While this is true even Lance Armstrong would probably be completely parked on a bad bike.
OK, I don't know much about bicycling, but I know for sure that this is the case in cross-country skiing, which is also a extreme endurance sport. Nations that throw extreme amounts of money on equipment and support teams will beat a just as good athlete without the support team any day. Norway have research groups where Ph.D.s are awarded for research into friction of snow against skis. Top skiers have like 50 different pairs, where each is given special preparation towards a race. Those athletes that go along with like 10 pairs doesn't stand much of a chance.
Funnily, you'd think that alpine skiing would have as much to gain from this research too, but they are actually lagging far behind.
Thanks for the response! As an experienced user, would you advocate that Debian should go for 5.3 or even 5.7 in Sarge? It seems a bit too conservative to me to go for this very old version, especially when it has critical bugs in import functions... If so, perhaps you could file a bug about that...?
the creation of the first fision bomb was probably the greatest scientific achievment in human history.
No way!
To the contrary!
I have talked to Josef Rotblat (who was among the advocates to get the Manhattan Project started), and he said that the reason why he thought it would be critical to start was that he realized how easy it was going to be. Surely, he said, anybody could do it, and seeing what Hitler had been capable of doing, it was critical that he didn't get it first. Later, he said, he understood how wrong he had been: You can't deter a madman (the argument is of course much longer and deeper than that, but that's the one-liner).
Also, in late 1941, (Bohr came on board much later IIRC), the other scientist you mention felt they had most of the stuff ready. They were allready certain how the bomb was going to be built. The rest was mere engineering to them. Sustained and controlled fission was a much more interesting problem, which they pretty much devoted all their attention to at that point, the question is if they really needed to do that to build a bomb....? Fermi was bored out of his mind by simply working on the bomb... I believe the reason why the got sustained fission is not because it was necessary for building the bomb, but because it was a much more interesting problem.
The bomb was no scientific achievement, it was a simple application of some trivial theory from contemporary science.
Do you use some common dummy email IDs too, to get around the privacy problem online?
Not really, if anything, I use throwaways on my own domain, that I can use as spamtraps.
Anyway, if there is identifyable information about you there along with the e-mail address, it could have funny privacy implications... For example someone you knew comes around and sends you an e-mail with something that should have been only between the two of you, and it suddenly ends up in some random person's mailbox... Whoops....:-)
I suspect Ian Hickson (aka hixie) is behind this. Hixie is a really great hacker, who works for Opera but still contributes a lot to Mozilla, as well as writing and editing W3C specs now and then.
That it is the webforms stuff that goes first is not at all surprising, as Hixie isn't very fond of XForms.
Anyway, I think it is pretty straightforward: The guys forming the group didn't want MS on board. It's probably a matter of personal taste, not a big attack intended to bring Goliath down once and for all.
GRASS is pretty powerful, but it's not something anybody can just start using; it's more like something a Unix GIS professional (difficult but powerful systems like ESRIs) would find interesting.
That's very interesting! I was wondering if you could give me some advice...?
This is the situatation: I'm looking at GIS now, as I need to expand my skills, and only solutions running on Linux will come under consideration. Furthermore, I wouldn't trust systems where I can't inspect the source code. It doesn't need to be free as in speech, but the source code must be available.
I've looked at GRASS, since it is in Debian. It segfaulted on me when I tried to load a data set, so I didn't get very far. It did indeed look rather hard to use, but since I am a long time UNIX user, and can do some hacking myself, perhaps it is for me anyway...? I'm also a long-time R user (I love that system), and the two are supposed to work well together.
So, what you're saying is that GRASS is a powerful system, but has a steep learning curve?
That's quite OK by me... But does it flatten some time? That is, is it designed so that when you've grokked the fundamentals, you can pretty much do anything?
I think what I'll do the most is to create topographic maps from DEMs. Then, I may do some tracings of LANDSAT or ASTER data, to add some rivers, glaciers and stuff like that. How hard would this be?
There is at least the SRTM-3 data set. It is an excellent data set covering most of the landmass between 60 N and 58 S (which, unfortunately just barely includes me...). It has a spatial resolution of about 90 meters and an elevation resolution of about 15 meters.
It's in a simple binary matrix, easy enough to hack up something to import it whereever you want.
Well, it has to be statistically significant to be a big deal. If it isn't statistically significant it just means it is likely to be a fluctuation of unknown cause, perhaps a measurement error or some kind of bias (for example a few articles praising Mozilla highly would attract many Mozilla users). It could be back to normal next month and nobody would care.
But a change of 1% could well be statistically significant if the errors are even smaller. And from the story, it sounds like it is.
Yup. I have often said that the difficulty of getting WMDs is not producing them, it is surviving the production, and not to speak of, not killing your own forces if you use them... WMDs are dangerous, you know....:-)
OTOH, I wouldn't want to clean up the mess afterwards....
OK, thanks! But it didn't work for me. I'm still on 0.8, waiting for the fine folks to fix some bugs (such as that -remote apparently isn't reliable in 0.9.1), and for it to be uploaded to Debian unstable.
Anybody knwo how to install the extensions system-wide on a Debian Sarge system?
Some extensions will prompt you if you want to install it system-wide, then some might prompt from a root password. With some extensions, this works, with some, it apparently doesn't.
I tried, for example, to download Adblock, dump it in
/usr/lib/mozilla-firebird/chrome/adblock.jar
and then run
update-mozilla-firefox-chrome
It did seemingly update something, the chrome.rdf file was modified, but it didn't do the trick.
Indeed! I think many distros should ship AdBlock enabled by default, with a nice little list of ad servers to block. I think may people would find this a killer app!
Actually, they do claim to have taken "free, shareware and open source" into account, it's in the methodology section.
Other than that, I agree. The whole report, especially the "methodology" section is a piece of crap. This is something that's written by drop-outs who never grokked anything.
There just isn't anything there, there is no methodology. They probably went out, wanted a result they could sell to the BSA, and BSA knows very well that nobody would ever question their results, so why commit itself to do a proper study?
Firstly, it's extremely similar to the Brazilian effort (which is totally based on Backstreet Ruby, which is a multi-headed solution that has been around for more than 2 years now),
I'm running Ruby for my home system, and it is really nice.
It wasn't quite clear to me if you're also running Ruby, or if you have hacked up your own solution? Also, are you using a patched X server, or the straightforward Mandrake X server?
It's really nice to see that these types of solutions get some corporate backing, and the eyeballs of full-time hackers. I think it is a really neat solution, and it certainly beats anything competition has to offer!
It is also surprisingly light on resources. When I set up my system, I was hoping I would get an excuse to buy more RAM, but I didn't...:-)
Actually, Britannica has historically had a lot of problems too. Take for example the alleged evolution of Ptolemy's geocentric system. In 1910, the entry on Ptolemy was pretty good. Not anything like modern research, but at least it was a reflection of the general consensus among contemporary historians.
In the 1950-ties, some got the weird idea that epicycles were added on epicycles throughout the middle ages. This was based on some very bad early research that historians of 1910 may have been aware of, but did not find worthy of elaborate comment.
Britannica was the publication that really took this to its extreme, at some point they wrote that 40-80 epicycles were added per planet! Not only is it horrendously wrong, it is completely absurd: Nobody in the middle ages had neither observational capacity nor the mathematical methods to deal with anything like that.
Britannica is largely to blame that this myth could get into university curriculums world-wide as an example of "ad hoc hypothesis gone wrong".
If you have a good research library available look for articles by Owen Gingerich on Ptolemy for details on this. The facts is that Ptolemy's system was hardly modified at all.
It was moderated in the 1980-ties, and the most horrendous claims were removed. Around 1995, I still found the articles lacking, as the gist of the articles were that the addition of epicycles was a good example of "ad hoc hypothesis gone wrong", and I exchanged a few e-mails with the editors about it.
It has been a few years since I last checked these articles, but last time I checked, they still did not reflect general consensus among contemporary historians.
So, it is very much reason to question articles you read in Britannica as well, not only Wikipedia. The bottom line is that critical reading of any source is a vital survival skill.
Hm, I'm wondering what Wikipedia has to say about this... Unfortunately, I don't have any time to kill. What am I doing on/.?;-)
As much as I love tomsrtbt, it has saved my butt many times, it is not the whole answer to the poster's problems. tomsrtbt is first and foremost a rescue system. You'd have to go through a lot of mounting and manually starting the stuff you want up. What he wants is to boot from floppy (and tomsrtbt is not the only distro that does that) and get the rest of the system up from a USB stick. There is quite some work to be done before you get there.
You are of course correct that lines shouldn't be too long, 62 characters is a good guideline (as any good LaTeX FAQ will tell you...:-) ). Still, I think you're missing the point. When you fix the canvas width (or whatever you want to call it) a user who likes to magnify the text is getting very short lines. Like two words. I like my text at 18 pt, and I've set "smallest font" in Firebird to 15 pt.
With a liquid design, it is up to the user to determine what he likes best, and that's how it is supposed to be. I have never seen a website where the fixed canvas width made sense.
As a parent some way up mentioned, the problem is that you do not expect the user to adjust the width of the window.
However, this is a terrible shortcoming of today's browsers, they should be figuring out a good default line length on the fly for any given page, and have that easily configurable and adjustable.
I'm faulting browser makers for this, good design still dictates that you leave the choice to the user, as the alternative is so much worse.
But then, I'm actually using Mozilla's sidebar to adjust the line length, whenever the page design allows me to. Works ok, I think. But a page design that deprives me of the privilige, I really don't like that.
A quote from Mr. Paul Watson [nationalcenter.org] (as a Greenpeace member, I'm certian you know of him, as he is a principal founder of your organization)
Paul Watson is a good example of an eco-terrorist, but to be fair, he left Greenpeace a long time ago. Whether he was expelled or just felt unwanted is an open matter, but Greenpeace is far more moderate than him.
I've heard others elsewhere suggest that there should be a server distro and a desktop distro in Debian. I like the idea personally.
It was a thread on Debian Planet, and I disagree. It isn't a server vs. desktop problem. My parents want a stable desktop, I want the latest and greatest. My server needs to be stable, but it needs frequent updates when there are moving targets, typically SA and security tools. Well, I guess I'll just repost my post from the above thread...:
[...] There are many backports on my server, spamassassin, razor, chkrootkit and snort to mention a few, but also critical stuff like Exim 4, which I found I needed to combat all the MS viruses.
My own workstation runs testing now, and I find that testing is great for me now. My parent's Desktop, however, has actually less backports than my server: It's just KDE 3.0.5 and OpenOffice 1.0.2 there. They are experienced computer users, but they don't want to learn new things too often, so actually, the Debian release cycle is not bad at all for them. They'll get Sarge when it is released, but they'll probably follow the stable release cycle.
I think that in some environments, such as for example my old university department, where most people really need a stable system, not neat eye-candy, and the sysadmin has enough to do with supporting heavy number-crunching, the Debian release cycle is great too.
So, it is not a Desktop vs Server problem.
The thing is that you have to keep certain things uptodate, things that shoot against moving targets, such as spam and exploits, and those you need to release more often.
Additionally, we need something for those of us that want the latest and greatest (like I admittedly do on my desktop).
I feel that the componitized distro of Progeny is the way to go.
The problem is that you would probably need to have several generations interoperating. For example, you want a base system that's rock solid, but occasionally, you need updates too, so you might need to support three generations of the base system.
Fast-moving stuff like SA and chkrootkit would need just a single generation, but it needs to work on many generations backward.
Things like KDE should also be supported with a few generations for those who want a stable desktop, in the case where you want the latest and greatest, it might require you do use a newer base system.
Yep, that's a bad one. I had a cow-orker overwrite a comments-column in a SQL database in much the same way. It wasn't a disaster, though.
The worst thing I've done was in my first week-long job doing some web design.
I had just finished the job, and all I needed to do was to remove some backup files I had strewn all over the place. So I did
find ~/www_docs/ -name '*.bak' -exec rm * {} \;
Whoooops... That asterisk wasn't supposed to be there... Fortunately, it was almost the first thing I did that morning, so I got it restored from backup without any loss. But it was very embarrasing...
It was tried: Fairtunes did this. It is now dead. It didn't work.
The problem is in fact that however you do it, the costs of making the money transaction in a reasonable reliable way (and Paypal is an example of the contrary) is still so expensive it just isn't doable. I think it is the incredible conservativeism of banks that are the problem.
But I agree with your main thesis: That we need some way to get the money directly to the artists. But the problem is that we, hackers, need to design and implement the system on our own. We can't expect any help from financial institutions, from current distributors, and only from very few artists.
And I don't think a conventional website will cut it. I think it is important that every player (or browser, or whatever), keeps track of what you like for you, and then now and then presents you with a suggestion of what you should pay. Then, the costs of actually paying must be small, which it isn't today (getting any small amount from the US to Norway through the banking system costs about $40....).
Actually, apart from the occasional troll, which is easily ignored and soon modded into oblivion, I think slashdotters in general are quite receptive and interested in what people from outside the US has to say, and generally acknowledge that/. is very much an international forum.
Slashdot Mirror
GNU/Emacs! KjetilK ducks...
OK, I don't know much about bicycling, but I know for sure that this is the case in cross-country skiing, which is also a extreme endurance sport. Nations that throw extreme amounts of money on equipment and support teams will beat a just as good athlete without the support team any day. Norway have research groups where Ph.D.s are awarded for research into friction of snow against skis. Top skiers have like 50 different pairs, where each is given special preparation towards a race. Those athletes that go along with like 10 pairs doesn't stand much of a chance.
Funnily, you'd think that alpine skiing would have as much to gain from this research too, but they are actually lagging far behind.
Thanks for the response! As an experienced user, would you advocate that Debian should go for 5.3 or even 5.7 in Sarge? It seems a bit too conservative to me to go for this very old version, especially when it has critical bugs in import functions... If so, perhaps you could file a bug about that...?
No way! To the contrary!
I have talked to Josef Rotblat (who was among the advocates to get the Manhattan Project started), and he said that the reason why he thought it would be critical to start was that he realized how easy it was going to be. Surely, he said, anybody could do it, and seeing what Hitler had been capable of doing, it was critical that he didn't get it first. Later, he said, he understood how wrong he had been: You can't deter a madman (the argument is of course much longer and deeper than that, but that's the one-liner).
Also, in late 1941, (Bohr came on board much later IIRC), the other scientist you mention felt they had most of the stuff ready. They were allready certain how the bomb was going to be built. The rest was mere engineering to them. Sustained and controlled fission was a much more interesting problem, which they pretty much devoted all their attention to at that point, the question is if they really needed to do that to build a bomb....? Fermi was bored out of his mind by simply working on the bomb... I believe the reason why the got sustained fission is not because it was necessary for building the bomb, but because it was a much more interesting problem.
The bomb was no scientific achievement, it was a simple application of some trivial theory from contemporary science.
Not really, if anything, I use throwaways on my own domain, that I can use as spamtraps.
Anyway, if there is identifyable information about you there along with the e-mail address, it could have funny privacy implications... For example someone you knew comes around and sends you an e-mail with something that should have been only between the two of you, and it suddenly ends up in some random person's mailbox... Whoops.... :-)
That it is the webforms stuff that goes first is not at all surprising, as Hixie isn't very fond of XForms.
Anyway, I think it is pretty straightforward: The guys forming the group didn't want MS on board. It's probably a matter of personal taste, not a big attack intended to bring Goliath down once and for all.
That's very interesting! I was wondering if you could give me some advice...?
This is the situatation: I'm looking at GIS now, as I need to expand my skills, and only solutions running on Linux will come under consideration. Furthermore, I wouldn't trust systems where I can't inspect the source code. It doesn't need to be free as in speech, but the source code must be available.
I've looked at GRASS, since it is in Debian. It segfaulted on me when I tried to load a data set, so I didn't get very far. It did indeed look rather hard to use, but since I am a long time UNIX user, and can do some hacking myself, perhaps it is for me anyway...? I'm also a long-time R user (I love that system), and the two are supposed to work well together.
So, what you're saying is that GRASS is a powerful system, but has a steep learning curve?
That's quite OK by me... But does it flatten some time? That is, is it designed so that when you've grokked the fundamentals, you can pretty much do anything?
I think what I'll do the most is to create topographic maps from DEMs. Then, I may do some tracings of LANDSAT or ASTER data, to add some rivers, glaciers and stuff like that. How hard would this be?
They have made everything available in at least .sxi too!
It's in a simple binary matrix, easy enough to hack up something to import it whereever you want.
Actually, an MS apologist I met did use this as an argument in a political debate I was in...
But a change of 1% could well be statistically significant if the errors are even smaller. And from the story, it sounds like it is.
OTOH, I wouldn't want to clean up the mess afterwards....
OK, thanks! But it didn't work for me. I'm still on 0.8, waiting for the fine folks to fix some bugs (such as that -remote apparently isn't reliable in 0.9.1), and for it to be uploaded to Debian unstable.
Some extensions will prompt you if you want to install it system-wide, then some might prompt from a root password. With some extensions, this works, with some, it apparently doesn't.
I tried, for example, to download Adblock, dump it in
and then run It did seemingly update something, the chrome.rdf file was modified, but it didn't do the trick.Anybody have clues to share?
Indeed! I think many distros should ship AdBlock enabled by default, with a nice little list of ad servers to block. I think may people would find this a killer app!
Other than that, I agree. The whole report, especially the "methodology" section is a piece of crap. This is something that's written by drop-outs who never grokked anything.
There just isn't anything there, there is no methodology. They probably went out, wanted a result they could sell to the BSA, and BSA knows very well that nobody would ever question their results, so why commit itself to do a proper study?
I'm running Ruby for my home system, and it is really nice.
It wasn't quite clear to me if you're also running Ruby, or if you have hacked up your own solution? Also, are you using a patched X server, or the straightforward Mandrake X server?
It's really nice to see that these types of solutions get some corporate backing, and the eyeballs of full-time hackers. I think it is a really neat solution, and it certainly beats anything competition has to offer!
It is also surprisingly light on resources. When I set up my system, I was hoping I would get an excuse to buy more RAM, but I didn't... :-)
In the 1950-ties, some got the weird idea that epicycles were added on epicycles throughout the middle ages. This was based on some very bad early research that historians of 1910 may have been aware of, but did not find worthy of elaborate comment.
Britannica was the publication that really took this to its extreme, at some point they wrote that 40-80 epicycles were added per planet! Not only is it horrendously wrong, it is completely absurd: Nobody in the middle ages had neither observational capacity nor the mathematical methods to deal with anything like that.
Britannica is largely to blame that this myth could get into university curriculums world-wide as an example of "ad hoc hypothesis gone wrong".
If you have a good research library available look for articles by Owen Gingerich on Ptolemy for details on this. The facts is that Ptolemy's system was hardly modified at all.
It was moderated in the 1980-ties, and the most horrendous claims were removed. Around 1995, I still found the articles lacking, as the gist of the articles were that the addition of epicycles was a good example of "ad hoc hypothesis gone wrong", and I exchanged a few e-mails with the editors about it.
It has been a few years since I last checked these articles, but last time I checked, they still did not reflect general consensus among contemporary historians.
So, it is very much reason to question articles you read in Britannica as well, not only Wikipedia. The bottom line is that critical reading of any source is a vital survival skill.
Hm, I'm wondering what Wikipedia has to say about this... Unfortunately, I don't have any time to kill. What am I doing on /.? ;-)
As much as I love tomsrtbt, it has saved my butt many times, it is not the whole answer to the poster's problems. tomsrtbt is first and foremost a rescue system. You'd have to go through a lot of mounting and manually starting the stuff you want up. What he wants is to boot from floppy (and tomsrtbt is not the only distro that does that) and get the rest of the system up from a USB stick. There is quite some work to be done before you get there.
With a liquid design, it is up to the user to determine what he likes best, and that's how it is supposed to be. I have never seen a website where the fixed canvas width made sense.
As a parent some way up mentioned, the problem is that you do not expect the user to adjust the width of the window.
However, this is a terrible shortcoming of today's browsers, they should be figuring out a good default line length on the fly for any given page, and have that easily configurable and adjustable.
I'm faulting browser makers for this, good design still dictates that you leave the choice to the user, as the alternative is so much worse.
But then, I'm actually using Mozilla's sidebar to adjust the line length, whenever the page design allows me to. Works ok, I think. But a page design that deprives me of the privilige, I really don't like that.
Paul Watson is a good example of an eco-terrorist, but to be fair, he left Greenpeace a long time ago. Whether he was expelled or just felt unwanted is an open matter, but Greenpeace is far more moderate than him.
It was a thread on Debian Planet, and I disagree. It isn't a server vs. desktop problem. My parents want a stable desktop, I want the latest and greatest. My server needs to be stable, but it needs frequent updates when there are moving targets, typically SA and security tools. Well, I guess I'll just repost my post from the above thread...:
[...] There are many backports on my server, spamassassin, razor, chkrootkit and snort to mention a few, but also critical stuff like Exim 4, which I found I needed to combat all the MS viruses.
My own workstation runs testing now, and I find that testing is great for me now. My parent's Desktop, however, has actually less backports than my server: It's just KDE 3.0.5 and OpenOffice 1.0.2 there. They are experienced computer users, but they don't want to learn new things too often, so actually, the Debian release cycle is not bad at all for them. They'll get Sarge when it is released, but they'll probably follow the stable release cycle.
I think that in some environments, such as for example my old university department, where most people really need a stable system, not neat eye-candy, and the sysadmin has enough to do with supporting heavy number-crunching, the Debian release cycle is great too.
So, it is not a Desktop vs Server problem.
The thing is that you have to keep certain things uptodate, things that shoot against moving targets, such as spam and exploits, and those you need to release more often.
Additionally, we need something for those of us that want the latest and greatest (like I admittedly do on my desktop).
I feel that the componitized distro of Progeny is the way to go. The problem is that you would probably need to have several generations interoperating. For example, you want a base system that's rock solid, but occasionally, you need updates too, so you might need to support three generations of the base system.
Fast-moving stuff like SA and chkrootkit would need just a single generation, but it needs to work on many generations backward.
Things like KDE should also be supported with a few generations for those who want a stable desktop, in the case where you want the latest and greatest, it might require you do use a newer base system.
The worst thing I've done was in my first week-long job doing some web design.
I had just finished the job, and all I needed to do was to remove some backup files I had strewn all over the place. So I did
Whoooops... That asterisk wasn't supposed to be there... Fortunately, it was almost the first thing I did that morning, so I got it restored from backup without any loss. But it was very embarrasing...
The problem is in fact that however you do it, the costs of making the money transaction in a reasonable reliable way (and Paypal is an example of the contrary) is still so expensive it just isn't doable. I think it is the incredible conservativeism of banks that are the problem.
But I agree with your main thesis: That we need some way to get the money directly to the artists. But the problem is that we, hackers, need to design and implement the system on our own. We can't expect any help from financial institutions, from current distributors, and only from very few artists.
And I don't think a conventional website will cut it. I think it is important that every player (or browser, or whatever), keeps track of what you like for you, and then now and then presents you with a suggestion of what you should pay. Then, the costs of actually paying must be small, which it isn't today (getting any small amount from the US to Norway through the banking system costs about $40....).
Actually, apart from the occasional troll, which is easily ignored and soon modded into oblivion, I think slashdotters in general are quite receptive and interested in what people from outside the US has to say, and generally acknowledge that /. is very much an international forum.