I'm amazed how much you know about this. I won't claim that I know, but judging by the interviews and reporters I've seen from Iraq, many say they are far worse off at this moment.
For instance, all prisoners were let out of jail when Saddam fell. A political and unfair law system may work better than no law at all...
I've also seen a few interviews with people who say they used to have electricity, petrol, water and heating, but haven't got it anymore.
I guess some people are better off, and some are not. Judging by the (quite extensive) coverage from Norwegian TV and radio, I believe most people are temporarily worse off. But then again, Norwegian media are probably communist.
Re:Right tool for the job
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
Linus has ideals. Obviously. He has an ideal of not letting his ideals influence his work with Linux.
Honestly, saying that the engineer has no influence is just ridiculous, because the statement requires that everyone else understands the work of the engineer. That will never be true.
The ideal "I will tell everyone how this works" is an ideal. If the creators of the nuclear bomb said "this bomb only damages people, and has no effect afterwards", people would have believed it. Now, it requires ideals to tell the truth.
So, Linus' stand is to let everyone use linux for everything. That is a stand and an ideal: The ideal of laissez-faire.
"I have yet to see a PIM for Linux that compares to [Outlook]. Evolution is nice, but is just a clone of the interface"
Well, if Evolution is a clone, doesn't it compare to Outlook? I think Evolution has pretty much the same advantage/disadvantage rating as Outlook. In what way does not Evolution compare to Outlook?
Or maybe we could just make the entire war in CGI:) Just artificial bombs, explosions and destruction. We would be able to make a real-time-war in almost no-time! Bush, Blair and Saddam would get their fun, and no lives would have to be taken.
"For people who are serious about removing all the cruft in XFree86, you could make serious headway by forcing all windows to be allocated with this TransluXent technique. The amount of legacy code you could rip out of XFree86 is staggering. All the clip mask code. All the loops around drawing code. Lots of tests become useless. No more need for Expose events. Also imagine a proper Xshape extension using alpha masks instead of clip lists."
You could probably reduce the usage of those hacks, but you couldn't possibly remove them. Video memory is still not infinite, you know. Most cards today have between 8 and 64 MB of memory. So you will need a workaround when you use a lot of windows (or one program which uses a lot of video memory (Quake)).
But to normally use video RAM for this is interesting and intelligent. It is probably the future, and my guess is that it is possible to implement it without messing with the old implementation (ie keep both in X). That way, people with 2MB video RAM will get the same performance as today.
Yep. They're the biggest. Swedish DreamHack is almost as large (and has been bigger previous years), but TG is the biggest ever. They're 5100 people (as stated in this FAQ).
When I was there the last time (2001), the male/female ratio was about 10:1.
The smell is rather terrible, yes.
The attraction is generally to meet people who do the same thing that you do in your spare-time. Remember that Norway's largest city is less than half a million, and most people live on the countryside. Not many geeks to socialize with.
"On a side note, this is the first time I have tried Red Hat as a desktop OS. I've been using it as the core of my servers since 6.0... and I must say, its getting close. My big issues are no media support (mp3, dvds, mov files, etc), and lack of a good office suite. Face it folks, OpenOffice just doesn't compare to MS Office... and its killing me to use it. I might go back to the dark side, just so I can open.doc files correctly."
Huh? OO is more feature-rich than MS Office. It is as stable as Office, and I've always been able to read the text of stupid.docs. OpenOffice is the killer app that made me migrate my desktop in the first place!
Btw.. my old high school is now using OpenOffice all over - and they're extremely happy about it! The admins over there say stuff like "Finally - a real macro language" and "Wow.. we have so much money for hardware now".
Who will suffer? The poor, of course. The IMF always asks governments to crack down on the poor, while sheltering the rich.
Generally, I do agree. The IMF does often suggests solutions which benefit the rich countries, not the people in the poor countries.
However: In this case I can't agree that this makes the poor suffer. Hello? We are talking about SMSs - not bread or anything. Those who can afford having a mobile phone should really give some of their wealth. That will enable the government to take care of the poor.
That said, the IMF often suggests that the government doesn't take care of the poor. Let's hope the Phillipines get this.
No. When you retire from work, you are no longer a sysadmin. Then you are a human being. It's true! Although you have the infinite power of sysadmining now, it will disappear overnight when you retire.
The National Centre of the New
Norwegian Language and Culture
Opened June 2000, as a centre for adventure
and information on language and cultural matters.
Designed by the architect Sverre Fehn, who has received the most outstanding international awards of architecture. Mr Fehn
has also designed the Norwegian Glacier Museum at Fjærland.
The most modern and sophisticated building in
Norway, and a traditional Norwegian country courtyard with four old buildings.
Presents a modern exhibition on language
throughout the world (you may even find your own language there), the New
Norwegian language, Norwegian culture, and an Ivar Aasen Museum, using modern
electronic facilities as well as traditional, elegant presentation.
All information in the exhibitions will be in
Norwegian and English.
An in-door concert hall with 110 seats; an
outdoor amphitheatre with 300 seats.
Concerts, readings, theatre, library, art
gallery, conferences, the annual New
Norwegian Festival of Literature and
Music.
In our cafeteria with 50 seats, we plan to serve
traditional food and sophisticated new dishes created especially for the Ivar
Aasen Centre by some of the best Norwegian cooks.
A place for surprises, a nice meal, relaxing
walks on easy paths into the nearby woods with glimpses of the Norwegian
fjords.
The New Norwegian Language
Norwegian consists of two written languages, Norwegian
Bokmål (Dano-Norwegian) and Norwegian Nynorsk (New Norwegian),
which are mutually understandable, but based on very different historical
traditions.
A long union with Denmark (1380-1814) made
Danish the only written language for all Norwegians, but in the dialects the
old Norwegian language lived on as an oral language.
About 1850 Ivar Aasen published a dictionary and
a grammar which set the standards for a new written language, The New
Norwegian, as a common denominator for the dialects. Improving the cultural
and social status of the lower classes; this language played a major role in
the development of democracy in Norway.
Today, New Norwegian is the main language of 20
% of the inhabitants, mainly in rural districts. Although it is a lesser used
language than Dano-Norwegian in general, it is the main language of Western
Norway and is used daily in mass media, at schools, churches and in public
administration all over the country.
25 % of the Norwegian newspapers are published
in New Norwegian, and some of the major theatres and publishing houses use
only this language.
Some of the best authors write in New Norwegian,
e.g. Jon Fosse, whose plays were performed in 14 European countries in the
1990's.
Ivar Aasen
Born at Aasen, close to the Hovden airport, as a
son of a poor farmer in 1813.
Died in Oslo 1896 as a highly respected
intellectual, also abroad.
Poet, linguist and founder of the New Norwegian
language.
Collected words and expressions from the living
dialects by walking throughout most of Norway, altogether about 5000 km -
more than 3100 miles.
Knew more about Norwegian customs, traditions
and everyday life in the 19th century than anyone else.
Even today, some of his poems and songs are
among the most popular.
An eager botanist; his collection of 500 flowers
and plants is in a very good condition.
His linguistic methods are today used in
several countries in both Africa and Asia.
When the expert died, no-one had the password for the database. But the Ivar Aasen museum has maybe found a solution.
The Ivar Aasen museum is a national documentation center for nynorsk (Red: We have two versions of our written language, bokmål and nynorsk) language culture (?). They got a huge database of more than 1600 books and magazines in nynorsk by the Ivar Aasen expert Reidar Djupedal who passed away in 1989. Unfortunately, the database was password protected and no-one knew the password.
Therefore, manager Ottar Grepstad went to the national radio channel NRK P1 to attract the attention of hackers.
Now, tips are coming in from everywhere.
- I've got 20 e-mails and 5 or 6 phone calls. It seems like this is something that really interest computer freaks (translation note: could be geek/nerd, in Norwegian "frik"), says Grepstad to dagbladet.no.
The old database program "DBase 4" has been used. The Aasen museum has tried every thinkable password. In addition they have contacted Bibsys (Note: the national coordination of library databases) in Trondheim, who also had to give up.
Parapsychological organization
- I've even been contacted a couple of times by a parapsychological (psychic) organization. They told me that maybe people with special abilities could help us finding the password. They said it could be a regular word spelled backwards, says Grepstad.
The manager hasn't had the time to go through all the tips, but many can be good.
- Some tips propose alternative programs that can be used. Others send me links to websites that can help and some propose firms that can help us break the password, he says.
The IT division will now go through all the tips to see if any of them are any good.
The probability of a sysadmin dying is not large - but it is way too large if you have important data hidden behind the passwords.
My proposal is to have two sysadmins knowing the password. There is still a possibility for them dying at the same time, but it is.. well.. not huge. And most companies would probably accept that probability, as it is smaller than the probability for your entire system burning up with all your backups.
And when one die/retire/falls into a coma, just change the passwords and hire a new sysadmin.
Of course, the probability of a sysadmin being untrustworthy is larger when you hire two. But still, it's not double. If a sysadmin "leaks" the password to someone, he probably does so because someone pays him for it. However, most sysadmins aren't either completely trustworthy or completely untrustworthy. It depends on how much it pays to be untrustworthy. Therefore, there is no linearity between the probability of one sysadmin telling the password and the probability of one out of two sysadmins telling the password.
These are my opinions of what needs to be standardized on GNU/Linux:
Installation. Red Hat's RPM, Debian's system, Slack's tar.gz - we need only one. This is not hard.
Boot scripts. There should at least be a common _interface_ to the boot scripts for installation programs, so that a distributor can ask the question "want it to start on boot-up?" and it will work.
Automatic Kernel Updater. A must. From the config-file of the original distro, it downloads, asks if you want to include new feature A, B or C , compiles and installs. No matter what distro you have.
Printing. If I know how to setup my printer on a RedHat box, I should know that it works on Slackware too.
Except this, we need the different flavours that the different distros provide. It is a strength that GNU/Linux comes in many flavours - but if RedHat is a different OS than TurboLinux, it has gone too far. Then there is no benefit from having GNU/Linux experience - you have to have specialized RedHat og TurboLinux experience.
" Is RedHat really such a good distro for corporate needs, or is it merely that it has a big name so everyone buys it? I always think of RedHat as the distro that's been around forever, even though no one seems to use it (here come the RedHat users to set me straight...) Guess I've been talking to the wrong people."
Well, most die-hard linux hackers do not say they use RedHat (Notable exception: Linus Torvalds). Most have used RedHat, though. Why don't they admit it? Because there is not very much to hack on RedHat. Red Hat's strength is that the stuff they throw in actually works. More or less out of the box.
However, I don't use RedHat today. I used RedHat up to 6.2. Then I started looking at other distributions. At that time, I did not know much about how GNU/Linux _really_ works. I never made my own startup scripts. I did'nt compile programs. Heck, I didn't know where my libraries were or how I inserted a kernel module from the command line!
I started testing different distros. Mandrake. TurboLinux. SuSE. Many others. I tried at least seven or eight distros before I met Slackware. At first, the entire Slackware system seemed awkward. But after a while, I experienced a lot and learnt even more.
Now, I'm most productive on Slackware. Because I know the system so well that doing stuff from scratch is _easier_ and _faster_ than using tools like rpm and linuxconf. (overall, of course, some things are still faster with linuxconf).
RedHat is a distro for those that want a GNU/Linux that works - not for those that want to get a GNU/Linux to work. It is a good distro, but not what I want from a GNU/Linux system.
As a last addition: It is not a funny OS either. Mandrake is. Cute little penguins and round, purple install buttons. Colors and fun. RedHat is grey and red. Only a few, boring games. A corporate-type webpage. RedHat has lost the childishness of linux jokes and internal humour. It has grown up.
Grown-ups are easy to communicate with - but children are much more fun and can be adjusted and tweaked more easily.
So what are you trying to say anyway -- that it is ok that Linux isn't as good as FreeBSD/OS X because anybody who uses Linux is not going to be worried about big- time stuff anyway? Yuk.
No - that was not at all my intention! I said there has been more important features to implement than such large disks. The original post was "ha-ha-ha - MacOS supports it already"-toned. OK, MacOS supports it, but Linux supports tons of features which are more important to the average user.
But as Linux evolves, the need to use these disks with linux will arrive. I think it's great that Linux, FreeBSD and whatever OS supports it, but it isn't much to brag about. There are simply too few 3TB disks out there.
p
On the other hand, approximately 0 % of Linux' intended uses does need 60 TB at this time. As the world and kernel evolves, this will be fixed if the linux community needs it.
Yes, it's hobbyist based. Yes, it's great that FreeBSD supports it. Honourful! But Linux has had more important features to implement before this - because only a very few people have had access to these kind of disks.
However, 2 TB is not that much - and it's about time Linux supports it.
Let's just throw away the entire GPL. It sounds old and awkward. Let's get a better name for it.. Like License X or License 2002.
And then we could start to sprinkle it with pie-charts and diagrams and drawings and small flash animations - to make everyone understand that our SeXy License 2002 is a Good Thing.
After we're through, only those who know how to disable all the funky marketing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H information would be able to read what our license is about. That way, everyone would like this cool license (OK, not those who can't play Flash movies) and we, the little elite, would know what it is about.
In my experience with computer software, and especially operating systems, I've never seen a single piece of software being released on its announced release day.
Why? Is it that project management and programming skills are two incompatible skills for a human brain? Is it that everyone try to hype their project by making people wait a little longer? Is it that `cal' has an undiscovered bug? Is the world made this way to please som obscure and annoying god?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm amazed how much you know about this. I won't claim that I know, but judging by the interviews and reporters I've seen from Iraq, many say they are far worse off at this moment. For instance, all prisoners were let out of jail when Saddam fell. A political and unfair law system may work better than no law at all... I've also seen a few interviews with people who say they used to have electricity, petrol, water and heating, but haven't got it anymore. I guess some people are better off, and some are not. Judging by the (quite extensive) coverage from Norwegian TV and radio, I believe most people are temporarily worse off. But then again, Norwegian media are probably communist.
Honestly, saying that the engineer has no influence is just ridiculous, because the statement requires that everyone else understands the work of the engineer. That will never be true.
The ideal "I will tell everyone how this works" is an ideal. If the creators of the nuclear bomb said "this bomb only damages people, and has no effect afterwards", people would have believed it. Now, it requires ideals to tell the truth.
So, Linus' stand is to let everyone use linux for everything. That is a stand and an ideal: The ideal of laissez-faire.
Well, if Evolution is a clone, doesn't it compare to Outlook? I think Evolution has pretty much the same advantage/disadvantage rating as Outlook. In what way does not Evolution compare to Outlook?
(Really - I'm curious!)
Or maybe we could just make the entire war in CGI :) Just artificial bombs, explosions and destruction. We would be able to make a real-time-war in almost no-time! Bush, Blair and Saddam would get their fun, and no lives would have to be taken.
Wouldn't realtime by WHILE the scene is filmed?
Uh, as in "the actors are able to watch rough CGI while they are filming a scene"? That would be great ;) Holographic characters!
...my webserver has been doing realtime CGI for years.
You could probably reduce the usage of those hacks, but you couldn't possibly remove them. Video memory is still not infinite, you know. Most cards today have between 8 and 64 MB of memory. So you will need a workaround when you use a lot of windows (or one program which uses a lot of video memory (Quake)).
But to normally use video RAM for this is interesting and intelligent. It is probably the future, and my guess is that it is possible to implement it without messing with the old implementation (ie keep both in X). That way, people with 2MB video RAM will get the same performance as today.
Yep. They're the biggest. Swedish DreamHack is almost as large (and has been bigger previous years), but TG is the biggest ever. They're 5100 people (as stated in this FAQ).
When I was there the last time (2001), the male/female ratio was about 10:1.
The smell is rather terrible, yes.
The attraction is generally to meet people who do the same thing that you do in your spare-time. Remember that Norway's largest city is less than half a million, and most people live on the countryside. Not many geeks to socialize with.
Huh? OO is more feature-rich than MS Office. It is as stable as Office, and I've always been able to read the text of stupid .docs. OpenOffice is the killer app that made me migrate my desktop in the first place!
Btw.. my old high school is now using OpenOffice all over - and they're extremely happy about it! The admins over there say stuff like "Finally - a real macro language" and "Wow.. we have so much money for hardware now".
Generally, I do agree. The IMF does often suggests solutions which benefit the rich countries, not the people in the poor countries.
However: In this case I can't agree that this makes the poor suffer. Hello? We are talking about SMSs - not bread or anything. Those who can afford having a mobile phone should really give some of their wealth. That will enable the government to take care of the poor.
That said, the IMF often suggests that the government doesn't take care of the poor. Let's hope the Phillipines get this.
It's written in some mix of C and assembler. To compile it, you'll need Watcom C v10.0b (not later versions) and TASM.
Not what I want in a handheld device, at least.
So.. hah!
The National Centre of the New Norwegian Language and Culture
The New Norwegian Language
Ivar Aasen
When the expert died, no-one had the password for the database. But the Ivar Aasen museum has maybe found a solution.
The Ivar Aasen museum is a national documentation center for nynorsk (Red: We have two versions of our written language, bokmål and nynorsk) language culture (?). They got a huge database of more than 1600 books and magazines in nynorsk by the Ivar Aasen expert Reidar Djupedal who passed away in 1989. Unfortunately, the database was password protected and no-one knew the password. Therefore, manager Ottar Grepstad went to the national radio channel NRK P1 to attract the attention of hackers. Now, tips are coming in from everywhere. - I've got 20 e-mails and 5 or 6 phone calls. It seems like this is something that really interest computer freaks (translation note: could be geek/nerd, in Norwegian "frik"), says Grepstad to dagbladet.no. The old database program "DBase 4" has been used. The Aasen museum has tried every thinkable password. In addition they have contacted Bibsys (Note: the national coordination of library databases) in Trondheim, who also had to give up.
Parapsychological organization
- I've even been contacted a couple of times by a parapsychological (psychic) organization. They told me that maybe people with special abilities could help us finding the password. They said it could be a regular word spelled backwards, says Grepstad. The manager hasn't had the time to go through all the tips, but many can be good. - Some tips propose alternative programs that can be used. Others send me links to websites that can help and some propose firms that can help us break the password, he says. The IT division will now go through all the tips to see if any of them are any good.
My proposal is to have two sysadmins knowing the password. There is still a possibility for them dying at the same time, but it is.. well.. not huge. And most companies would probably accept that probability, as it is smaller than the probability for your entire system burning up with all your backups.
And when one die/retire/falls into a coma, just change the passwords and hire a new sysadmin.
Of course, the probability of a sysadmin being untrustworthy is larger when you hire two. But still, it's not double. If a sysadmin "leaks" the password to someone, he probably does so because someone pays him for it. However, most sysadmins aren't either completely trustworthy or completely untrustworthy. It depends on how much it pays to be untrustworthy. Therefore, there is no linearity between the probability of one sysadmin telling the password and the probability of one out of two sysadmins telling the password.
My advice: At least two should know the password!
Except this, we need the different flavours that the different distros provide. It is a strength that GNU/Linux comes in many flavours - but if RedHat is a different OS than TurboLinux, it has gone too far. Then there is no benefit from having GNU/Linux experience - you have to have specialized RedHat og TurboLinux experience.
Well, most die-hard linux hackers do not say they use RedHat (Notable exception: Linus Torvalds). Most have used RedHat, though. Why don't they admit it? Because there is not very much to hack on RedHat. Red Hat's strength is that the stuff they throw in actually works. More or less out of the box.
However, I don't use RedHat today. I used RedHat up to 6.2. Then I started looking at other distributions. At that time, I did not know much about how GNU/Linux _really_ works. I never made my own startup scripts. I did'nt compile programs. Heck, I didn't know where my libraries were or how I inserted a kernel module from the command line!
I started testing different distros. Mandrake. TurboLinux. SuSE. Many others. I tried at least seven or eight distros before I met Slackware. At first, the entire Slackware system seemed awkward. But after a while, I experienced a lot and learnt even more.
Now, I'm most productive on Slackware. Because I know the system so well that doing stuff from scratch is _easier_ and _faster_ than using tools like rpm and linuxconf. (overall, of course, some things are still faster with linuxconf).
RedHat is a distro for those that want a GNU/Linux that works - not for those that want to get a GNU/Linux to work. It is a good distro, but not what I want from a GNU/Linux system.
As a last addition: It is not a funny OS either. Mandrake is. Cute little penguins and round, purple install buttons. Colors and fun. RedHat is grey and red. Only a few, boring games. A corporate-type webpage. RedHat has lost the childishness of linux jokes and internal humour. It has grown up.
Grown-ups are easy to communicate with - but children are much more fun and can be adjusted and tweaked more easily.
No - that was not at all my intention! I said there has been more important features to implement than such large disks. The original post was "ha-ha-ha - MacOS supports it already"-toned. OK, MacOS supports it, but Linux supports tons of features which are more important to the average user.
But as Linux evolves, the need to use these disks with linux will arrive. I think it's great that Linux, FreeBSD and whatever OS supports it, but it isn't much to brag about. There are simply too few 3TB disks out there. p
First of all, it signifies that Adams is neither a part of life or the universe. With a chill in my spine, I have come to realize that.
Secondly, Adams substitutes everything in the title. And most certainly, he has been the substitution for almost everything else to many a geek.
Thirdly, it signifies that Adams is one of the three basic principles of existance: We have life, we have the universe, and we have Douglas Adams.
Beautiful. Definitely beautiful.
Yes, it's hobbyist based. Yes, it's great that FreeBSD supports it. Honourful! But Linux has had more important features to implement before this - because only a very few people have had access to these kind of disks.
However, 2 TB is not that much - and it's about time Linux supports it.
General Kernel stuff
Fix all kernel warnings
All kernel warnings? That's almost like being a fire-fighter in hell..
Let's just throw away the entire GPL. It sounds old and awkward. Let's get a better name for it.. Like License X or License 2002.
And then we could start to sprinkle it with pie-charts and diagrams and drawings and small flash animations - to make everyone understand that our SeXy License 2002 is a Good Thing.
After we're through, only those who know how to disable all the funky marketing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H information would be able to read what our license is about. That way, everyone would like this cool license (OK, not those who can't play Flash movies) and we, the little elite, would know what it is about.
Sounds like FUD?
Why? Is it that project management and programming skills are two incompatible skills for a human brain? Is it that everyone try to hype their project by making people wait a little longer? Is it that `cal' has an undiscovered bug? Is the world made this way to please som obscure and annoying god?
I guess it's a mix.