Standards are certainly a good thing. Imagine if GE lightbulbs only fit into GE sockets. But your post for some reason called to mind something that happened at work a year or so ago. At that time I had a dual-boot NT/Linux machine and had had it for well over a year*. Most of my work was done in NT, but I enjoyed playing around with Linux from time to time. One day the middle-level manager whose little empire includes MIS (a MS bigot and pretty much computer illiterate to boot) got wind of it and complained to my boss that I was using a "non-standard" OS on his network. I had to laugh.
*The punch line is that now I'm running Linux full-time and using NT from inside of VMware.
Forgive me if I'm way off-base here. I haven't looked at the new std yet (but I will.....really) and it's been some time since I read the old one. But I thought/opt was at least semi-defined so that packages go in/opt/<pkg_name>, the executables are in/opt/<pkg_name>/bin and/opt/bin contained links to/opt/<pkg_name>/bin (so that $PATH wouldn't get gnarly). So if you look in/opt you would see bin, package1, package2, share (I suppose), and so on.
This seemed ugly to me at first, but it does have the advantage that to remove a package, all you have to do is rm -r/opt/<pkg_name> and then get rid of all the symlinks you just orphaned in/opt/bin.
Yeah, I can hear a difference. How noticible it is depends on the type of music and how it was recorded, but in general, these are my findings:
128K mp3 - awful. This is the vast majority of what you find on Napster, et al, which is why I almost never go hunting for music there.
256K and higher mp3 - pretty good for most sources, but if you have any live recordings of bands like Phish, DMB, etc. the high freqs are quite distorted and it sounds like the band is playing underwater. I can certainly hear the diff vs. CDDA.
192 mp3 w/ vbr - as good as 256K but the files are smaller.
ogg - better than mp3 at the same bitrate and better compression. Uses vbr always. Still not CD quality, even at 350K, but the best you can do at this point.
Mozilla 0.8 loaded that page fine for me (but what a butt-ugly web page!!) and yes, I did have JavaScript turned on. It also refused to read from/dev/zero and/dev/port.
In regards to the relative ease of installation of Linux vs. Win2k or whatever....I'm not going to get into a discussion of which is easier. For me it's Linux, for others it's Windows, but that's beside the point. The point I was making is that *both* are probably beyond the expertise of the average home computer user.
The "too little, too late" comment is not like saying that Linux is just for hackers. In fact it has nothing to do with Linux. I was expressing the opinion that the newfound stability of Windows (presuming it really exists - I wouldn't know) is too late. The typical home user is already conditioned to frequent meltdowns and regards this situation as an acceptable and normal aspect of computing. They don't realise that there is something better in the form of BeOS, Linux, Win2k, etc.
Having said all that, though, I agree that Linux is not ready for primetime. I'm not sure it ever will be, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing, either.
But NT 4 works well, and 2000 is even better. Too little, too late. The mindset in the userbase is already established. And it's not primarily in the office, but at home. As someone else pointed out, users think it's normal to have to reboot. It's almost a reflex: BSOD -->> push button.
I agree that at work you should be using NT/W2K, especially if you have a qualified sysadmin to help to setup and maintain. But how many home users are going to know enough to setup an NT/W2K box? About as many as will be able to setup a Linux/*BSD box.
If this works, I'm going to kick myself. Classic case of doing it the hard way when the easy way is actually better. I can't wait to do another upgrade to try it out.
Thanks for the response, and also for not answering the "Am I just an idiot?" question.:)
If I understand this correctly, you already have to have the package installed for this to work. Otherwise you get "No package provides libesd.so". What I'm after is a way to find out what rpm a given file is in so that I can install it to satisfy./configure.
Yes, I usually use RPMFind to solve the first problem, so at least that's a reasonable solution as long as I have a net connection. Seems like you should be able to write a script to scan through a set of rpms looking for a particular file. But I can't figure out how to list the contents of an rpm unless it's already installed.
As to the second, perhaps recursive is the wrong word to describe it....global might be better. A way to look at the whole bunch of packages I'm updating and take care of dependencies automagically. A friend of mine set up a Debian system recently and he showed me how apt works. I had heard all sorts of good things about it, but this was the first time I saw it in action. I was stunned. dselect could use some work, but apt is just awesome.
Also, if the other response to my question is correct (use rpm -Fvh *rpm instead of the for loop) then rpm already takes care of this situation, but I was too ignorant to realize it (not that the documentation is any help).
That *is* a nice feature, but it only works if the package is already installed. What if you're trying to compile something and./configure says you need library foobar.so.0 and you don't know what rpm it's in? Is there a way to query the rpm database to find out what rpm to install? Otherwise, you have to go get the source for the library and compile it up as well. Or guess what rpm it's in.
On a different note, the main thing that's broken in rpm (imo) is its lack of recursiveness. I recently installed the updates to RH7. I had a bunch of rpms and did 'for i in *rpm; do rpm -Fvh $i; done;' and of course about a dozen failed because foobar-1.0.0-1.rpm needed foobar-devel-1.0.0-1.rpm which hadn't been installed yet. Re-running the command takes care of this simple (but annoying) problem, but more insidious is the situation where it won't update something because another package depends on it, but you are also updating the other package, so the dependency doesn't matter. You end up installing a bunch of stuff by hand with --force --nodeps. Am I being an idiot? Is there a better way or is rpm as broken as it seems?
Enigma was about as unbreakable as you could get back then. The reason it was broken had nothing to do with the cypher itself being weak. It was broken because of sloppy procedures: easily discovered initial settings (like H-I-T-L-E-R), the use of common phrases within the cyphertext (aka cribs), not randomizing the wheels after encrypting a message, etc. And the reason they were sloppy is that they thought it was unbreakable. The irony is that if they had not believed that, it probably would have been unbreakable.
As someone else pointed out, a cypher system is as strong as its weakest link and that's usually the gray matter at either end of the encryption.
If you or your SO think it's adultery then it is. It's that simple. Some couples don't think it's a betrayal of marriage vows to occaisionally sleep with another person, some think it's ok as long as the other person approves it, some think it's not ok to even look at another with lust in one's eyes. There is a whole spectrum of beliefs. So in any individual case, it is up to those individuals.
If you want to appoint some outside agency (the Catholic Church as an example) to make that decision for you, then you must find out what their stance is on the issue. If you were Catholic then I'm pretty sure they would consider it a sin. As George Carlin said: "Wanna is a sin all by itself!" Just thinking about having sex with someone else is a sin.
In the end, however, it is you and your partner who must decide whether it's wrong or not.
What is this Lemming-esque infatuation with having only ONE option. There should be no less than 3 viable ways to do ANYthing. This meagre level of diversity is needed to ensure competition and some variety. Not all of us want to do things exactly the same way that the rest of the herd does.
I couldn't agree more! In fact, this exactly the point I was trying to make in my original post. There is room in the Unix community to accomodate all sorts of different ways to do something. If you prefer a CLI, use it. If you like a pointy-clicky interface instead, use that. There doesn't have to be just one way to do it. So why bash each other for solving a problem a different way?
Example: last year I set up a gateway on my home net so that all my boxen could share my internet connection. I used Linux because that's what I know. I could have used OpenBSD (or some other variant) and perhaps gotten better performance, security, etc., but does that make my decision wrong? No. Just different. Arguably suboptimal, but not wrong.
The decisions are not made around what is said on slashdot.org or any other advocatcy(sp) channel. Agreed, but the current KDE/Gnome war isn't too constructive. And the SysV vs. BSD & Sun vs. everybody else fights in the 80's were quite contentious for a while until the Great Unification. My only point is that a lot of times we end up fighting amonst ourselves when we should be presenting a unified front.
All any of us asked for was for the inflammatory pro-linux/anti-BSD flavor of it to be toned down, and the misinformation cleared up.
The BSD folks are right to ask for that, but I also think there is a little bitterness toward the Linux camp due to its recent (last couple of years) notoriety. Especially since BSD has been around in one form or another longer, and does some things arguably better, yet never achieved the "fame" Linux has.
I really hope that this doesn't deteriorate into more BSD vs. Linux wars. This is the type of thing that has divided the Unix community for so many years and it's time for it to stop. Sys V vs. BSD; emacs vs. vi; Motif vs. OpenLook; Gnome vs. KDE; and on and on and on. Look, everybody, can't you see we're all on the same side here? I know that rivalry and competetion are good, but there's a certain point where it becomes destructive. This balkanization oftentimes hurts the Unix community as a whole. In this day and age of MS dominating nearly every market, if we can't rally together for a common cause, then I think we're just doomed in the long run.
Linux and BSD each have their strengths and weaknesses. Use them where they are most appropriate. It doesn't have to be an either/or situation.
Re:We need a simple definition of planet...
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Is Pluto A Planet?
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· Score: 1
No, he showed what the moon's orbit looks like from the point of view of a stationary observer (wrt the Sun) above the plane of the ecliptic. It looks like a circle except the radius of curvature is a bit less in some places (when it is between Earth & Sun) and a bit more in others (when it is outside of Earth's orbit). I don't know about convex vs. concave, but if you were standing on the surface of the Sun, the moon would never exhibit retrograde motion.
I'll see if I can find something on the web that discusses this and if I do, I'll e-mail it to you.
Re:We need a simple definition of planet...
on
Is Pluto A Planet?
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· Score: 1
is the moon's orbit really convex wrt the sun? Yes, it is. I wish I had a link to point to that backs this up, but I don't. But I once attended a talk given by a NASA scientist and he spoke at some length about this fact. I was pretty surprised at the time. Now, I'd be surprised if Luna was the *only* moon in the solar system with this behavior.
Re:Good Fnarg! that article is so full of shit.
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2.2 vs 2.4
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· Score: 3
Funny, I thought anyone could include PPPoE in the kernel when configuring it for a recompile. Perhaps he could have mentioned that it was enhanced and tweaked, but saying it's included in the kernel is like saying your brand new car comes with a steering wheel. Du-uh!
Actually this is new. Previously to get PPPoE support (in a stable kernel) you had to install a kernel patch or use a client that runs in user land (e.g., rp-pppoe - which is excellent, thanks David). Now it's included in the kernel.
I agree with everything else, though. This guy needs a couple of good whacks with a cluestick.
Hehe, reminds me of a wacko that used to post on sci.astro, sci.physics and related ng's (maybe still does....haven't been there lately). He wanted to "soft land" the Moon somewhere on Earth (Pacific Ocean, say) to provide more room for people. He had a response for every argument we threw at him. It will require too much energy to soft land it....we'll bring it in slowly from *behind*. It will disintigrate when it hits the Roche limit....no it won't. It will cause the Earth to become unstable in its rotation....it'll settle back down when a new center of gravity is established. And on and on...... I could never tell if the guy was just trolling or seriously believed some of the stuff he was spewing. His turbolift clearly didn't make it all the way to the bridge, but he sure was entertaining. I think his name was Archimedes Plutonium or something like that. If you're bored, do a deja search on him. He might still be around. You/. trolls could learn a lot from him.
Perhaps zania can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the reason for the 6 planes was that was what it would take for adequate coverage of the globe. Actually, I think there were originally 7 planes but they scaled back to save money.
As for switching to birds on other planes, I think the probability is low unless you're in motion and cross from an area covered by one plane to one covered by another. More likely you would switch to the one following along behind it as the old one goes over the horizon.
One way to visualize this is to view the Earth from one of the poles and imagine 6 lines crossing the poles at 60 degree intervals. These are the six orbital planes. There 11 sats in each plane moving along in single file. So the worsst case coverege area is at the equator where the planes are spaced farthest apart.
I made all this up, so I really hope it's right. Someone jump in and straighten me out if not.
I second RiffRaff's opinion. The flares aren't really a problem and they only occur shortly after dark or just before dawn. The problem was the frequency band they operated in interfered with radio astronomy. I don't know if this is still the case or not, but I would assume that in it's new role, the sats could share the airwaves with the radio astronomers more peacefully.
Slashdot Mirror
Standards are certainly a good thing. Imagine if GE lightbulbs only fit into GE sockets. But your post for some reason called to mind something that happened at work a year or so ago. At that time I had a dual-boot NT/Linux machine and had had it for well over a year*. Most of my work was done in NT, but I enjoyed playing around with Linux from time to time. One day the middle-level manager whose little empire includes MIS (a MS bigot and pretty much computer illiterate to boot) got wind of it and complained to my boss that I was using a "non-standard" OS on his network. I had to laugh.
*The punch line is that now I'm running Linux full-time and using NT from inside of VMware.
Forgive me if I'm way off-base here. I haven't looked at the new std yet (but I will.....really) and it's been some time since I read the old one. But I thought /opt was at least semi-defined so that packages go in /opt/<pkg_name>, the executables are in /opt/<pkg_name>/bin and /opt/bin contained links to /opt/<pkg_name>/bin (so that $PATH wouldn't get gnarly). So if you look in /opt you would see bin, package1, package2, share (I suppose), and so on.
/opt/<pkg_name> and then get rid of all the symlinks you just orphaned in /opt/bin.
This seemed ugly to me at first, but it does have the advantage that to remove a package, all you have to do is rm -r
Yeah, I can hear a difference. How noticible it is depends on the type of music and how it was recorded, but in general, these are my findings:
128K mp3 - awful. This is the vast majority of what you find on Napster, et al, which is why I almost never go hunting for music there.
256K and higher mp3 - pretty good for most sources, but if you have any live recordings of bands like Phish, DMB, etc. the high freqs are quite distorted and it sounds like the band is playing underwater. I can certainly hear the diff vs. CDDA.
192 mp3 w/ vbr - as good as 256K but the files are smaller.
ogg - better than mp3 at the same bitrate and better compression. Uses vbr always. Still not CD quality, even at 350K, but the best you can do at this point.
As always, ymmv.
I've been wondering what to get for my next tattoo.....now I know. Can't wait to see the look on the tattoo artist's face when I show him this.
Mozilla 0.8 loaded that page fine for me (but what a butt-ugly web page!!) and yes, I did have JavaScript turned on. It also refused to read from /dev/zero and /dev/port.
In regards to the relative ease of installation of Linux vs. Win2k or whatever....I'm not going to get into a discussion of which is easier. For me it's Linux, for others it's Windows, but that's beside the point. The point I was making is that *both* are probably beyond the expertise of the average home computer user.
The "too little, too late" comment is not like saying that Linux is just for hackers. In fact it has nothing to do with Linux. I was expressing the opinion that the newfound stability of Windows (presuming it really exists - I wouldn't know) is too late. The typical home user is already conditioned to frequent meltdowns and regards this situation as an acceptable and normal aspect of computing. They don't realise that there is something better in the form of BeOS, Linux, Win2k, etc.
Having said all that, though, I agree that Linux is not ready for primetime. I'm not sure it ever will be, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing, either.
Thanks....:)
It was first said by John Hrarstar, I think, and I had to paraphrase a little to make it fit into the siglimit imposed by slashcode.
But NT 4 works well, and 2000 is even better.
Too little, too late. The mindset in the userbase is already established. And it's not primarily in the office, but at home. As someone else pointed out, users think it's normal to have to reboot. It's almost a reflex: BSOD -->> push button.
I agree that at work you should be using NT/W2K, especially if you have a qualified sysadmin to help to setup and maintain. But how many home users are going to know enough to setup an NT/W2K box? About as many as will be able to setup a Linux/*BSD box.
I'll be dipped.....
:)
If this works, I'm going to kick myself. Classic case of doing it the hard way when the easy way is actually better. I can't wait to do another upgrade to try it out.
Thanks for the response, and also for not answering the "Am I just an idiot?" question.
If I understand this correctly, you already have to have the package installed for this to work. Otherwise you get "No package provides libesd.so". What I'm after is a way to find out what rpm a given file is in so that I can install it to satisfy ./configure.
Thanks for your answer....
Yes, I usually use RPMFind to solve the first problem, so at least that's a reasonable solution as long as I have a net connection. Seems like you should be able to write a script to scan through a set of rpms looking for a particular file. But I can't figure out how to list the contents of an rpm unless it's already installed.
As to the second, perhaps recursive is the wrong word to describe it....global might be better. A way to look at the whole bunch of packages I'm updating and take care of dependencies automagically. A friend of mine set up a Debian system recently and he showed me how apt works. I had heard all sorts of good things about it, but this was the first time I saw it in action. I was stunned. dselect could use some work, but apt is just awesome.
Also, if the other response to my question is correct (use rpm -Fvh *rpm instead of the for loop) then rpm already takes care of this situation, but I was too ignorant to realize it (not that the documentation is any help).
That *is* a nice feature, but it only works if the package is already installed. What if you're trying to compile something and ./configure says you need library foobar.so.0 and you don't know what rpm it's in? Is there a way to query the rpm database to find out what rpm to install? Otherwise, you have to go get the source for the library and compile it up as well. Or guess what rpm it's in.
On a different note, the main thing that's broken in rpm (imo) is its lack of recursiveness. I recently installed the updates to RH7. I had a bunch of rpms and did 'for i in *rpm; do rpm -Fvh $i; done;' and of course about a dozen failed because foobar-1.0.0-1.rpm needed foobar-devel-1.0.0-1.rpm which hadn't been installed yet. Re-running the command takes care of this simple (but annoying) problem, but more insidious is the situation where it won't update something because another package depends on it, but you are also updating the other package, so the dependency doesn't matter. You end up installing a bunch of stuff by hand with --force --nodeps. Am I being an idiot? Is there a better way or is rpm as broken as it seems?
Exactly.
Enigma was about as unbreakable as you could get back then. The reason it was broken had nothing to do with the cypher itself being weak. It was broken because of sloppy procedures: easily discovered initial settings (like H-I-T-L-E-R), the use of common phrases within the cyphertext (aka cribs), not randomizing the wheels after encrypting a message, etc. And the reason they were sloppy is that they thought it was unbreakable. The irony is that if they had not believed that, it probably would have been unbreakable.
As someone else pointed out, a cypher system is as strong as its weakest link and that's usually the gray matter at either end of the encryption.
If you or your SO think it's adultery then it is. It's that simple. Some couples don't think it's a betrayal of marriage vows to occaisionally sleep with another person, some think it's ok as long as the other person approves it, some think it's not ok to even look at another with lust in one's eyes. There is a whole spectrum of beliefs. So in any individual case, it is up to those individuals.
If you want to appoint some outside agency (the Catholic Church as an example) to make that decision for you, then you must find out what their stance is on the issue. If you were Catholic then I'm pretty sure they would consider it a sin. As George Carlin said: "Wanna is a sin all by itself!" Just thinking about having sex with someone else is a sin.
In the end, however, it is you and your partner who must decide whether it's wrong or not.
What is this Lemming-esque infatuation with having only ONE option. There should be no less than 3 viable ways to do ANYthing. This meagre level of diversity is needed to ensure competition and some variety. Not all of us want to do things exactly the same way that the rest of the herd does.
I couldn't agree more! In fact, this exactly the point I was trying to make in my original post. There is room in the Unix community to accomodate all sorts of different ways to do something. If you prefer a CLI, use it. If you like a pointy-clicky interface instead, use that. There doesn't have to be just one way to do it. So why bash each other for solving a problem a different way?
Example: last year I set up a gateway on my home net so that all my boxen could share my internet connection. I used Linux because that's what I know. I could have used OpenBSD (or some other variant) and perhaps gotten better performance, security, etc., but does that make my decision wrong? No. Just different. Arguably suboptimal, but not wrong.
Oh, I get plenty of fresh air....:)
The decisions are not made around what is said on slashdot.org or any other advocatcy(sp) channel.
Agreed, but the current KDE/Gnome war isn't too constructive. And the SysV vs. BSD & Sun vs. everybody else fights in the 80's were quite contentious for a while until the Great Unification. My only point is that a lot of times we end up fighting amonst ourselves when we should be presenting a unified front.
From the headline:
The BSD folks are right to ask for that, but I also think there is a little bitterness toward the Linux camp due to its recent (last couple of years) notoriety. Especially since BSD has been around in one form or another longer, and does some things arguably better, yet never achieved the "fame" Linux has.
I really hope that this doesn't deteriorate into more BSD vs. Linux wars. This is the type of thing that has divided the Unix community for so many years and it's time for it to stop. Sys V vs. BSD; emacs vs. vi; Motif vs. OpenLook; Gnome vs. KDE; and on and on and on. Look, everybody, can't you see we're all on the same side here? I know that rivalry and competetion are good, but there's a certain point where it becomes destructive. This balkanization oftentimes hurts the Unix community as a whole. In this day and age of MS dominating nearly every market, if we can't rally together for a common cause, then I think we're just doomed in the long run.
Linux and BSD each have their strengths and weaknesses. Use them where they are most appropriate. It doesn't have to be an either/or situation.
No, he showed what the moon's orbit looks like from the point of view of a stationary observer (wrt the Sun) above the plane of the ecliptic. It looks like a circle except the radius of curvature is a bit less in some places (when it is between Earth & Sun) and a bit more in others (when it is outside of Earth's orbit). I don't know about convex vs. concave, but if you were standing on the surface of the Sun, the moon would never exhibit retrograde motion.
I'll see if I can find something on the web that discusses this and if I do, I'll e-mail it to you.
is the moon's orbit really convex wrt the sun?
Yes, it is. I wish I had a link to point to that backs this up, but I don't. But I once attended a talk given by a NASA scientist and he spoke at some length about this fact. I was pretty surprised at the time. Now, I'd be surprised if Luna was the *only* moon in the solar system with this behavior.
Funny, I thought anyone could include PPPoE in the kernel when configuring it for a recompile. Perhaps he could have mentioned that it was enhanced and tweaked, but saying it's included in the kernel is like saying your brand new car comes with a steering wheel. Du-uh!
Actually this is new. Previously to get PPPoE support (in a stable kernel) you had to install a kernel patch or use a client that runs in user land (e.g., rp-pppoe - which is excellent, thanks David). Now it's included in the kernel.
I agree with everything else, though. This guy needs a couple of good whacks with a cluestick.
Hehe, reminds me of a wacko that used to post on sci.astro, sci.physics and related ng's (maybe still does....haven't been there lately). He wanted to "soft land" the Moon somewhere on Earth (Pacific Ocean, say) to provide more room for people. He had a response for every argument we threw at him. It will require too much energy to soft land it....we'll bring it in slowly from *behind*. It will disintigrate when it hits the Roche limit....no it won't. It will cause the Earth to become unstable in its rotation....it'll settle back down when a new center of gravity is established. And on and on...... I could never tell if the guy was just trolling or seriously believed some of the stuff he was spewing. His turbolift clearly didn't make it all the way to the bridge, but he sure was entertaining. I think his name was Archimedes Plutonium or something like that. If you're bored, do a deja search on him. He might still be around. You /. trolls could learn a lot from him.
Yep, you're right. Thanks for the correction. I was wondering how they got good enough coverage with them spaced so far apart.
Perhaps zania can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the reason for the 6 planes was that was what it would take for adequate coverage of the globe. Actually, I think there were originally 7 planes but they scaled back to save money.
As for switching to birds on other planes, I think the probability is low unless you're in motion and cross from an area covered by one plane to one covered by another. More likely you would switch to the one following along behind it as the old one goes over the horizon.
One way to visualize this is to view the Earth from one of the poles and imagine 6 lines crossing the poles at 60 degree intervals. These are the six orbital planes. There 11 sats in each plane moving along in single file. So the worsst case coverege area is at the equator where the planes are spaced farthest apart.
I made all this up, so I really hope it's right. Someone jump in and straighten me out if not.
I second RiffRaff's opinion. The flares aren't really a problem and they only occur shortly after dark or just before dawn. The problem was the frequency band they operated in interfered with radio astronomy. I don't know if this is still the case or not, but I would assume that in it's new role, the sats could share the airwaves with the radio astronomers more peacefully.