I'm using 2.6 most of the time. 2.6 compiles a little faster, runs a little better, and I don't have to patch it as much to use stuff I'd like to use (like ALSA, and preemptive scheduling). If it wasn't for the random crashes, it'd be great.
On the other hand, they STILL haven't addressed CD/DVD-burning at all. There's no support for variable length packet writing, and fixed length is in it's infancy (this is difficult because of a design flaw in the kernel - something that could have been redesigned about three years ago when the format came out). This will be a big problem specifically because DVD+-RW drives are getting pretty cheap, and people can just copy files straight to them on all the other major OSes.
The drives have a standard media format, as well as a standard kind of driver (MMC). There's not really a great reason why using DVD and CD media in UDF format shouldn't involve just mounting a drive and copying files to it.
I guess we'll have to wait another four years before we have close to decent support for cheap file backup.
And the more accurate usage is not: "President Bush to Call for Return TO the moon"; its: "President Bush to Call for Return OF the moon";
Whoever took the moon had better give it back, soon.
We NEED the moon. We need it for the children. This is a war - a war on terror. A war against whoever took the moon.
President Bush has called for a return of the moon - and with good reason!
How else are we going to govern the tides? I've done it by hand, and let me tell you, this "moon" thing they came up with is a lot better. I, for one, will be glad when it's were it belongs - back in the US, and out of the hands of terrorists.
Yeah, but you don't know the topics. I can just picture it now. If they're going to go for physics, and they're going to make it four days long, they might as well make it so unbeliably boring that they break that record, too, right?
WELL KNOWN FOUR DAY PHYSICS LECTURES
The Physics of the Q-Tip
Ether and other ideas that seemed to make sense at the time (taught by this stoned guy they found in the park).
Physics models without any known application that are difficult to understand (as lectured by a well-known physicist and singer, who will drone on in a constant A below middle C)
How to use sheeps bladders to prevent earthquakes
The physical properties of this lint I found in my belly button
Ah, yes...easier to get into and away from and for killing lots of people.
Terrorists are often jumping into trains, and forcing the drivers to drive to other places at gunpoint in order to blow them up. This also makes escape easier, because, rather than having to meet armed guards at the places that the trains are going to end up, they have their friends waiting to help them.
OH WAIT! THAT ONLY APPLIES TO PLANES! Trains travel on tracks, and they don't leave the tracks. The best you can do is derail the train and kill the people on board. You can't do anything nearly as fantastic as blow up the world trade center, and you can't really hope much for an easy escape because the trains are going to go where they're going to go (I guess you could jump off, but...then you wouldn't have control of the train anymore, and it wouldn't derail. You can't jump off WHILE it's derailing. That would be as fantastically suicidal as staying on board.). Also, telecommunication is much easier in a train, which means that if it were hijacked, someone would probably find out very quickly.
They crash, get bad gas milage, cost a lot, and once you use it, you're stuck with a proprietary system that you can't upgrade. I'll be driving my open-source tank. They come up with upgrades for it every few months, they are free, and kernel version 2.6 is just about to come out...
Wait, was I talking about cars or linux?
Re:Taking a moment for clarification.
on
On The Death Of Unix
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Color 'ls' is nonstandard; autocompletion is nonstandard; bugfixes are nonstandard; many useful X apps are nonstandard.
Unix has not moved with the demands it's users and GNU has. GNU is free, and available on all those other platforms. It implements all the standards, and then goes beyond the call of duty.
This is why it's good to switch to GNU.
Taking a moment for clarification.
on
On The Death Of Unix
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Linux is not Unix. Essentially, Unix is something that comes from the Unix codebase, which, essentially, Linux does not. Linux implements Posix, just like a Unix, but it does so many other things better.
This is a good way to point out the similaries and differences. Linix and Unix both do posix. Linux is not Unix.
No, It'll be fine. You know when they're releasing it? It's going to be a while.
They're hoping to add phasing technology - making people their device phase through other solid matter in order to solve the very obvious problem of keeping 300 pounds of matter from going splat or exploding when it hits 2 tons of it (the normal accident of scooter vs car).
Otherwise, what could they be thinking? Are they going to let people go 35MPH on the sidewalk? Of course not.
With RAM you don't have a huge surface of volitile area; you have lots of little transistor-based pieces of memory. Memory points aren't actually touching each other.
But this thing is one piece - one cube. You could perhaps read more of it that way, but it more closely resembles a hard drive than RAM, in that they've both got to have something that works about the same way that the head does (either that, or their much more expensive).
You'd have to either move the electrodes or move the cube to read all each part.
Either way, you're not better off than now.
Re:Some PacMan fantisies (sic) ...
on
Human Pac Man
·
· Score: 1
I don't know...my Pac Man fantasy is always that when you beat Pac Man it opens up a door to another world filled with millions of unbelievably attractive women whose destiny it is to serve the one who beat the game.
There is a chapter of AIEE (aerospace engineers) that met at my school that had three Elvis impersonators.
It was wierd.
They'd go to every football game dressed as Elvis -all of them.
They called themselves "The Flying Elvii"
There was even a time when the band did an Elvis number, and they let the Flying Elvii stand right in front of the drum majors and act Elvish...or is it Elvisish?
I have an idea. Why don't we stop adding all of the languages together that make up English and just go from one root?
Then we wouldn't have complexities or spelling issues and it would all make sense.
Those, as well as all the things I mentioned, do a lot more to make the language more complex and less usable than using a new word that actually makes sense to a lot of people.
It is better to make the language more flexible and thus more usable through the additional precision than to not allow certain types of new rules.
English: a beautifully flexible language.
on
20 Years of Virii
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
We make new words out of old ones all the time; we verb anything; we create words like "tintinabulation" just because of how they sound, or add words just to have another one that means the same thing; we create euphemisms for euphemisms; there is even a word or two with roots that come from two different languages; we have only a few words to describe the qualities of sounds (mostly only distinguishing good sounds from bad ones), and between the qualities of smells (mostly only distinguishing good smells from bad ones); we can make gramatically correct sentences that are difficult to parse - in fact, it has been proven that we can make such sentences that are impossible to parse.
All these things are, of course, ridiculous.
Why not add one more thing to the list of ridiculii?
The driver is the part of the speaker that causes movement - the electromagnet and the magnet. The cone is not part of the driver. You'll notice I referred to the cone.
We're talking about cell phones here, not home audio. In this context, what I discussed is a speaker. There is no cabinet, no crossover, and only one driver.
Actually, in the context of home audio, it's also a speaker, though the cabinet, sounding board, and occasionally a crossover are also often included in that label.
Re:To me, "ISP" is much more narrower.
on
Who Is An ISP?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
That's a very good point, but you should always remember that the one thing that you should never do under any circumstances is
The idea is that a coil of wire (known as an "inductor") creates a magnetic field due to an electric current that varies in strength (this is known as an "electromagnet"), which then attracts and repels it, along with a cone designed to move sound, from a permanent magnet. In other words, the movement of the electromagnet moves the cone, which moves the air to create sound. Clever isn't it? Modern, perhaps? The whole mechanism is currently known as a "speaker."
I'm sure that this is neat and modern, but the naming scheme leaves something to be desired. What does "magnetic induction" mean in this case?
I'd be interested to see something that reads DVD-RAM discs at all since they're inside a cartridge that you're not supposed to open. How would the disc fit in the drive?
At any rate, they say that DVD+R and DVD+RW are 100% compatible with DVD players, while DVD-R and DVD-RW are not.
They're extrapolating the existence of a particle from mass concentration readouts, which are in turn extrapolated from gravitational effects on the measuring instruments.
This is not direct at all. A more direct approach would allow the particle to be observed more closely, and possibly manipulated. Of course, this is not really possible for such short-lived phenomena, but we must still consider that interpretation of mass readouts is prone to error.
It's not like looking at, holding, and biting into an apple in order to declare that what you have is an apple (this analogy points out several more direct methods of observation, of which, sadly, none are even remotely possible for mesons).
I tend to go for the "we're spewing particles out of an accelerator just to see what happens and looking at the results in a roundabout way to extrapolate the existence of particles."
The methods themselves are not questionable, but extrapolation such as this can easily lead to errors in conclusions drawn.
Actually, that's not the currently believed theory.
The entire human nuclear arsonal, if strategically placed, could blow the moon into tiny little pieces (actually, one very powerful bomb could supposedly do this).
Most geologists think that this is true of the Earth as well - if we aim something between techtonic plates, they think we can send a shockwave to the core and blow the planet to chunks.
Perhaps you meant "the entire non-nuclear arsonal"?
Normally, unauthorized bots are identified and kicked specifically because they're spammers - that is, the bots are designed to advertise a message to the rest of the channel.
The general goal of any channel is self-preservation (among other things), which is invariably hampered by spambots, who annoy the regular attenders.
AI bots that talk can be just as annoying, which is why channel ops like to control them - to ensure that they follow the purpose of the channel.
Where do listening bots fit into this? They would not hamper channel preservation (unless they channel was doing something illegal), and would not annoy people with questions. I doubt most channel operators would mind. And it's not like a single bot costs a lot of bandwidth, even if it's in every channel on a network.
Nobody seems to mind when I jump into a channel, do nothing, and let my logger listen away.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using 2.6 most of the time. 2.6 compiles a little faster, runs a little better, and I don't have to patch it as much to use stuff I'd like to use (like ALSA, and preemptive scheduling). If it wasn't for the random crashes, it'd be great.
On the other hand, they STILL haven't addressed CD/DVD-burning at all. There's no support for variable length packet writing, and fixed length is in it's infancy (this is difficult because of a design flaw in the kernel - something that could have been redesigned about three years ago when the format came out). This will be a big problem specifically because DVD+-RW drives are getting pretty cheap, and people can just copy files straight to them on all the other major OSes.
The drives have a standard media format, as well as a standard kind of driver (MMC). There's not really a great reason why using DVD and CD media in UDF format shouldn't involve just mounting a drive and copying files to it.
I guess we'll have to wait another four years before we have close to decent support for cheap file backup.
And the more accurate usage is not :
"President Bush to Call for Return TO the moon";
its:
"President Bush to Call for Return OF the moon";
Whoever took the moon had better give it back, soon.
We NEED the moon. We need it for the children. This is a war - a war on terror. A war against whoever took the moon.
President Bush has called for a return of the moon - and with good reason!
How else are we going to govern the tides? I've done it by hand, and let me tell you, this "moon" thing they came up with is a lot better. I, for one, will be glad when it's were it belongs - back in the US, and out of the hands of terrorists.
Yeah, but you don't know the topics. I can just picture it now. If they're going to go for physics, and they're going to make it four days long, they might as well make it so unbeliably boring that they break that record, too, right?
WELL KNOWN FOUR DAY PHYSICS LECTURES
The Physics of the Q-Tip
Ether and other ideas that seemed to make sense at the time (taught by this stoned guy they found in the park).
Physics models without any known application that are difficult to understand (as lectured by a well-known physicist and singer, who will drone on in a constant A below middle C)
How to use sheeps bladders to prevent earthquakes
The physical properties of this lint I found in my belly button
Ah, yes...easier to get into and away from and for killing lots of people.
Terrorists are often jumping into trains, and forcing the drivers to drive to other places at gunpoint in order to blow them up. This also makes escape easier, because, rather than having to meet armed guards at the places that the trains are going to end up, they have their friends waiting to help them.
OH WAIT! THAT ONLY APPLIES TO PLANES! Trains travel on tracks, and they don't leave the tracks. The best you can do is derail the train and kill the people on board. You can't do anything nearly as fantastic as blow up the world trade center, and you can't really hope much for an easy escape because the trains are going to go where they're going to go (I guess you could jump off, but...then you wouldn't have control of the train anymore, and it wouldn't derail. You can't jump off WHILE it's derailing. That would be as fantastically suicidal as staying on board.). Also, telecommunication is much easier in a train, which means that if it were hijacked, someone would probably find out very quickly.
They crash, get bad gas milage, cost a lot, and once you use it, you're stuck with a proprietary system that you can't upgrade. I'll be driving my open-source tank. They come up with upgrades for it every few months, they are free, and kernel version 2.6 is just about to come out...
Wait, was I talking about cars or linux?
Color 'ls' is nonstandard; autocompletion is nonstandard; bugfixes are nonstandard; many useful X apps are nonstandard.
Unix has not moved with the demands it's users and GNU has. GNU is free, and available on all those other platforms. It implements all the standards, and then goes beyond the call of duty.
This is why it's good to switch to GNU.
Linux is not Unix. Essentially, Unix is something that comes from the Unix codebase, which, essentially, Linux does not. Linux implements Posix, just like a Unix, but it does so many other things better.
This is a good way to point out the similaries and differences. Linix and Unix both do posix. Linux is not Unix.
No, It'll be fine. You know when they're releasing it? It's going to be a while.
They're hoping to add phasing technology - making people their device phase through other solid matter in order to solve the very obvious problem of keeping 300 pounds of matter from going splat or exploding when it hits 2 tons of it (the normal accident of scooter vs car).
Otherwise, what could they be thinking? Are they going to let people go 35MPH on the sidewalk? Of course not.
With RAM you don't have a huge surface of volitile area; you have lots of little transistor-based pieces of memory. Memory points aren't actually touching each other.
But this thing is one piece - one cube. You could perhaps read more of it that way, but it more closely resembles a hard drive than RAM, in that they've both got to have something that works about the same way that the head does (either that, or their much more expensive).
You'd have to either move the electrodes or move the cube to read all each part.
Either way, you're not better off than now.
I don't know...my Pac Man fantasy is always that when you beat Pac Man it opens up a door to another world filled with millions of unbelievably attractive women whose destiny it is to serve the one who beat the game.
Does that happen at the end?
There is a chapter of AIEE (aerospace engineers) that met at my school that had three Elvis impersonators.
It was wierd.
They'd go to every football game dressed as Elvis -all of them.
They called themselves "The Flying Elvii"
There was even a time when the band did an Elvis number, and they let the Flying Elvii stand right in front of the drum majors and act Elvish...or is it Elvisish?
I have an idea. Why don't we stop adding all of the languages together that make up English and just go from one root?
Then we wouldn't have complexities or spelling issues and it would all make sense.
Those, as well as all the things I mentioned, do a lot more to make the language more complex and less usable than using a new word that actually makes sense to a lot of people.
It is better to make the language more flexible and thus more usable through the additional precision than to not allow certain types of new rules.
We make new words out of old ones all the time;
we verb anything;
we create words like "tintinabulation" just because of how they sound, or add words just to have another one that means the same thing;
we create euphemisms for euphemisms;
there is even a word or two with roots that come from two different languages;
we have only a few words to describe the qualities of sounds (mostly only distinguishing good sounds from bad ones), and between the qualities of smells (mostly only distinguishing good smells from bad ones);
we can make gramatically correct sentences that are difficult to parse - in fact, it has been proven that we can make such sentences that are impossible to parse.
All these things are, of course, ridiculous.
Why not add one more thing to the list of ridiculii?
No it doesn't.
A speaker consists of a driver and a cone.
The driver is the part of the speaker that causes movement - the electromagnet and the magnet. The cone is not part of the driver. You'll notice I referred to the cone.
We're talking about cell phones here, not home audio. In this context, what I discussed is a speaker. There is no cabinet, no crossover, and only one driver.
Actually, in the context of home audio, it's also a speaker, though the cabinet, sounding board, and occasionally a crossover are also often included in that label.
That's a very good point, but you should always remember that the one thing that you should never do under any circumstances is
No phone uses magnets and induction?
I can think of a device in a phone that does.
The idea is that a coil of wire (known as an "inductor") creates a magnetic field due to an electric current that varies in strength (this is known as an "electromagnet"), which then attracts and repels it, along with a cone designed to move sound, from a permanent magnet. In other words, the movement of the electromagnet moves the cone, which moves the air to create sound. Clever isn't it? Modern, perhaps? The whole mechanism is currently known as a "speaker."
I'm sure that this is neat and modern, but the naming scheme leaves something to be desired. What does "magnetic induction" mean in this case?
I'd be interested to see something that reads DVD-RAM discs at all since they're inside a cartridge that you're not supposed to open. How would the disc fit in the drive?
At any rate, they say that DVD+R and DVD+RW are 100% compatible with DVD players, while DVD-R and DVD-RW are not.
So I'd say that is the better choice.
Unless the sites I've read about it were lying.
How can sheep's bladders be used to prevent earthquakes?
Just consider the facts:
B: What causes earthquakes?
A: Sudden slippage along a fault line
B: Ah, but WHY does that cause earthquakes?
A: Because it's a lot of ground moving?
B: No, try again.
A: Because it doesn't slip smoothly?
B: Yes, that's right. So...logically...
A: We could prevent it if we got it to slip smoothly?
B: And what do you slip on all of the time?
A: Sheep urine?
B: Absolutely. And where do you find sheep urine?
A: Sheep bladders.
B: Therefore...
A: If we stick sheep bladders into a fault line, it'll prevent earthquakes!
A: Thank you, Bedevere. Good insight.
B: My pleasure, Oh King.
I thought my argument was fairly obvious.
They're extrapolating the existence of a particle from mass concentration readouts, which are in turn extrapolated from gravitational effects on the measuring instruments.
This is not direct at all.
A more direct approach would allow the particle to be observed more closely, and possibly manipulated. Of course, this is not really possible for such short-lived phenomena, but we must still consider that interpretation of mass readouts is prone to error.
It's not like looking at, holding, and biting into an apple in order to declare that what you have is an apple (this analogy points out several more direct methods of observation, of which, sadly, none are even remotely possible for mesons).
I tend to go for the "we're spewing particles out of an accelerator just to see what happens and looking at the results in a roundabout way to extrapolate the existence of particles."
The methods themselves are not questionable, but extrapolation such as this can easily lead to errors in conclusions drawn.
Actually, that's not the currently believed theory.
The entire human nuclear arsonal, if strategically placed, could blow the moon into tiny little pieces (actually, one very powerful bomb could supposedly do this).
Most geologists think that this is true of the Earth as well - if we aim something between techtonic plates, they think we can send a shockwave to the core and blow the planet to chunks.
Perhaps you meant "the entire non-nuclear arsonal"?
Normally, unauthorized bots are identified and kicked specifically because they're spammers - that is, the bots are designed to advertise a message to the rest of the channel.
The general goal of any channel is self-preservation (among other things), which is invariably hampered by spambots, who annoy the regular attenders.
AI bots that talk can be just as annoying, which is why channel ops like to control them - to ensure that they follow the purpose of the channel.
Where do listening bots fit into this? They would not hamper channel preservation (unless they channel was doing something illegal), and would not annoy people with questions. I doubt most channel operators would mind. And it's not like a single bot costs a lot of bandwidth, even if it's in every channel on a network.
Nobody seems to mind when I jump into a channel, do nothing, and let my logger listen away.
Don't feel too powerful by that.
XGoogle.ORG, (which is not affiliated with google at all) crashes on a regular basis without slashdot's help.
They already do this. Not just to get a rank - also to actually advertise sites.
Every channel I've ever been on has an autokick set up to kick these bots every time they come on or as soon as they're identified.
So google wouldn't have a huge problem because bots get kicked as soon as they something the channelops don't like.
All google would have to do is look for a kick after an ad to know whether or not it is spam.