-surfing, it's nice to find more use for it than just clicking. Oh - I almost forgot the one I use the most. Back and forth in history can be accomplished by pressing mouse1 (for forward) or mouse2 (for backward) and press the opposite button.
I use KDE as well - my shortcut theme is quite useful and effective. The mouse gestures are a nice addition.
Good point. My 'ol 286 flies at 6 MHz, with a turbo-button to push it up to 12 MHz. A friend of mine has a 16 MHz 286. But I've never heard about 20.
IIRC, there were some expanion kits to the 286 to make it a 386 with co-processor. These could might have been able to make it 20 MHz, but I never used them, so I wouldn't know...
Ah, well. My current workstation is 400 MHz. Works like a charm. What is all this fuzz about Gigaherz?
Heh, I remember reading a magazine from.. probably the 50s or 60s about the trouble computers might cause when they, in the distant future, ran at speeds up to a MEGAherz. They were afraid the computers would interfere with other electronic equipment at those kind of speeds.. (-8
It's improbable, but he could be using the "ELKS kernel , though strictly speaking not Linux. It's a small subset of the Linux kernel designed for 8086 and upwards. I'm thinking of putting my old 286 into semi-useful use with this...
I don't have the feeling that DR-DOS, Lotus, Java are viable competitors in a world sans Microsoft. If Microsoft decided to ship nothing new for 5 years these "competitors" all put together or individually wouldn't fill the void.
You think so? In 5 years sans Microsoft, other products would have gotten a chance - we'd potentially had real competition. Software in fair competition usually follows Darwin's theory - "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." In today's world, the one with the money that survives.
Microsoft dominates where others don't make good competition. It's not really that special.
Could you explain this point in more detail? On what specific areas is Microsoft competiting without good competition? Take a look at the by far most succesful pieces of Microsoft software: Lotus SmartSuite, StarOffice (or OpenOffice) and GoBe make great competitors to Microsoft Office. Some OSes are viable alternatives to Windows - in example BeOS and (arguably, I won't go there) Linux.
As you mention Netscape, there's a point. Netscape was qood, but didn't make it in the long run. The reasons are many. A good point is what you mentioned - Netscape didn't evolve too much (Darwin). This might be because of the second reason: the way Microsoft distributed Internet Explorer, eventually integrating it into their OS (or so they say in court). Today, there are many browsers in the market - myself, I use Opera. Lots of people like Mozilla.
I don't think that Microsoft should be "shut down." I beleive in a world with fair competition, where the sheer quality (or hackability, or fun, or whatever you preferences are) of software decides who "wins." Microsoft has had several court decision against them - they are guilty, you know.
They were trying to register an SSL certificate with Thawte, and Thawte needed them to prove it was their own domain. Nobody could actually prove that..
So, in this case, it's up to them to prove that they are entitled to it, though nobody forces them to. They can just not sign up with Thawte..
Re:Given that live music is the best music...
on
Instant Concert CDs?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
And the best thing is, if you have fast enough CD-burners, you can actually burn a lot more CDs than you have burners at the same time, according the RIAA..
Actually, the only thing it's possible to die from, is lack of oxygen support to the brain. Every cause of death eventually leads to this, and only then can you be declared medically (?) dead. Although, sometimes it's possible to wake a dead person (for example with CPR).
At least that's how they define death here in Norway. Dunno how it is with american guns and bullets.
Do you really think a 20k image every hour or so is such a big deal?
Every hour? Heh, not the creators of Opera. Nothing is sacrisfied for speed, they say. To keep bandwith at its max at (alomst) all times, the ads are downloaded once a week in bulk. That's probably 150K or so every week. I can live with that (-8
That said, I'm purchasing Opera. Been using it for some time now, and in comparison there are No Other Browsers(TM). I'm purchasing it as much for support as getting rid of the ads - good products deserves good money. At $20 for students (like me), it's quite bearable.
Nice observations. I've thought about it meself, but my brain really can't grasp this infinity-thing. These monkies (curse them) would have written all past history and all future history an INIFITE number of times each second. Bah.
First of all, my.sig is a qoute from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The/. sig-limit kind of limits it, so the last words and credits to Adams doesn't show, and I haven't bothered to fix it.
But inifity set aside, any number of monkeys could, given enough time, write both one and two copies of Hamlet. Even one monkey, with a rate at one keypress per second could do that, if you just give him some time. The hard part is finding out where Hamlet starts, and where Macbeth ends.
But there would be some troubles in feeding the monkies. You'd have to have an awful lot of bananas.
Why are there so few of you!? Where are you? Where do you go?
I mean, if I were the one that made something like this, I'd be proud as few, and get a lot of recognition from my (male) geek-friends. But would it attract the girls? *sigh* It sure ain't easy...you wouldn't happen to be norwegian? (-;
I'm sure you're right if it mattered just computer-generated random numbers. But IIRC, Linux, for example, relies on user interactions for random numbers. This includes log-ins and keyboard events. It's difficult to predict what the user might do at what time, so these numbers are truly random. That is, the definition "truly random" isn't clear. If you knew the posistion of every particle in the universe, as well as all physic laws and plotted this into a computer, would you be able to figure out the future by fast-forwarding? (This, of course, beside the fact that it's not logically practical to have a computer that contains references to the rest of the universe - the computer would
a) be able to contain references to itself
b) Take at least the same amount of mass that the universe contains to store the informatinon - hence a little logical problem)
But since we're probably talking about pure computer (mathematical) devices, this don't apply.. (-8
Heh.. Sorry (-8 That'll teach me to read posts twice before replying to them. English isn't my native language, so I misunderstood the tone. It could have been a joke, though, if people didn't actually send their mails as MS Word attachments. Oh well.
As for sending replies in DVI-format, that's a good idea. I'll do that next time (-8
Do not make jokes about that - it's actually quite true. I've seen a lot of mails with no content or "See the attached file" where an attached MS Word document contains the.. content.
Sometimes, the reason for this is because the content is formatted especially in Word, but most of the time it's just a letter or something.
I've gotten some of these. I just reply and request the information in an open format.
Looking at a single window, being able to check 6 or 7 checkboxes and hit the "enter" button is more efficient than trying to figure out which of 6 or 7 flags to use, their arguments if necessary, and then enter a string on a command line.
While I agree on the rest of you comment, this is I disagree on. It might take longer the first and second time you need to type a command (spending five minutes figuring out what flags to use is definitly less intuitive than checking 6 boxes), but the next 500 times you do it, you save time. A lot of time.
Processing visual information is a parallel process - scanning text is a serial one. This is certainly correct, but text can be lined up quite neatly. I can scan well layoted text in a console quite fast - for example, read a man page or watch for unusual stuff in logs. With some color added, it's argubly faster than a GUI.
Needless to say, I'm a command-line kind of guy. I beleive in the CLI! (-8
The way I've understood it, you only need to provide sources to those few customers. However, you'd have to give the freedom you've got with it in the first place as well. I.e. the GPL-license. That means that the customers may redistribute the software any way they like, for free or at a charge (and of course, under the terms of the GPL).
About the list of names: There's no list of names you choose from when you name your children. However, there is a list of names you're not allowed to call them. This would include (the norwgeian) words like "fuck" and "dick." People are actually trying to name their kids stuff like that. If you read norwegian, there's info about it on The Norwegian Language Council web pages. Limited english version here.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it would be that huge. I'm running Debian.. The apt-tools does the same thing as Windows Update - only much better, IMO (it can do quite a lot - advanced version management and distribution-side upgrade to name a few). The Debian distribution is rather large, and consists of over 12 000 packages, wich includes all sorts of applications.
Apt never sends any information to any servers - it just downloads the package definitions. Granted, the package definitions are a few megabytes, but when it updates them, it does so incrementally - an "apt-get update" (to update the definitions) rarely downloads more than a couple of hundred kilobytes a week. Keep in mind that this accounts for the whole system, not just the key applications (as Windows Update does - only Windows core, IE and Office, IIRC). I've even set my sources to be from two different distributions - sarge and sid.
To help leave the burden on specific servers, I'm using my local mirror, of course.
Some basic statistics from my computer:
Total Package Names : 15453 (618k)
Normal Packages: 12176
Pure Virtual Packages: 489
Single Virtual Packages: 292
Mixed Virtual Packages: 213
Missing: 2283
Total Distinct Versions: 16876 (810k)
Total Dependencies: 92578 (2592k)
Total Ver/File relations: 23283 (373k)
Total Provides Mappings: 2998 (60.0k)
Total Globbed Strings: 97 (1111)
Total Dependency Version space: 419k
Total Slack space: 89.2k
Total Space Accounted for: 4543k
I'm fairly sure there's better ways of doing Windows Update than the ones in use right now.
Same goes with "Xerox" copies.
Careful with the "American Tunnel Vision Syndrome." The verb xerox is in my experience rarely used outside the US. I Norway, where I live, we copy stuff. Or, if you're kind of old, photocopy it.
Kudos for Hitchhiker-sig!
.sig-limit is too short. I won't bother to fix mine.)
(Yeah, I know, the
I don't see the point in making you "a beleiver." As long as people love and use mouse gestures, there's a market for it. Nobody forces you to make use of them (-8
Opera's mouse gestures are really great. I open a link in the background as a new window by holding mouse2, and move my mouse down and up. I close a window by drawing and L (still with mouse2 pressed). I can open new, blank windows, reload and then some. Some of these gestures are performed just as fast with a keyboard, but not all (like the link-clicking stuff). As the mouse is the primary input device for web-surfing, it's nice to find more use for it than just clicking. Oh - I almost forgot the one I use the most. Back and forth in history can be accomplished by pressing mouse1 (for forward) or mouse2 (for backward) and press the opposite button.
I use KDE as well - my shortcut theme is quite useful and effective. The mouse gestures are a nice addition.
Good point. My 'ol 286 flies at 6 MHz, with a turbo-button to push it up to 12 MHz. A friend of mine has a 16 MHz 286. But I've never heard about 20.
.. probably the 50s or 60s about the trouble computers might cause when they, in the distant future, ran at speeds up to a MEGAherz. They were afraid the computers would interfere with other electronic equipment at those kind of speeds.. (-8
IIRC, there were some expanion kits to the 286 to make it a 386 with co-processor. These could might have been able to make it 20 MHz, but I never used them, so I wouldn't know...
Ah, well. My current workstation is 400 MHz. Works like a charm. What is all this fuzz about Gigaherz?
Heh, I remember reading a magazine from
It's improbable, but he could be using the "ELKS kernel , though strictly speaking not Linux. It's a small subset of the Linux kernel designed for 8086 and upwards. I'm thinking of putting my old 286 into semi-useful use with this...
I don't have the feeling that DR-DOS, Lotus, Java are viable competitors in a world sans Microsoft. If Microsoft decided to ship nothing new for 5 years these "competitors" all put together or individually wouldn't fill the void.
You think so? In 5 years sans Microsoft, other products would have gotten a chance - we'd potentially had real competition. Software in fair competition usually follows Darwin's theory - "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change." In today's world, the one with the money that survives.
Microsoft dominates where others don't make good competition. It's not really that special.
Could you explain this point in more detail? On what specific areas is Microsoft competiting without good competition? Take a look at the by far most succesful pieces of Microsoft software: Lotus SmartSuite, StarOffice (or OpenOffice) and GoBe make great competitors to Microsoft Office. Some OSes are viable alternatives to Windows - in example BeOS and (arguably, I won't go there) Linux.
As you mention Netscape, there's a point. Netscape was qood, but didn't make it in the long run. The reasons are many. A good point is what you mentioned - Netscape didn't evolve too much (Darwin). This might be because of the second reason: the way Microsoft distributed Internet Explorer, eventually integrating it into their OS (or so they say in court). Today, there are many browsers in the market - myself, I use Opera. Lots of people like Mozilla.
I don't think that Microsoft should be "shut down." I beleive in a world with fair competition, where the sheer quality (or hackability, or fun, or whatever you preferences are) of software decides who "wins." Microsoft has had several court decision against them - they are guilty, you know.
Oh, nothing against two hot chairs...
It was this about reading the articles... (-8
They were trying to register an SSL certificate with Thawte, and Thawte needed them to prove it was their own domain. Nobody could actually prove that..
So, in this case, it's up to them to prove that they are entitled to it, though nobody forces them to. They can just not sign up with Thawte..
And the best thing is, if you have fast enough CD-burners, you can actually burn a lot more CDs than you have burners at the same time, according the RIAA..
We're on to knitpicking? Great!
Actually, the only thing it's possible to die from, is lack of oxygen support to the brain. Every cause of death eventually leads to this, and only then can you be declared medically (?) dead. Although, sometimes it's possible to wake a dead person (for example with CPR).
At least that's how they define death here in Norway. Dunno how it is with american guns and bullets.
Do you really think a 20k image every hour or so is such a big deal?
Every hour? Heh, not the creators of Opera. Nothing is sacrisfied for speed, they say. To keep bandwith at its max at (alomst) all times, the ads are downloaded once a week in bulk. That's probably 150K or so every week. I can live with that (-8
That said, I'm purchasing Opera. Been using it for some time now, and in comparison there are No Other Browsers(TM). I'm purchasing it as much for support as getting rid of the ads - good products deserves good money. At $20 for students (like me), it's quite bearable.
Nice observations. I've thought about it meself, but my brain really can't grasp this infinity-thing. These monkies (curse them) would have written all past history and all future history an INIFITE number of times each second. Bah.
.sig is a qoute from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The /. sig-limit kind of limits it, so the last words and credits to Adams doesn't show, and I haven't bothered to fix it.
First of all, my
But inifity set aside, any number of monkeys could, given enough time, write both one and two copies of Hamlet. Even one monkey, with a rate at one keypress per second could do that, if you just give him some time. The hard part is finding out where Hamlet starts, and where Macbeth ends.
But there would be some troubles in feeding the monkies. You'd have to have an awful lot of bananas.
Why are there so few of you!? Where are you? Where do you go?
..you wouldn't happen to be norwegian? (-;
I mean, if I were the one that made something like this, I'd be proud as few, and get a lot of recognition from my (male) geek-friends. But would it attract the girls? *sigh* It sure ain't easy.
I'm sure you're right if it mattered just computer-generated random numbers. But IIRC, Linux, for example, relies on user interactions for random numbers. This includes log-ins and keyboard events. It's difficult to predict what the user might do at what time, so these numbers are truly random. That is, the definition "truly random" isn't clear. If you knew the posistion of every particle in the universe, as well as all physic laws and plotted this into a computer, would you be able to figure out the future by fast-forwarding? (This, of course, beside the fact that it's not logically practical to have a computer that contains references to the rest of the universe - the computer would
a) be able to contain references to itself
b) Take at least the same amount of mass that the universe contains to store the informatinon - hence a little logical problem)
But since we're probably talking about pure computer (mathematical) devices, this don't apply.. (-8
Guess what..... I wasn't joking.
Heh.. Sorry (-8 That'll teach me to read posts twice before replying to them. English isn't my native language, so I misunderstood the tone. It could have been a joke, though, if people didn't actually send their mails as MS Word attachments. Oh well.
As for sending replies in DVI-format, that's a good idea. I'll do that next time (-8
Do not make jokes about that - it's actually quite true. I've seen a lot of mails with no content or "See the attached file" where an attached MS Word document contains the .. content.
Sometimes, the reason for this is because the content is formatted especially in Word, but most of the time it's just a letter or something.
I've gotten some of these. I just reply and request the information in an open format.
Now, THAT's about the best thing I've read all day (-8 Thank you, my friend, you just made it to the Quotes-section of my door!
You, my friend, just made my day (-8
Well, that won't be nescessary.
I wonder how many non-autorative entries they've got in their members database! (-8
Looking at a single window, being able to check 6 or 7 checkboxes and hit the "enter" button is more efficient than trying to figure out which of 6 or 7 flags to use, their arguments if necessary, and then enter a string on a command line.
While I agree on the rest of you comment, this is I disagree on. It might take longer the first and second time you need to type a command (spending five minutes figuring out what flags to use is definitly less intuitive than checking 6 boxes), but the next 500 times you do it, you save time. A lot of time.
Processing visual information is a parallel process - scanning text is a serial one.
This is certainly correct, but text can be lined up quite neatly. I can scan well layoted text in a console quite fast - for example, read a man page or watch for unusual stuff in logs. With some color added, it's argubly faster than a GUI.
Needless to say, I'm a command-line kind of guy. I beleive in the CLI! (-8
Great.. you just ruined the S.E.P. on that hyperlink!
The S.E.P? But I could see it quite clearly without having to catch it in the corner of my eye..?
Now, that just made my day (-8
We'd totally melt her down. Poor thing. We wouldn't even have to use PowerBooks.
The way I've understood it, you only need to provide sources to those few customers. However, you'd have to give the freedom you've got with it in the first place as well. I.e. the GPL-license. That means that the customers may redistribute the software any way they like, for free or at a charge (and of course, under the terms of the GPL).
About the list of names: There's no list of names you choose from when you name your children. However, there is a list of names you're not allowed to call them. This would include (the norwgeian) words like "fuck" and "dick." People are actually trying to name their kids stuff like that. If you read norwegian, there's info about it on The Norwegian Language Council web pages. Limited english version here.