Anyway, the study is farcial because it counts sales, not installed systems. Thus, Debian doesn't get reported.
Hear, hear!
I'm in the middle of downloading 2.2 images for a couple of servers at work (yes I am using rsync to be kind to the iso mirrors:-)
It seems incredible that an article about distributions for servers could skip debian. Whilst the article did state that they were using IDC info, and that this didn't reflect pre-installed sales, it nowhere stated that most people download their distro.
How many people are running debian? - I don't know and IDC don't know, that's fair enough - but the article is very misleading to talk about market share, and then ignore half the market! Just my 0.02 - Derwen
haha...gummysevers, running linux...
hehe...hrmmm...8 $1,500 gummyservers running linux
hrmm...uhhh..8 $1,500 gummyservers running a free OS
uhhh...ummm...$12,000 worth of gummiservers
ummm...$18,000 - $12,000 != 0
Developing and supporting quality parallel solutions != $0.00
Terra Soft Solutions are, AFAICT, concerned with quality and responsibility in their work, as well as making an operating profit.
Build a parallel cluster at home. Get it to work. Now think about supporting it for a range of uses and users. Now add up the cost again.
- Derwen
NASA have done a lot of research on this at their John C. Stennis Skylab Space Center. Dr. Wolverton discusses the effect of 50 houseplants in "Eco-Friendly House Plants".
There are many horrors lurking in our homes and offices. Perusal of this article (text-only link here) could lead you to live out your life in a tent. However the "big, bad three" ( formaldehyde, benzene and trichloroethylene) are largely scrubbed from the air by plants. The book referred to above looks at the most effective. You are correct in thinking that Chlorophytum comosum (Thunb.) Jaccques (The spider plant) is particularly useful. An important point is that plants are an effective, low-tech solution, self-replicating and aesthetically-pleasing - this beats expensive, quick-fix high-tech solutions any time.
It should come as no surprise that vascular plants do this so well as they have been cleaning earth's atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years (and much longer in the case of their predecessors).
- Derwen
KDE2 won't be in the official Debian archive for Potato
"Considering how many people have been asking for KDE packages in Debian I expect that we will have packages within 2 weeks of the Qt/UNIX 2.2 release." - Wicchert Ackerman, Debian project
leader, in an article on Debian's response to Trolltech's GPL announcement.
So at least a package will be available to anyone who can type apt-get. =)
- Derwen
but I REALLY don't think you are going to find any way to broadcast CD quality sound over F.M. radio.. oh what's that? you have?... ...Beethovan's[sic] 9th could sound wonderful when I'm driving my car home if only the broadcast quality was better
Actually digital radio gives close-to-cd sound using a compression system similar to MP3, called MUSICAM (Masking Pattern Universal Sub-band Integrated Coding And Multiplexing)with encoding options in the range 64 kbit/s to 384 kbit/s.
Analogue broadcast on FM is of very good quality, possibly limited by the digital encoding used for distribution for the last 20 years. The problem is that most staions use compression to control the dynamic range. One of the reasons that they do this is because people listen to the wireless in their cars, a noisy environment. Some stations increase their compression at "drivetime", and are gracious enough to reduce it in the evenings, to give better audio quality broadcasts.
By the way, I always thought 'CD quality' was an oxymoron, but then I'm fortunate enough to have my recorded music in the grooves of vinyl disks.
- Derwen
And now, if your boss (or spouse) grouses that there aren't any free, multilingual Linux journals online, not only do you know their excuse barrel is near empty, but you can... help them out with...
I don't like hats and the colour red makes me nervous.
Penguins are cold creatures.
It's all written by some character out of Peanuts.
A self-recursive what?
I'm not having anyone with long hair contributing to my company.
If we're not paying anyone for it, how can I get my kickback?
This OS works on the sabbath - at least windows had the decency to crash then.
or more seriously:
I might get caught in the crossfire of a pointless and tired flamewar.
- Derwen
Security and stability should come first in a distribution, not convenience. Isn't that most of Microsoft's problem?
It may be M$'s problem where security and stability both matter, but on the desktop stability takes a second place to 'really neat features' for many users. The advantage of OSS is that the user has the choice. I can be happy with Debian 2.2 on my i486's and someone else can enjoy the latest betas on their pentium III desktop and tolerate the odd crashed app.. Micros~1 doesn't give this choice, that's their problem. - Derwen
Remember the days of 2MB demos? Remember the days of 360k games?
I was sorting out the attic the other day when I came accross the tapes (yes compact cassettes, not disks) of games programs for my 1K 8-bit Sinclair ZX81: 'Breakout', 'Space Invaders' and a music program from Macronics of Knowle, UK and Artic Computing's 'ZXChess.'
Yes, that's right, a functional chess program in 1024 bytes of memory. I wonder if the programmer is still coding now - can he|she cope with having to write all the extra lines of poorly written code expected for bloating todays app.s?
- Derwen
They're not going to take much notice until you realize that it is Red Hat kernel 2.0.34 and Red Hat kernel 2.4.x. All mainstream publishers know that Red Hat is Linux. Jeez.
[for the humour impaired, think very carefully a minute]
I think that the subscription idea sounds about fairest way - especially with a discount to purchasers of the first edition. It may be difficult to arrange collection of monies from people in other countries with no credit card - have you thought about the practicalities of this - you don't want to exclude a segment of potential readers, do you?
How about making all material freely available to non-subscribers 10 or 12 months later, so that this useful resource can be accessed by those who are interested, but are never going to subscribe to everything.
A large number of paying subscribers will also give your current publisher pause for thought.
- Derwen
At 1.30 gmt Amazon UK is down with the following message:
Keep shopping...
Feel free to visit our partner site Amazon.com, which remains open.
Again, we apologise for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.
Your friends at Amazon.co.uk
Please enter your e-mail address:
Has the site been slashdotted by Americans over-eager for the single-volume version. How can you be so unethical? Does the matter of patents mean nothing to you??;-)
- Derwen
Actualy[sic], anybody have a UK source other than amazon.com?
You could try streetsonline. For a hardback copy at 19 UK Pounds, or a paperback [Am. Eng. = "softback"] copy at 14.24 UK Pounds. They advertize US shipping.
The review referred to certainly makes me want to read the book. She sounds a very interesting character, strange obsession with degree courses notwithstanding. I'm interested to see how well the academic wrap of 'a translation of medieval Latin manuscripts (the work of Dr. Pierce Ratcliff, professor of War Studies), a major revision and modernisation of the "Lost History of Burgundy"' goes. A similar narrative device in Stephen Lawhead'sCeltic Crusade cycle can be a little jarring - though it does have a feeling of leading up to something.
- Derwen
Like organic farming, 'gasohol' will take up much more farmland than is currently in use, effectively wiping out all natural land that can be farmed. Goodbye, nature preserves. Wetlands will be drained, forests razed.
I am sure that if you took the time to do just a little reading, you would know that after a short conversion period, organic farming gives roughly the same yield as its chemical counterpart.
The real key to efficiently feeding ourselves lies in going beyond organic techniques and using good design to produce systems which use natural cycles to increase production and reduce pollution. See here for a randomly selected example, and here or here for more globally representative projects. - Derwen
You are quite right, growing our fuel is way more efficient. All the CO2 (greenhouse gas) released is absorbed by the next years crop: we work with a natural cycle instead of a linear path of mine resource, consume, pollute. Another advantage is the chance to grow and process fuel locally, for local needs - oil-producing countries are not too keen on this possibility of course.
In England, one town (Reading) recently ran its buses on diesel from oilseed rape (this may be used in an unmodified engine). New government regulations meant that "because of immense bureaucratic compliance requirements the buses in Reading went back to running on diesel."
However the vehicles worked well: "Drivers reported the buses started well, had no breakdowns and produced little smoke. The fuel was as good or better than diesel." (If you scroll a long way down this link, you will find these quotes.)
For information on the project to use biodiesel in America's Yellowstone National Park, see here.
Forget about ad potential, can you imagine standing at a street corner and hearing, "THIS IS THE VOICE OF GOD!
Actually the article states that " frequency response, depending on size, extends down to a few hundred Hertz." I think people will be more surprised than alarmed to discover that the 'voice of god' is a soprano.
- Derwen
... and let bygones be bygones? Anyway, if you do look for a link, good luck:
NetBSD Search results
-------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------
No matches were found for theo and de and raadt
Looks like he's been purged with Stalin-like efficiency;-p - Derwen
Unless Dell are really serious about their Linux commitment, then this is one hell of a big screen just for executives sitting on jets to play minesweeper.
- Derwen
Potential investors regularly contact de Raadt with offers of financial backing, he notes, but he has rebuffed them all: "I talked to a venture capitalist a couple of weeks ago. I ended up convincing him to just give us a donation."
Every open-source project needs someone like this on the team, regardless of his/her other abilities. - Derwen
It's a shame: N-Cube sounds OK in an apple sort of way, but if it had been called dolphin, then when it was shut down it could have said So long and thanks for all the frag I guess it's not the kind of thing that Arthuer Dent would buy anyway. - Derwen
Re:But when quality matters [Even more offtopic]
on
Computer Historian?
·
· Score: 1
It will if it takes off. The trick now is getting it to a mass market. As has been said
"We think there is potential to be a mass-market product," Kelsey said. "Will it take over CD? That's still up in the air. Even among DVD audio owners there may be artists where the CD is enough for them."
It may never replace CD's, but it's good if the choice of a higher quality format is available. Me? I'll carry on listening to my gramophone records, and buying up those classic 1950's Decca presssings when I see them. - Derwen
Slashdot Mirror
Hear, hear!
I'm in the middle of downloading 2.2 images for a couple of servers at work (yes I am using rsync to be kind to the iso mirrors :-)
It seems incredible that an article about distributions for servers could skip debian. Whilst the article did state that they were using IDC info, and that this didn't reflect pre-installed sales, it nowhere stated that most people download their distro.
How many people are running debian? - I don't know and IDC don't know, that's fair enough - but the article is very misleading to talk about market share, and then ignore half the market!
Just my 0.02
- Derwen
Terra Soft Solutions are, AFAICT, concerned with quality and responsibility in their work, as well as making an operating profit.
Build a parallel cluster at home. Get it to work. Now think about supporting it for a range of uses and users. Now add up the cost again.
- Derwen
No way, I have it on very good authority that that was done by Al Gore .
- Derwen
Hey, that's no problem, most of these cut 'n' paste 1337 5cr1p+ k1dd13s have only ever scraped a D- or E anyway.
- Derwen
NASA have done a lot of research on this at their John C. Stennis Skylab Space Center. Dr. Wolverton discusses the effect of 50 houseplants in "Eco-Friendly House Plants".
There are many horrors lurking in our homes and offices. Perusal of this article (text-only link here) could lead you to live out your life in a tent. However the "big, bad three" ( formaldehyde, benzene and trichloroethylene) are largely scrubbed from the air by plants. The book referred to above looks at the most effective. You are correct in thinking that Chlorophytum comosum (Thunb.) Jaccques (The spider plant) is particularly useful. An important point is that plants are an effective, low-tech solution, self-replicating and aesthetically-pleasing - this beats expensive, quick-fix high-tech solutions any time.
It should come as no surprise that vascular plants do this so well as they have been cleaning earth's atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years (and much longer in the case of their predecessors).
- Derwen
"Considering how many people have been asking for KDE packages in Debian I expect that we will have packages within 2 weeks of the Qt/UNIX 2.2 release." - Wicchert Ackerman, Debian project leader, in an article on Debian's response to Trolltech's GPL announcement.
So at least a package will be available to anyone who can type apt-get. =)
- Derwen
- Derwen
Actually digital radio gives close-to-cd sound using a compression system similar to MP3, called MUSICAM (Masking Pattern Universal Sub-band Integrated Coding And Multiplexing)with encoding options in the range 64 kbit/s to 384 kbit/s.
Analogue broadcast on FM is of very good quality, possibly limited by the digital encoding used for distribution for the last 20 years. The problem is that most staions use compression to control the dynamic range. One of the reasons that they do this is because people listen to the wireless in their cars , a noisy environment. Some stations increase their compression at "drivetime", and are gracious enough to reduce it in the evenings, to give better audio quality broadcasts.
By the way, I always thought 'CD quality' was an oxymoron, but then I'm fortunate enough to have my recorded music in the grooves of vinyl disks.
- Derwen
I might get caught in the crossfire of a pointless and tired flamewar.
- Derwen
- Derwen
I was sorting out the attic the other day when I came accross the tapes (yes compact cassettes, not disks) of games programs for my 1K 8-bit Sinclair ZX81: 'Breakout', 'Space Invaders' and a music program from Macronics of Knowle, UK and Artic Computing's 'ZXChess.'
Yes, that's right, a functional chess program in 1024 bytes of memory. I wonder if the programmer is still coding now - can he|she cope with having to write all the extra lines of poorly written code expected for bloating todays app.s?
- Derwen
[for the humour impaired, think very carefully a minute]
How about making all material freely available to non-subscribers 10 or 12 months later, so that this useful resource can be accessed by those who are interested, but are never going to subscribe to everything.
A large number of paying subscribers will also give your current publisher pause for thought.
- Derwen
At 1.30 gmt Amazon UK is down with the following message:
Has the site been slashdotted by Americans over-eager for the single-volume version. How can you be so unethical? Does the matter of patents mean nothing to you??
- Derwen
You could try streetsonline. For a hardback copy at 19 UK Pounds, or a paperback [Am. Eng. = "softback"] copy at 14.24 UK Pounds. They advertize US shipping.
The review referred to certainly makes me want to read the book. She sounds a very interesting character, strange obsession with degree courses notwithstanding. I'm interested to see how well the academic wrap of 'a translation of medieval Latin manuscripts (the work of Dr. Pierce Ratcliff, professor of War Studies), a major revision and modernisation of the "Lost History of Burgundy"' goes. A similar narrative device in Stephen Lawhead's Celtic Crusade cycle can be a little jarring - though it does have a feeling of leading up to something.
- Derwen
I am sure that if you took the time to do just a little reading, you would know that after a short conversion period, organic farming gives roughly the same yield as its chemical counterpart.
The real key to efficiently feeding ourselves lies in going beyond organic techniques and using good design to produce systems which use natural cycles to increase production and reduce pollution. See here for a randomly selected example, and here or here for more globally representative projects.
- Derwen
Another advantage is the chance to grow and process fuel locally, for local needs - oil-producing countries are not too keen on this possibility of course.
In England, one town (Reading) recently ran its buses on diesel from oilseed rape (this may be used in an unmodified engine). New government regulations meant that "because of immense bureaucratic compliance requirements the buses in Reading went back to running on diesel."
However the vehicles worked well: "Drivers reported the buses started well, had no breakdowns and produced little smoke. The fuel was as good or better than diesel." (If you scroll a long way down this link, you will find these quotes.)
For information on the project to use biodiesel in America's Yellowstone National Park, see here.
- Derwen
Actually the article states that " frequency response, depending on size, extends down to a few hundred Hertz."
I think people will be more surprised than alarmed to discover that the 'voice of god' is a soprano .
- Derwen
Anyway, if you do look for a link, good luck:
Looks like he's been purged with Stalin-like efficiency
- Derwen
- Derwen
Every open-source project needs someone like this on the team, regardless of his/her other abilities.
- Derwen
So long and thanks for all the frag
I guess it's not the kind of thing that Arthuer Dent would buy anyway.
- Derwen
It may never replace CD's, but it's good if the choice of a higher quality format is available.
Me? I'll carry on listening to my gramophone records, and buying up those classic 1950's Decca presssings when I see them.
- Derwen