Initially I installed a number of distros in a mult-boot config to figure out which one I wanted. I evaluated:
CalderaLinux, TurboLinux, Debian (woody), SuSE (6.2), and RedHat (also 6.2).
I picked SuSE - mainly because every package I looked for in the first few weeks of use were available on one of the 6 cd's the distro came on; but for other reasons, too (liked some aspects of Yast and there was an early LVM how-to written with SuSE in mind).
From there, it was (in order):
SuSE 6.2
SuSE 6.3
SuSE 6.4
SuSE 7.0
SuSE 7.1
SuSE 7.2
SuSE 7.3
Lindows/Linspire (remember those $799 laptops? yeah, I had one)
RedHat 9
Gentoo (forget the version number)
FreeBSD 4.0
Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)
Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake)
openSuSE 10.2
openSuSE 10.3
openSuSE 11.1
openSuSE 11.2
openSuSE Tumbleweed (based on 12.1)
Ubuntu LTS 12.04
Really, glitchy drivers? Way to RTFA:
"On the third day of use a loud coil squeal/chirp became apparent, becoming louder when it was running on battery power. Within hours the wireless chipset failed and refused to connect, the display began glitching with horizontal lines appearing through it, and it became unresponsive. I tested it with a Windows live USB thumb drive"
Klaxon (http://code.google.com/p/klaxon/) is a must have. It's an on-call app for text message receiving. You can separate out your on-call texts from personal ones and set separate alarms and everything. It's fantastic.
That would be pretty sweet...
Text includes words 'emergency' 'urgent' 'system' 'down' -> (Zzzz)
Text includes words 'down' 'hours' 'hardware' 'failure' -> (Zzzz)
Text includes words 'panic' 'weeping' 'wailing' 'praying' -> (Zzzz)
Text includes words 'payroll' 'not' 'running' -> (WAKEY! WAKEY!)
For differentiating between "personal" and "oncall" pages, I use handcent... then set the "on call" pages to play my Strong Bad "The System is down" ringtone.
Downside? I can't watch strongbad without my jacking up my blood pressure.
The resolution number was actually S.J.Res.6, and the vote on the motion to proceed to consideration of it failed on a not quite party line vote 54-46 just now. DOA in the Senate.
Amazon is a shelf. You put your shit on the shelf and they show it to the public and handles the cash register and the accounting.
Amazon has zero experience or value to add as a publisher.
Anyone who's read books published by authors without the benefit of a professional team of editors at a publishing house knows that such books have interesting ideas but read like crappy books, or read well but have crappy ideas, or are just crappy through and through.
The rise of Amazon as a publisher should be much less scary to publishers than the rise of another actual publishing house.
Publishers who panic just because authors are moving to Amazon are failing to recognize that in the end they will survive because they add value and Amazon does not, and there will be some segment of the reading public and the writing community who value what they add.
Amazon isn't a shelf, it's a marketplace: they connect suppliers with consumers. Right now, they're trying to connect authors with readers; but a rational evolution of that marketplace would be to also connect authors with editors, authors with artists, and authors with marketers. The amazon platform for suggesting purchases you might like should be adaptable to suggestion artists that might fit your writing style, editors who fit your genre, etc. Their rating system could be adapted to provide ways to evaluate potential editors and select based on the value proposition that an editor of a particular level of experience and specialization brings to the table.
If amazon envisions such an evolution and acts on it effectively, publishers have a LOT to be afraid of.
Which authors have been forced into exclusive contracts with Amazon?
None, the parent's jumping to some understandable, but (to me, at least) unwarranted assumptions: namely that Amazon will become so dominant that they try and lock out any competition. Many company's have certainly gone that route; but Amazon hasn't yet and there are good reasons to doubt they will.
Currently, Amazon doesn't give a whit whether you publish with anyone else - in fact, Smashwords' whole business model's predicated on that fact. As things currently stands, Amazon's primary ambition seems to become a universal marketplace that shaves a few percentage points off from every transaction and beats it's competition by providing the most flexibility for content providers and third party retailers to sell the way they prefer.
Actually, this is the part that ticks me off the most about America:... that some company has to carry your drivel.... In fact, if government forced a company to carry someone's drivel, they'd be essentially violating that company's freedom of press. It would be the government telling them what to print and/or distribute.
One of the biggest things that currently ticks ME off about the US is the fact that companys are treated exactly like individuals when it comes to defense of rights. Corporate rights should NOT be the same as personal rights. When personal freedoms and corporate freedoms come into conflict, personal freedoms should win.
Strictly speaking, you're correct - that is the current state of affairs; but SHOULD it be?
In a world where so much of the technology we use for communications are owned by private third parties and provided essentially free to the end user, or only leased by the user (rather than purchased); I find myself more and more bothered by the idea that we're protected from our government stifling free speech without being protected from government sized corporations doing the same thing, practically speaking. I really do wonder if it should be permissible for a private contract to sign away freedoms that are otherwise constitutionally protected.
Doesn't this state of affairs de facto circumvent the spirit of the first amendment, if obviously not its strict wording? After all, the idea of leasing a communications medium would probably never have occurred to the authors of the amendment.
Shouldn't the very protections that save these companies from liability simply by saying "we're not responsible for content" also protect the people who ARE responsible for the content from meddling by the same company?
Bear in mind that red light cameras don't tend to trip below about 5mph, so "I just pulled into the junction to let the ambulance past" won't fly.
You're completely incorrect. As the article specified, they DO catch "rolling stops", if a rolling stop didn't end up in a citation, it's simply because the officials managing the particular municipality's red light enforcement chose not to issue a citation (whether because they felt it was too close to call, or they felt no traffic hazard existed, or because of an internal policy, or a technical problem, or just human oversight). In fact, the article specifically mentioned "pulling into the junction to let the ambulance past" as one of the reasons a citation wasn't issued to some of the recorded incidents.
Anyone who has the right sort of CPE, the right knowledge, and proper credentials can use a dish subscriber network to get as much as 2mbps down and 1mbps up. The latency blows, but it's not like the service is meant for playing the latest FPS. The big downside is the customer equipment - satellite dishes are thick on the ground in most areas of the middle east, but I'd be a little surprised if enough of them are the right sort of dish to matter. If they are, it may not matter - Iran's been taking various measures to reduce citizen's access to satellites
This is news? Redhat (like every OS vendor I've ever dealt with) have been pushing out updates with broken assumptions for years.
In fact, this isn't even the first time they've done something similar when updating bind: back in 2004 they released RHEL 3 update 4 and many people had precisely the same experience. Additionally, when applied, Update 4 removed the/etc/rc*.d/S*named and/etc/rc*.d/K*named and then shut named off.
As a quick glance at redhat's bugzilla shows, the first problem (the same one you experienced in this release) wasn't a schoolboy mistake on the packagers part, or a bug. It was the result of a poorly understood choice on the part of the person who originally provisioned the machine.
Rather than installing just the original bind-9.2.4, the people who had their named.conf overwritten had installed bind plus a package called caching-nameserver. It's that package that, when updated, backed up and overwrote their bind config. The "caching-nameserver" package should only be installed if you want to run a caching nameserver, because the caching-nameserver package isn't an application at all - it's simply a named.conf file.
The real bug (back in 2004) wasn't actually in Update 4's bind package. As it turns out, the package it replaced incorrectly contained a `chkconfig --del named` in its uninstall script.
Anyone without proper alerting and a good QA process found that one out the hard way. I had customers who'd gotten so blasè about performing nighttime maintenances without proper reversion testing that they scheduled nightly cronjobs that ran up2date at midnight and rebooted the production machine, Naturally, they woke up in the morning to find they'd just suffered 8 hours of downtime.
Lesson? Don't trust the vendor's QC work, don't install unnecessary packages, and make sure to QC your own work! Ask any experienced Windows admin about unintended consequences from "trusted" vendor patches...
One fantasy series that'll keep any kid busy for a good long while is the "Redwall" collection. I've known more than a few people who were profoundly affected by Jacques clever tales of animal adventure. Most notable (to me, at least) are the numerous people I've known who found these books to be delightful, despite a lack of interest in SF or fantasy.
Never having seen the film "Jumper", I feel the need to warn against judging any of Stephen C. Gould's three books ("Jumper","Wildside, and "Reflex") on the basis of the film.
Whatever the the Hollywood production may have been, Gould's books are boy adventure novels with conscience and character. Subtler than Heinlein's "Have space suit -- will travel", "Space Cadet", "Rocket Ship Galileo", "Farmer in the sky" and the like, Gould's books share a similar sense of adventure coupled with a deep sense of responsibility and voices that I believe are more identifiable to modern readers. When I first discovered "Wildside" in my teen years, I reread it repeatedly.
Gould doesn't have the historical inertia of Bradbury, Heinlein, LeGuinn, Butler, Verne, and the countless others who introduced so many of us to worlds of wonder; but I feel he's got the hallmark of an author who will similarly stand the tests of time. While not nearly as prolific as, say, Orson Scott Card; Gould has consistently produced high quality young adult material. He depicts young characters anyone can identify with as they learn how to stand up and do something about the world around them.
I personally prefered Wildside; but don't take my word for it - read them all yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
also, now that I think about it I'm pretty sure the inital debian I evaluated was potato, not woody.
Point of clarity - the above list only refers to desktops/laptops. Servers would complicate the chronology pretty significantly.
Initially I installed a number of distros in a mult-boot config to figure out which one I wanted. I evaluated:
CalderaLinux,
TurboLinux,
Debian (woody),
SuSE (6.2), and
RedHat (also 6.2).
I picked SuSE - mainly because every package I looked for in the first few weeks of use were available on one of the 6 cd's the distro came on; but for other reasons, too (liked some aspects of Yast and there was an early LVM how-to written with SuSE in mind).
From there, it was (in order):
SuSE 6.2
SuSE 6.3
SuSE 6.4
SuSE 7.0
SuSE 7.1
SuSE 7.2
SuSE 7.3
Lindows/Linspire (remember those $799 laptops? yeah, I had one)
RedHat 9
Gentoo (forget the version number)
FreeBSD 4.0
Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)
Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake)
openSuSE 10.2
openSuSE 10.3
openSuSE 11.1
openSuSE 11.2
openSuSE Tumbleweed (based on 12.1)
Ubuntu LTS 12.04
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shred_(Unix)
Really, glitchy drivers? Way to RTFA: "On the third day of use a loud coil squeal/chirp became apparent, becoming louder when it was running on battery power. Within hours the wireless chipset failed and refused to connect, the display began glitching with horizontal lines appearing through it, and it became unresponsive. I tested it with a Windows live USB thumb drive"
If he'd have caught this front page article he'd have saved himself some future embarrassment.
Hey, the 90's called -- they want their "Ask Slashdot" question back!
That's so 14 days ago
Klaxon (http://code.google.com/p/klaxon/) is a must have. It's an on-call app for text message receiving. You can separate out your on-call texts from personal ones and set separate alarms and everything. It's fantastic.
That would be pretty sweet...
Text includes words 'emergency' 'urgent' 'system' 'down' -> (Zzzz)
Text includes words 'down' 'hours' 'hardware' 'failure' -> (Zzzz)
Text includes words 'panic' 'weeping' 'wailing' 'praying' -> (Zzzz)
Text includes words 'payroll' 'not' 'running' -> (WAKEY! WAKEY!)
For differentiating between "personal" and "oncall" pages, I use handcent... then set the "on call" pages to play my Strong Bad "The System is down" ringtone.
Downside? I can't watch strongbad without my jacking up my blood pressure.
The resolution number was actually S.J.Res.6, and the vote on the motion to proceed to consideration of it failed on a not quite party line vote 54-46 just now. DOA in the Senate.
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/10/142213971/senate-halts-gop-bid-to-repeal-net-neutrality-rules [npr.org]
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/10/idUS211494328220111110
Amazon is a shelf. You put your shit on the shelf and they show it to the public and handles the cash register and the accounting.
Amazon has zero experience or value to add as a publisher.
Anyone who's read books published by authors without the benefit of a professional team of editors at a publishing house knows that such books have interesting ideas but read like crappy books, or read well but have crappy ideas, or are just crappy through and through.
The rise of Amazon as a publisher should be much less scary to publishers than the rise of another actual publishing house.
Publishers who panic just because authors are moving to Amazon are failing to recognize that in the end they will survive because they add value and Amazon does not, and there will be some segment of the reading public and the writing community who value what they add.
Amazon isn't a shelf, it's a marketplace: they connect suppliers with consumers. Right now, they're trying to connect authors with readers; but a rational evolution of that marketplace would be to also connect authors with editors, authors with artists, and authors with marketers. The amazon platform for suggesting purchases you might like should be adaptable to suggestion artists that might fit your writing style, editors who fit your genre, etc. Their rating system could be adapted to provide ways to evaluate potential editors and select based on the value proposition that an editor of a particular level of experience and specialization brings to the table.
If amazon envisions such an evolution and acts on it effectively, publishers have a LOT to be afraid of.
Which authors have been forced into exclusive contracts with Amazon?
None, the parent's jumping to some understandable, but (to me, at least) unwarranted assumptions: namely that Amazon will become so dominant that they try and lock out any competition. Many company's have certainly gone that route; but Amazon hasn't yet and there are good reasons to doubt they will.
Currently, Amazon doesn't give a whit whether you publish with anyone else - in fact, Smashwords' whole business model's predicated on that fact. As things currently stands, Amazon's primary ambition seems to become a universal marketplace that shaves a few percentage points off from every transaction and beats it's competition by providing the most flexibility for content providers and third party retailers to sell the way they prefer.
Damn skippy.
Does a CR-48 count as a "thin client"?
Actually, this is the part that ticks me off the most about America: ... that some company has to carry your drivel. ... In fact, if government forced a company to carry someone's drivel, they'd be essentially violating that company's freedom of press. It would be the government telling them what to print and/or distribute.
One of the biggest things that currently ticks ME off about the US is the fact that companys are treated exactly like individuals when it comes to defense of rights. Corporate rights should NOT be the same as personal rights. When personal freedoms and corporate freedoms come into conflict, personal freedoms should win.
Strictly speaking, you're correct - that is the current state of affairs; but SHOULD it be?
In a world where so much of the technology we use for communications are owned by private third parties and provided essentially free to the end user, or only leased by the user (rather than purchased); I find myself more and more bothered by the idea that we're protected from our government stifling free speech without being protected from government sized corporations doing the same thing, practically speaking. I really do wonder if it should be permissible for a private contract to sign away freedoms that are otherwise constitutionally protected.
Doesn't this state of affairs de facto circumvent the spirit of the first amendment, if obviously not its strict wording? After all, the idea of leasing a communications medium would probably never have occurred to the authors of the amendment.
Shouldn't the very protections that save these companies from liability simply by saying "we're not responsible for content" also protect the people who ARE responsible for the content from meddling by the same company?
Bear in mind that red light cameras don't tend to trip below about 5mph, so "I just pulled into the junction to let the ambulance past" won't fly.
You're completely incorrect. As the article specified, they DO catch "rolling stops", if a rolling stop didn't end up in a citation, it's simply because the officials managing the particular municipality's red light enforcement chose not to issue a citation (whether because they felt it was too close to call, or they felt no traffic hazard existed, or because of an internal policy, or a technical problem, or just human oversight). In fact, the article specifically mentioned "pulling into the junction to let the ambulance past" as one of the reasons a citation wasn't issued to some of the recorded incidents.
I was more impressed when that bunch of Catalan Highschool Students did the same thing. They also had some fairly impressive photos as well.
In theory, WIMAX can give you usable (if somewhat slow) speeds out to 50km - which might get some villages close to Iran's borders but won't help Tehran at all.
Anyone who has the right sort of CPE, the right knowledge, and proper credentials can use a dish subscriber network to get as much as 2mbps down and 1mbps up. The latency blows, but it's not like the service is meant for playing the latest FPS. The big downside is the customer equipment - satellite dishes are thick on the ground in most areas of the middle east, but I'd be a little surprised if enough of them are the right sort of dish to matter. If they are, it may not matter - Iran's been taking various measures to reduce citizen's access to satellites
Yes
Really. Check it out
This is news? Redhat (like every OS vendor I've ever dealt with) have been pushing out updates with broken assumptions for years.
In fact, this isn't even the first time they've done something similar when updating bind: /etc/rc*.d/S*named and /etc/rc*.d/K*named and then shut named off.
back in 2004 they released RHEL 3 update 4 and many people had precisely the same experience. Additionally, when applied, Update 4 removed the
As a quick glance at redhat's bugzilla shows, the first problem (the same one you experienced in this release) wasn't a schoolboy mistake on the packagers part, or a bug. It was the result of a poorly understood choice on the part of the person who originally provisioned the machine.
Rather than installing just the original bind-9.2.4, the people who had their named.conf overwritten had installed bind plus a package called caching-nameserver. It's that package that, when updated, backed up and overwrote their bind config. The "caching-nameserver" package should only be installed if you want to run a caching nameserver, because the caching-nameserver package isn't an application at all - it's simply a named.conf file.
The real bug (back in 2004) wasn't actually in Update 4's bind package. As it turns out, the package it replaced incorrectly contained a `chkconfig --del named` in its uninstall script.
Anyone without proper alerting and a good QA process found that one out the hard way. I had customers who'd gotten so blasè about performing nighttime maintenances without proper reversion testing that they scheduled nightly cronjobs that ran up2date at midnight and rebooted the production machine, Naturally, they woke up in the morning to find they'd just suffered 8 hours of downtime.
Lesson? Don't trust the vendor's QC work, don't install unnecessary packages, and make sure to QC your own work! Ask any experienced Windows admin about unintended consequences from "trusted" vendor patches...
One fantasy series that'll keep any kid busy for a good long while is the " Redwall " collection. I've known more than a few people who were profoundly affected by Jacques clever tales of animal adventure. Most notable (to me, at least) are the numerous people I've known who found these books to be delightful, despite a lack of interest in SF or fantasy.
I'd like to reinforce one of Sierran's authors:
Never having seen the film "Jumper", I feel the need to warn against judging any of Stephen C. Gould's three books ( "Jumper" , "Wildside , and "Reflex" ) on the basis of the film.
Whatever the the Hollywood production may have been, Gould's books are boy adventure novels with conscience and character. Subtler than Heinlein's "Have space suit -- will travel", "Space Cadet", "Rocket Ship Galileo", "Farmer in the sky" and the like, Gould's books share a similar sense of adventure coupled with a deep sense of responsibility and voices that I believe are more identifiable to modern readers. When I first discovered "Wildside" in my teen years, I reread it repeatedly.
Gould doesn't have the historical inertia of Bradbury, Heinlein, LeGuinn, Butler, Verne, and the countless others who introduced so many of us to worlds of wonder; but I feel he's got the hallmark of an author who will similarly stand the tests of time. While not nearly as prolific as, say, Orson Scott Card; Gould has consistently produced high quality young adult material. He depicts young characters anyone can identify with as they learn how to stand up and do something about the world around them.
I personally prefered Wildside; but don't take my word for it - read them all yourself.
This is sort of a two-fer, since apparently "died in a knitting accident?" has garnered just as much attention :)