AFAIK, the extended programming information that makes TiVo wish-lists and the "record first-runs only" so nice and useful (data like leading actors, guest stars, director(s), producer(s), original air date) is not available as part of the Guide+(TM) data. There would also be no suggestions except maybe for advertiser sponsored "suggestions".
My father has an RCA TV with Guide+, and the data is not very complete (there are quite a few channels on his cable that they don't list). It seems to be more focused on ads. Without more complete data, using Guide+ for a PVR will be frustrating (I've got one channel that Tribune and TiVo don't have full data for and that is highly annoying; not having any data for a number of channels would be a show-stopper for me).
Guide+ is something that RCA has pushed but pretty much everyone else seems to have ignored.
It sounds like RCA is going to make something competitive to an original TiVo series 1 with the original software; nice, but three years out-of-date.
The ShareAlike License looks like it requires that any modifications be distributed under the ShareAlike license (and no other). The GPL only requires that the key provisions of the GPL be followed. If you want to distribute your derivative work under a different (but compatible) license, that is acceptable under the GPL but not under the ShareAlike License. Without reading the fine print, that requirement may actually make the ShareAlike license incompatible with the GPL (as it puts additional restrictions).
Tapes are fine for backups, but I never expect to pull complete and
usable data off of them after 6 months. Why? Tape degrades - it's
nothing more than rust on platic.
So use a reliable tape format and store it properly. When stored
properly, DLT has a shelf life rated in decades.
Even worse, tape drive formats keep changing - and since tape drives are
guaranteed to wear out, where are you going to get a working tape drive
to restore data 5, 10, 15 years from now?
So use a tape format that is backward compatible. Today's SDLT
drives can still read all the old DLT formats.
Where tape has traditionally shined is as a short-term backup format,
although with the drop in DVD-burner drives/media, and the high-cost of
high-capacity tape drives/media, this may no longer be the case
Check the shelf life of CD-{R,RW} and DVD[+-]{R,RW}. Most of the
CD/DVD media is only rated for a five year life at most. Mastered CDs
and DVDs will be readable for decades, but burned CDs and DVDs won't
be.
The bigger problem with really long term backups is with the data
format used by the backup software. If you use a backup program that
only runs under Windows, what are you going to do when you need to
recover that data in 10 years, and you only have Linux (or the other way
around, the point still stands)? This is where Open Source software is
good, because (assuming you can still find the source) you can always
decode the data stream.
I saw AotC Friday night in the US Space & Rocket Center's Spacedome theater (it is an Omnimax dome), and I was underwhelmed. The print seemed too dark (which I don't think was the fault of the theater or projector; I've seen lots of movies in this theater and never seen that before), making some scenes like the chase on Corescant very difficult to follow (most action scenese tended to blur and be difficult to follow). I sat near the center (just a couple of seats from the projector), and it was just too big - when two people were talking on the screen, I had too look back and forth too much.
However, the scroll at the beginning looked like it was going straight up a wall, which was kind of cool.:-)
Next they'll realize that they can track nerds via/. posts.
Not an accurate comparison to Linux
on
Overview of the BSDs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But virtually all modern operating systems -- from Windows
to BeOS to Linux -- rely on crucial BSD code to run.
Linux does not "rely on crucial BSD code to run." The Linux IP stack
was a clean re-write (in part because at the time, the "free" BSD
license was incompatible with the GNU GPL). There are some drivers that
are developed cooperatively with FreeBSD and Linux (typically dual
licensed under the BSD license and the GPL). AFAIK, the only code in
Linux that originated in classic BSD is in a couple of the PPP
compression modules, but that's hardly crucial code that is relied upon
for operation.
Unlike most other operating systems (including most
distributions of Linux), FreeBSD is extremely easy to install directly
via an Internet connection. No CD-ROM is required, though one must
download two 1.4 MB floppy disk image files and use them to create
bootstrap floppies.
I only have to download one 1.4 MB floppy disk image file to install
Red Hat Linux from the Internet. Does that mean RHL is twice as good?
Not really (although it is;-) ).
Sci-Fi channel is going to be showing four episodes of "Stargate SG-1" a week, not a day. Now, they are going to show them back-to-back on Monday night through prime-time and then strip them after prime-time Monday through Thursday, but that is still only four a week (not counting season five airing on Friday, but that's only one more episode).
They're also going to show "X-Files" at eight episodes a week: four on Tuesday and four on Wednesday. I wonder how long this schedule will last (I can't imagine that one show will really pull the ratings in when you run it that much).
Two of the Space Camp simulators in Huntsville, AL are fairly accurate
recreations of the whole flight deck and mid deck of an orbiter (the
panels are really only a small part of it). One of them (Atlantis) is
from the movie "Space
Camp" (don't ever watch it if you can help it). The other
simulators in Huntsville are not as accurate (they are motion-based, and
it is hard to build a two story motion-based simulator), but the panels
are just about as accurate (although the relative placement isn't 100%).
Basically, when he says "To my knowledge, there is not another like it
in the world.", he may be right (to his knowledge, but then that just
means that he is not very knowledgeable). There are other Space Camps
around the US and the world (they are franchisees from the original in
Huntsville) and at least some of them also have simulators.
There are some truly dumb things in a standard install of Tru64 Unix that have been fixed for ages in Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. One thing in particular came up (and was fixed in Linux, etc.) in 1996! I pointed it out to someone at Compaq over six months ago and was told that it was being worked on, but two patchkits later, there's no change. They're adding some things, slowly, like a secure mkstemp command that was added to 5.1A with PK1. But overall, the reaction from Compaq (and now HP) to security problems is underwhelming at best.
Anyone that is programming for Unix (or a POSIX compliant system) should definately have a bookmark for (or download a copy of) the Single Unix Specification from The Open Group. The SUS version 3 was recently released on the web and for download here. You do have to give your name and email address (although I don't think they are validated), and you can bookmark the resulting page.
After this is sorted out, he can try to travel to Cuba. The long-time ban by the US Government not allowing US citizens to visit Cuba is still in place. I thought that restricting travel to other countries would have gone away with the Soviet Union, but apparently not.
Solaris 9 comes with a slightly modified OpenSSH (according to Sun). The only commercial Unix ssh server that I'm aware of is from SSH.com (it is resold be several companies like F-Secure IIRC).
Compaq^WHP supplies SSH.com's ssh for Tru64 Unix (free download from Compaq's site, and I think will be included with Tru64 5.1B).
They'll be happy right until their broadband provider goes belly up.
See also: Covad, Nortpoint, Bluestar, @Home,...
Bits aren't free. An ISP sells lower cost bandwidth than their upstream(s) banking on the fact that they can aggregate a lot of users together and oversell their bandwidth by a lot. When an ISP can no longer oversell their bandwidth, they have to pass the whole cost on to the customer. Try pricing a T1 or a T3 from a "tier 1" provider (try Worldcom/UUNet, AT&T, Sprint, Cable & Wireless, etc. for example). Hardware costs go up significantly as well (a vendor-C 7xxx router to handle a T3 costs many many times what a vendor-C 25xx T1 router costs).
As for Oracle, Solaris is THE platform to run it on as Oracle people have told many times, Solaris is the prefered Oracle platform because Oracle is developed on Solaris and then ported to other OSes.
That's funny. An Oracle rep said that their primary platform in many ways was Tru64 Unix running on Alpha. They started on VAX/VMS and migrated from there. He also said that Oracle licensed Tru64's TruCluster clustering software to port it to Solaris and Linux to get reliable Oracle clustering.
soo, was that your keeyboard they used in that study about keyboard hygene compared to toilets...
Nope - being IBM keyboards, it was easy to disassemble and clean them both. One of them looked like it was basically new in the box when I got it, but one looked like it had been rolled in the dirt (but being an IBM, it survived with flying colors).
I use only old IBM 101 key "clicky" keyboards (both at work and at home). I type as much as 10-12 hours a day sometimes, and I don't have any RSI type problems. I do think using a good "regular" keyboard is important; using a "mushy" keyboard causes me to type harder (because I can't tell when I've pressed the key).
I hate using so-called ergonomic keyboards (especially the MS version), because I can't find the keys without looking around to see which ones are on which side of the "break" (because they aren't all the same).
I've got a couple of spare IBM keyboards on the off chance I manage to break one, but that's unlikely. The keyboard I'm typing on right now survived college dorm life and is still going strong (I've had it for 10 years now and I bought it used).
If this were Microsoft, Sun, or anyone else, you'd all be flaming them like crazy! Since its a LINUX company, most of the posts are of the variety "Well I'm sure Red Hat won't do anything bad with this..." and "Well, I'm sure its just for protection...".
Microsoft and Sun don't release almost anything they write under the GPL. Red Hat releases virtually everything they write under the GPL, including the code covered by this patent, which means that this can be freely used under the GPL (there is a patent clause in the GPL).
You can download 100% of a Red Hat Linux release with source code under an Open Source compatible license (except for Netscape, but that's going away soon). That's part of why programs such as tin have been removed; they don't fall under a true Open Source license. The same is not true of many other Linux distributors (they don't release everything for free, or don't release source for their own software, etc.).
And whose to say the Red Hat of 5 years from now, under new management, won't go and start suing projects that use these techniques now retroactively? This isn't a trademark..So they COULD do that..
No, they can't, because of the GPL.
In short, fuck you Red Hat.
So, when are you going to stop using Linux? Face it, a lot of development work is done by people on the Red Hat payroll. As long as you use Linux, you are receiving the benefit of Red Hat's work (including the work covered under these patents, which you can use for free forever).
I don't want to get involved in any window manager wars, but you can do this in sawfish; it just isn't in the default key bindings.
Either go into the sawfish configurator and select "Bindings" or choose "Shortcuts" from the sawfish window manager menu. Click "Add", and add
C-Right bound to "Move viewport right" C-Left bound to "Move viewport left" C-Up bound to "Move viewport up" C-Down bound to "Move viewport down"
I used to use that all the time in fvwm, but now I typically just use
M-TAB bound to "Cycle windows" M-ISO_Left_Tab bound to "Cycle windows backwards"
and go from window to window (I don't have _too_ many windows, and I tend to remember which one is where in the stacking order and can get there quickly).
I live in Huntsville. We have a lot of odd-balls running for public office around here. A couple of years ago we had a homeless guy run for mayor, so why not a supermarket guy for Congress? The article says he lives in Hampton Cove, which is one of the "ritzier" areas of town, so he must not be doing too bad.
It isn't all that likely that he'd win anyway; Bud Cramer has won several terms in a row with increasing percentage of the vote, and he hasn't done anything to piss people off.
For those that don't know, politicians in Alabama try to do everything with sales taxes, which results in a lot of budget shortfalls with every little downturn in the area economy. Over dependance on sales taxes is a bad idea (and since books and toys are probably among the first things people stop buying when their wallet thins, NASA would be in trouble all the time).
Also, there is currently no national sales tax like that IIRC, so this would require a new bureaucracy, which would probably eat all the money this would raise and then some.
Actually, Supernews is now part of Critical Path (the RemarQ name went away). And yes, Jeremy Nixon does work for Supernews. He also wrote Cleanfeed, the anti-spam program that Usenet admins everywhere to make news bearable to read.
The "he's against it because it saves bandwidth" argument makes no sense. If it saves users a little bandwidth, it saves Supernews many many times that much bandwidth, lowering their costs (which means they don't have to charge users as much to provide the same service). It also saves disk space, meaning Supernews doesn't have to buy new disks quite as soon. And a good bit of Supernews' business is in the corporate (outsourced ISP) service, which they don't charge by the gigabyte (they have speed caps, not monthly download quotas).
The problem is that any savings are just an illusion; this is just a momentary blip in the growth of Usenet. Since yEnc doesn't have the 100% market penetration that uuencode and MIME have, people are more likely to post binaries in multiple formats, causing storage and bandwidth needs to increase, not decrease.
This is probably in response to open source software people finally figuring out most of (the undocumented) NTFS. They don't want Linux, *BSD, etc. to be able to read and write their filesystem easily, as that would make it easier for people to dual-boot and/or migrate away from Microsoft operating systems.
Slashdot Mirror
My father has an RCA TV with Guide+, and the data is not very complete (there are quite a few channels on his cable that they don't list). It seems to be more focused on ads. Without more complete data, using Guide+ for a PVR will be frustrating (I've got one channel that Tribune and TiVo don't have full data for and that is highly annoying; not having any data for a number of channels would be a show-stopper for me).
Guide+ is something that RCA has pushed but pretty much everyone else seems to have ignored.
It sounds like RCA is going to make something competitive to an original TiVo series 1 with the original software; nice, but three years out-of-date.
The ShareAlike License looks like it requires that any modifications be distributed under the ShareAlike license (and no other). The GPL only requires that the key provisions of the GPL be followed. If you want to distribute your derivative work under a different (but compatible) license, that is acceptable under the GPL but not under the ShareAlike License. Without reading the fine print, that requirement may actually make the ShareAlike license incompatible with the GPL (as it puts additional restrictions).
So use a reliable tape format and store it properly. When stored properly, DLT has a shelf life rated in decades.
So use a tape format that is backward compatible. Today's SDLT drives can still read all the old DLT formats.
Check the shelf life of CD-{R,RW} and DVD[+-]{R,RW}. Most of the CD/DVD media is only rated for a five year life at most. Mastered CDs and DVDs will be readable for decades, but burned CDs and DVDs won't be.
The bigger problem with really long term backups is with the data format used by the backup software. If you use a backup program that only runs under Windows, what are you going to do when you need to recover that data in 10 years, and you only have Linux (or the other way around, the point still stands)? This is where Open Source software is good, because (assuming you can still find the source) you can always decode the data stream.
However, the scroll at the beginning looked like it was going straight up a wall, which was kind of cool. :-)
Next they'll realize that they can track nerds via /. posts.
Linux does not "rely on crucial BSD code to run." The Linux IP stack was a clean re-write (in part because at the time, the "free" BSD license was incompatible with the GNU GPL). There are some drivers that are developed cooperatively with FreeBSD and Linux (typically dual licensed under the BSD license and the GPL). AFAIK, the only code in Linux that originated in classic BSD is in a couple of the PPP compression modules, but that's hardly crucial code that is relied upon for operation.
I only have to download one 1.4 MB floppy disk image file to install Red Hat Linux from the Internet. Does that mean RHL is twice as good? Not really (although it is ;-) ).
Sci-Fi channel is going to be showing four episodes of "Stargate SG-1" a
week, not a day. Now, they are going to show them back-to-back on
Monday night through prime-time and then strip them after prime-time
Monday through Thursday, but that is still only four a week (not
counting season five airing on Friday, but that's only one more
episode).
They're also going to show "X-Files" at eight episodes a week: four on
Tuesday and four on Wednesday. I wonder how long this schedule will
last (I can't imagine that one show will really pull the ratings in when
you run it that much).
Basically, when he says "To my knowledge, there is not another like it in the world.", he may be right (to his knowledge, but then that just means that he is not very knowledgeable). There are other Space Camps around the US and the world (they are franchisees from the original in Huntsville) and at least some of them also have simulators.
There are some truly dumb things in a standard install of Tru64 Unix that have been fixed for ages in Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. One thing in particular came up (and was fixed in Linux, etc.) in 1996! I pointed it out to someone at Compaq over six months ago and was told that it was being worked on, but two patchkits later, there's no change. They're adding some things, slowly, like a secure mkstemp command that was added to 5.1A with PK1. But overall, the reaction from Compaq (and now HP) to security problems is underwhelming at best.
Anyone that is programming for Unix (or a POSIX compliant system) should definately have a bookmark for (or download a copy of) the Single Unix Specification from The Open Group. The SUS version 3 was recently released on the web and for download here. You do have to give your name and email address (although I don't think they are validated), and you can bookmark the resulting page.
After this is sorted out, he can try to travel to Cuba. The long-time
ban by the US Government not allowing US citizens to visit Cuba is still
in place. I thought that restricting travel to other countries would
have gone away with the Soviet Union, but apparently not.
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the METRIC SYSTEM down?
We do, we do!
Solaris 9 comes with a slightly modified OpenSSH (according to Sun).
The only commercial Unix ssh server that I'm aware of is from SSH.com
(it is resold be several companies like F-Secure IIRC).
Compaq^WHP supplies SSH.com's ssh for Tru64 Unix (free download from
Compaq's site, and I think will be included with Tru64 5.1B).
useless government studies cost $120 billion a year.
See also: Covad, Nortpoint, Bluestar, @Home,
Bits aren't free. An ISP sells lower cost bandwidth than their
upstream(s) banking on the fact that they can aggregate a lot of users
together and oversell their bandwidth by a lot. When an ISP can no
longer oversell their bandwidth, they have to pass the whole cost on to
the customer. Try pricing a T1 or a T3 from a "tier 1" provider (try
Worldcom/UUNet, AT&T, Sprint, Cable & Wireless, etc. for example).
Hardware costs go up significantly as well (a vendor-C 7xxx router to
handle a T3 costs many many times what a vendor-C 25xx T1 router costs).
s/ISP/\$TELCO/
That's funny. An Oracle rep said that their primary platform in many ways was Tru64 Unix running on Alpha. They started on VAX/VMS and migrated from there. He also said that Oracle licensed Tru64's TruCluster clustering software to port it to Solaris and Linux to get reliable Oracle clustering.
Nope - being IBM keyboards, it was easy to disassemble and clean them both. One of them looked like it was basically new in the box when I got it, but one looked like it had been rolled in the dirt (but being an IBM, it survived with flying colors).
I use only old IBM 101 key "clicky" keyboards (both at work and at home). I type as much as 10-12 hours a day sometimes, and I don't have any RSI type problems. I do think using a good "regular" keyboard is important; using a "mushy" keyboard causes me to type harder (because I can't tell when I've pressed the key).
I hate using so-called ergonomic keyboards (especially the MS version), because I can't find the keys without looking around to see which ones are on which side of the "break" (because they aren't all the same).
I've got a couple of spare IBM keyboards on the off chance I manage to break one, but that's unlikely. The keyboard I'm typing on right now survived college dorm life and is still going strong (I've had it for 10 years now and I bought it used).
You can download 100% of a Red Hat Linux release with source code under an Open Source compatible license (except for Netscape, but that's going away soon). That's part of why programs such as tin have been removed; they don't fall under a true Open Source license. The same is not true of many other Linux distributors (they don't release everything for free, or don't release source for their own software, etc.).
No, they can't, because of the GPL. So, when are you going to stop using Linux? Face it, a lot of development work is done by people on the Red Hat payroll. As long as you use Linux, you are receiving the benefit of Red Hat's work (including the work covered under these patents, which you can use for free forever).I don't want to get involved in any window manager wars, but you can do
this in sawfish; it just isn't in the default key bindings.
Either go into the sawfish configurator and select "Bindings" or choose
"Shortcuts" from the sawfish window manager menu. Click "Add", and add
C-Right bound to "Move viewport right"
C-Left bound to "Move viewport left"
C-Up bound to "Move viewport up"
C-Down bound to "Move viewport down"
I used to use that all the time in fvwm, but now I typically just use
M-TAB bound to "Cycle windows"
M-ISO_Left_Tab bound to "Cycle windows backwards"
and go from window to window (I don't have _too_ many windows, and I
tend to remember which one is where in the stacking order and can get
there quickly).
It isn't all that likely that he'd win anyway; Bud Cramer has won several terms in a row with increasing percentage of the vote, and he hasn't done anything to piss people off.
For those that don't know, politicians in Alabama try to do everything with sales taxes, which results in a lot of budget shortfalls with every little downturn in the area economy. Over dependance on sales taxes is a bad idea (and since books and toys are probably among the first things people stop buying when their wallet thins, NASA would be in trouble all the time).
Also, there is currently no national sales tax like that IIRC, so this would require a new bureaucracy, which would probably eat all the money this would raise and then some.
The "he's against it because it saves bandwidth" argument makes no sense. If it saves users a little bandwidth, it saves Supernews many many times that much bandwidth, lowering their costs (which means they don't have to charge users as much to provide the same service). It also saves disk space, meaning Supernews doesn't have to buy new disks quite as soon. And a good bit of Supernews' business is in the corporate (outsourced ISP) service, which they don't charge by the gigabyte (they have speed caps, not monthly download quotas).
The problem is that any savings are just an illusion; this is just a momentary blip in the growth of Usenet. Since yEnc doesn't have the 100% market penetration that uuencode and MIME have, people are more likely to post binaries in multiple formats, causing storage and bandwidth needs to increase, not decrease.
This is probably in response to open source software people finally
figuring out most of (the undocumented) NTFS. They don't want Linux,
*BSD, etc. to be able to read and write their filesystem easily, as that
would make it easier for people to dual-boot and/or migrate away from
Microsoft operating systems.