I got sick of looking for more, but I think you get the idea. Trademarks are everywhere, and for all intents and purposes do not stand in the way of Open Source Software(TM)
Oh, I agree completely! On the other hand, Red Hat had a recent PR fiasco for not being very clear on what you could or couldn't do with their trademark. Debian has always been very clear (and very sensible) in what you can or can't do with theirs. But with Easy Software Products, unlike Debian and unlike Red Hat (now that they've cleared things up), I can't find any information on what their policies are regarding the use of their trademark. I don't object to trademarking, I was just hoping they'd follow Debian's example and make information about its use available on their web site. Seems only sensible to me. Unless they have some sinister intentions...
ANYONE can use a trademark name so long as they credit the owner. The purpose of a trademark is to protect the integrity of a name. We're doing that for CUPS for the same reason that Linus trademarked Linux...
Thanks for replying! Nice to see a company savy enough to read Slashdot.:)
I'm not a lawyer, obviously, or even terribly familiar with the legalities of this sort of thing. I was under the impression that you could do something like this. For example, there was a recent outcry over RedHat's enforcing of its trademark, by not allowing people to advertise they were selling "Red Hat Linux" when in fact, they were selling Red Hat Linux, but not the official boxed set. Debian allows their trademark to be used in specified ways, but not in others (i.e. anyone can slap together a "Debian" disk but an "Official Debian" disk must be burned from ISO images they supply). I object to neither of these uses of trademark law -- it seems perfectly reasonable to me. But the potential for abuse does exist (many thought Red Hat had crossed the line into abuse). Since the bloody notice I quoted appears at the bottom of every page, a word somewhere about it somewhere (or make the notice a link) with a little explanation might be nice, even if it says nothing much more than what you just said here, perhaps a little more explanation about why it's important to "protect the integrity of the name" etc. to satisfy nervous nellies like me.;)
As for IPP, look at the available docos on the net. Make your own decision.
Actually, I wasn't commenting on the protocol itself as much as the dripping marketting hype.
As for IPP-based fax, CUPS doesn't come enabled for that. Security is a very big deal for us.
Good. IPP-based fax sounds like an extraordinarily bad idea to me. It'll be great for about as long as it takes spammers to figure out how to exploit it, and be useless after that.
No, you don't have to pay them a license fee. You have to give them the code! And I quote (from their website):
To contribute code to the base CUPS distribution, please contact us via email at cups-info@cups.org. Because we also provide CUPS under a binary distribution license, we will require that all ownership of the code be transferred to Easy Software Products, or that Easy Software Products be granted unlimited distribution rights to the code (possibly via payment of a fee to the contributor.)
Note this does only apply to changes to the base distribution. You can write drivers all the live long day and keep ownership.
CUPS and the CUPS logo are the trademark property of Easy Software Products.
Now, they've said the code is GPL, but what about the name? Will I need to send money their way if I want to advertise "NekoLinux comes with CUPS!" or something? Or are they simply protecting the name so that someone else can't also put out a program named CUPS? The later I can live with, but I'm going to get suspicious if it's so the trademark can only be used in "approved" ways without them specifying what an "approved use" is. Some clarification on their website would seem to be in order...
Oh, one other great quote:
The Internet Printing Protocol is an exciting new network protocol that provides a common set of network printing services.
I get suspicious whenever a network protocol is described as "exciting"...
Oh, and one more:
One of the many potential applications of IPP is Internet Facsimile services - you can print a document from any machine in the world to any printer in the world using IPP!
What no one has bothered asking is why, with so much money and so many smart people, they fuck-up so regularly? No, this is not a troll. Here's a shortlist of incidents where a little real intelligence would have gone a long ways...
Castro taking over Cuba
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait
It took us quite some time to build up the necessary forces to liberate Kuwait. Give this, what would be the value of knowing it was going to occur a day or two earlier than we did? For that matter, what makes you think we didn't know ahead of time? The fact that the NSA didn't give a press conference about it two days before it happened? The NSA is not a public information service. The fact that the world at large did not know ahead of time that is was going to happen is not evidence that the NSA didn't tell a select few people that it was going to happen ahead of time.
The India/Pakistani nuclear tests
Again, why in the world do you believe the NSA did not inform certain people of this before it happened? And for that matter, what value is this intelligence? Were we supposed to bomb India or Pakistan to prevent the tests from occuring or something? It just makes no sense to consider this a "failure" on anybody's part.
North Korean Missile tests ("3 stages?" oops)
The location of Chinese embassies
I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the job the NSA does or not.
and I'm sure others can supply more examples.
Actually, anyone who claims to be able to supply examples is full of shit. If you don't work for the NSA (and even for most who do), you don't know enough about their involvement in any of these affairs or any others for that matter to know whether any perceived failures, if there were any, where the fault of the NSA or not.
Give me just one good example where intelligence gathered by the NSA has done the world any substantial good.
If I could do that, it would be a failure on the NSA's part. Again, the NSA is a secret intelligence agency, not a public information service. Anytime I can tell you anything about what the NSA does, it's a failure on the NSA's part.
Sun would be thrilled to have them all using Linux, it's a great first step to Solaris.
As someone who recently reformatted the Solaris 7 installation on my SPARCstation and installed RedHat 6.0 instead, I find this highly unlikely. I'm not going back, that's for darn sure...
Actually, considering Corel Linux is based on Debian, Bruce Perens may be the more appropriate choice. It's a rather large bit of his copyrighted work, after all, that's being incorrectly relicensed. Not that ESR's isn't, too, but line for line I think BP's got more in this than ESR.
Besides, this really is more an FSF thing than an OSI thing. This would be more up RMS's alley than ESR's...
Anyways, I don't care. As long as someone is on top of it. RMS can work on policy statements and ESR can work on press releases while Bruce sorts it all out...;)
File a motion, or take a step (inaction) that will tend to erode the validity of the GPL.
Now, I'm not a lawyer, so feel free to jump in if you are and correct me, but...
Contracts and licenses are NOT trademarks. If I don't vigorously enforce my trademark, I may loose it. But if I have a contract with someone, and they do something in violation of the contract, but I decide to look the other way, the contract does not "dissolve" or "erode". I can still choose to pursue legal action later for a different violation, or the same violation if I get fed up with them violating it, no?
In short, if those who issue the licenses for their copyrighted software decide to allow Corel to do what it's doing without making a fuss, I don't see how this "erodes the validity of the GPL" in any way...
Have you actually thought this requirement of yours through? It sounds fairly dodgy to me.
I'm not the original poster, but I've got a similar problem and would be interested in a solution along the lines he proposes.
For a start, you can't seriously be advocating that spare blocks from a variety of machines be used to provide unique bits and pieces of storage for virtual files distributed across those machines, I hope. This would make the availability and reliability of those files extremely low, ie. as low as the weakest link in the system.
He can seriously be suggesting that. I am. I have a small LAN in my home. I'm not running a bank. Furthermore, none of my local machines has ever gone down. Either I'm lucky or I don't run NT.:) But seriously, yeah, this would be as unstable as the weakest link in the system. I haven't got a problem with that. If you think this is at all a problem, you don't understand my requirements.
Secondly, what happens when one of the contributing filestores requires more space, but can't use it because it's been allocated to one of those distributed files? You could no longer just delete something from the machine concerned without going through that hypothetical distributed filestore manager, because it would be the only party that would know whether the item in question is part of a distributed file and hence whether it can be deleted. (This assumes that it creates real files in the local filespace for allocating to distributed files, which it would have to do otherwise the space it allocates would evaporate if the distributing daemon died.) In other words, *all* of your storage becomes dependent on this new manager, slows to a crawl, and probably loses a lot of the reliability of your native filesystem to boot. No, no, no...
First of all, the amount of free space on most of my machines is fairly constant. My webserver, for example, doesn't suddenly up and decide to create a few dozen extra megabytes of files for no reason. What happens when a machine runs out of room? The same thing that happens when a machine NOT using this system runs out of room. A system not using a DFS, a system unconnected to a network at all, can run out of room. So your "problem" is one that's not unique (and in fact has nothing to do with) this question. As always, one must be aware of how much disk space is required for a system, and not provide less than that. For all but one of my systems, these numbers are fairly constant and very well determined. I'd be more than happy to just dedicate half a gig of diskspace my mailserver has never used and never will, plus nearly another half gig by webserver never touches, to such a scheme. This will introduce no problems that everyone hasn't faced before when setting up partitions. Just make sure the space you dedicate for local use is sufficient, same thing you do every time you partition a drive. There's no problem here that we didn't already face without this scheme being proposed.
If the new distributed filesystem manager actually *does* make space on one machine as requested, it would clearly have to push out the data onto some other machine to compensate. If you think about it, the policy issues in this area are "interesting". (Aka "horrid".)
The original poster quite clearly said he was doing this in his home. I've found policy issues on my own home LAN remarkably easily to resolve and completely uncontroversial.
Finally, since the first point (unavailability cased by one machine going down) makes the idea completely untenable in most cases, you'd have to be talking about a system in which blocks are allocated in multiple places for each virtual file block. That's great, but notice that such a scheme is *not* storage-efficient, yet your requirement is based on not wanting to waste storage space!!!
You've obviously completely missed the original poster's point. You'd be an idiot to suggest allocating blocks in multiple places. That's a completely inappropriate suggestion, considering the original goals. Having each block in only one place, far from being untenable, is in fact exactly what is called for under the circimstances and is every bit as reliable as is required, under the circumstances.
No, I don't think you've thought this requirement through.
No, it's more like you didn't read the original question very carefully. But that's par for the course. A couple of people have suggested using network block devices and 'md'. (The opinions are that this would be slow, but in my book a slow drive is better than no drive at all.) Nearly everyone else has gone on and on about NFS issues that are admittedly interesting but have almost nothing at all to do with what the original poster's problem. We're quite clearly NOT looking for something like Coda or Arla or anything like that. Right off the bat, if you think keep the same data at multiple locations is a good idea, you're profoundly confused about what the problem is. If you're worried about what happens if a machine goes down, or the new virtual drive fills up, or one of the local drives fills up, you're worrying about things completely unrelated to the problem. Perhaps you should understand the requirements before you decide to criticize them.
I have to agree. I don't know their names offhand, but when I saw the announcement, the first thing through my mind was "The Apache Team". Can we nominate a team?
Hmm. I actually run three different linux distributions: I use Mandrake (6.0 at the moment, but 6.1 is being burned onto a CD-RW as I write this) on my Intel box, RedHat 6.0 on my SPARCstation, and Debian 2.1 on my Mac. Between the three, I think Debian is the easiest to install and upgrade packages on. I wish Mandrake and RedHat had some sort of installer with all the capabilities of dselect. Granted, it's not pretty, but it works.
Those who suffer from WZBDFPED are usually withdrawn from their personal ego due to lack of appreciation for themselves. Luckily, since you have a mild case (MWZBDFPED), the treatment should be relatively simple. Engage in some ego-boosting activity. Write an OS that will be adopted by millions of users...
RedHat 5.1 initially shipped with kernel 2.0.34pre6 IIRC. Didn't seem to do any harm. The harm came when they made a silent upgrade to 2.0.35. You'd buy an Official RedHat 5.1 CD and end up with a different version than someone else who bought an Official RedHat 5.1 CD. Why is this a problem? Try installing RedHat 5.1 on someone else's machine as a favor after having installed 5.1 on your machine. I was pulling hair out trying to get sound to work, until many hours later I finally traced the problem to the fact that her RedHat 5.1 CD had kernel 2.0.35, which had apparently made some major changes to the sound code from 2.0.34 (so much for the so-called "stable" branch), thus my attempt to set up her identical sound card in the same way as mine was set up wouldn't work, since I was running RedHat 5.1 whereas she was running RedHat 5.1, which is incompatible with RedHat 5.1 as far sound configuration goes. Lovely...
Thankfully, since then, RedHat has vowed to stop making silent upgrades (what they should have done is release this as RedHat 5.1.1, what they decided to do instead is stop shipping CD's with updates already applied -- which is lame but better than the original situation). And with any luck the kernel people will start making stable branches that are actually stable (i.e. after the feature freeze, nothing goes in but bug fixes -- if you want to have new features, run the odd series kernels).
C does not lack polymorphism. When you declare the struct for a "subclass", include the "superclass" as the first element. Since no pointer type checking occurs in C, you can treat pointers to the subclass as pointers to the superclass with impunity. And since you're using function pointers for method calls, and the subclass's "initializer" will set them appropriately when it creates objects of the subclass, polymorphism works perfectly.
The only thing thing C++ gets you with regards to OOP that doesn't find easy expression in C is multiple inheritence. This can be accomplished in C as well, but it's ugly. If you need it, go with C++. If you don't, C is perfectly adequate for OOP.
Do like I do: turn off the ringer on your phone. And when you're busy, turn off the volume on the answering machine. It used to be that they'd still make a horrible racket playing with the tapes (I'm somewhat hypersensitive to sound), but today's digital answering machines are completely silent. You don't even know someone's leaving you a message until you look at the counter...
Of course. People who admit it are data that fit with the theory. People who deny it are in denial, so they fit with the theory too. I just love unfalsifiable theories.
This also ignores the reams of evidence that this is due to genetic or pre-natal influence. Certain monkeys display introversion to the point of social phobia -- and they can usually be identified as such within a couple of days of their birth, with about 100% accuracy.
The original reason for not having social skills is really not the point here: if you're autistic (let's say) with a sub-normal IQ, you're not going to be a great programmer. Good maybe. And from my limited exposure to people with mental illness, most are not high-IQ level; probably at least the same proportion as in the general population.
Keep in mind that having a disorder is frequently defined (and rightly so, IMNSHO) as having problems to a degree that you cannot cope with ordinary life. I don't care what your symptom is, from fear of other people to actually hearing voices, if it doesn't interfere with your ability to live your life, it's not actually a problem! It's just a personality quirk. So, if the voices don't bother you and you have no difficulties interacting with people, holding a job, etc, it's not a "disorder". That may be an extreme example, but you get the idea...
Thus, you may have gotten the correct impressions of the IQ levels of the mentally ill people you've met (or you may not have, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that you did). However, you may also have met much more intelligent people with the same symptoms to the same degree, and not realized they had the same symptoms because, by the definition above, they don't have a problem! Being of higher IQ has helped them cope with the same symptoms with the same severity, so that they lead a normal life despite them. So, even if your impressions of the mentally ill you've met are correct, it means nothing to the original question. It may be that many people of high IQ have these same symptoms, they're just not labelled as having the disorder, nor should they be, since it shouldn't be considered a disorder unless you're unable to cope with it.
Either that, or I'm just biased because I'm nuts...:)
Well, most "common sense" consists of things told to you that "everybody knows", hence the name "common". Most intelligent people know that the phrase "everybody knows X" has the same meaning (functionally, at least) as "no one questions that X", which in my mind is a big tip off for something that's maybe true but all too often false and not widely known to be false simply because no one ever questions it. Common sense also consists largely of prima facia explanations, things that come immediately to mind when you witness something, and less intelligent people tend to thus just accept these without exploring other possibilities, not considering that the reality of things is often different from first apperance.
Thus, intelligent people tend to recognize "common sense" as vast collection of "facts" that are epistemically suspect. Thus, we tend to reject or pay no attention to "common sense" notions of this or that. And when we witness things, we tend to reject or at least not give over much credence to "common sense explanations", knowing that the real reasons for things often differ from common sense explanations.
So it's not that common sense dribbles out one ear as real information comes in, it's just that common sense never takes hold in the first place because we're too skeptical of it to believe it when we hear it.
Heh. One of my best friends is a terrific example of ADHD -- virtually every symptom you ever hear associated with it, he displays in spades. And he's over 30. I actually lived with him for a year, he made an interesting roommate. If you don't suffer the same problem, let me give you a tip: NEVER let the person with ADHD have the remote control. Yikes!
Ars Magica was not a Storyteller game, like Vampire or Mage. It was not part of the line, although it did have a bit of background in common (Ars Magica was a game Mark Rein-Hagen co-developed with Jonathan Tweet a number of years before striking out on his own with the Storyteller series). The first two editions of Ars Magica, published by Lion Rampant, were excellent. Then White Wolf bought it and tried to integrate it into the World of Darkness (but never into the Storyteller system -- it always had its own rules). The result was the horrible Ars Magica 3rd Edition, which seemed bent on destroying Ars Magica entirely. Thankfully, White Wolf eventually sold the game, and it eventually ended up in the hands of Atlas Games. Although they don't spend nearly as much money as White Wolf on glossy glitz and appearance, they've greatly improved the game with their release of 4th Edition.
Incidently, I'm a big fan of WoD and Storyteller games. But I'm also a big fan of Ars Magica, so I'm rather overjoyed that it finally landed in the hands of a company willing to do it justice with far better respect for the game than White Wolf ever had...
What are they for, anyways? I've never grokked docks/wharfs/panels. It seems like an annoying way to duplicate the same functionality already available by right clicking on the desktop or (on my system) hitting the Menu key under WM.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I agree completely! On the other hand, Red Hat had a recent PR fiasco for not being very clear on what you could or couldn't do with their trademark. Debian has always been very clear (and very sensible) in what you can or can't do with theirs. But with Easy Software Products, unlike Debian and unlike Red Hat (now that they've cleared things up), I can't find any information on what their policies are regarding the use of their trademark. I don't object to trademarking, I was just hoping they'd follow Debian's example and make information about its use available on their web site. Seems only sensible to me. Unless they have some sinister intentions...
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ANYONE can use a trademark name so long as they credit the owner. The purpose of a trademark is to protect the integrity of a name. We're doing that for CUPS for the same reason that Linus trademarked Linux...
Thanks for replying! Nice to see a company savy enough to read Slashdot.
I'm not a lawyer, obviously, or even terribly familiar with the legalities of this sort of thing. I was under the impression that you could do something like this. For example, there was a recent outcry over RedHat's enforcing of its trademark, by not allowing people to advertise they were selling "Red Hat Linux" when in fact, they were selling Red Hat Linux, but not the official boxed set. Debian allows their trademark to be used in specified ways, but not in others (i.e. anyone can slap together a "Debian" disk but an "Official Debian" disk must be burned from ISO images they supply). I object to neither of these uses of trademark law -- it seems perfectly reasonable to me. But the potential for abuse does exist (many thought Red Hat had crossed the line into abuse). Since the bloody notice I quoted appears at the bottom of every page, a word somewhere about it somewhere (or make the notice a link) with a little explanation might be nice, even if it says nothing much more than what you just said here, perhaps a little more explanation about why it's important to "protect the integrity of the name" etc. to satisfy nervous nellies like me.
As for IPP, look at the available docos on the net. Make your own decision.
Actually, I wasn't commenting on the protocol itself as much as the dripping marketting hype.
As for IPP-based fax, CUPS doesn't come enabled for that. Security is a very big deal for us.
Good. IPP-based fax sounds like an extraordinarily bad idea to me. It'll be great for about as long as it takes spammers to figure out how to exploit it, and be useless after that.
Thanks again and keep up the good work!
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To contribute code to the base CUPS distribution, please contact us via email at cups-info@cups.org. Because we also provide CUPS under a binary distribution license, we will require that all ownership of the code be transferred to Easy Software Products, or that Easy Software Products be granted unlimited distribution rights to the code (possibly via payment of a fee to the contributor.)
Note this does only apply to changes to the base distribution. You can write drivers all the live long day and keep ownership.
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CUPS and the CUPS logo are the trademark property of Easy Software Products.
Now, they've said the code is GPL, but what about the name? Will I need to send money their way if I want to advertise "NekoLinux comes with CUPS!" or something? Or are they simply protecting the name so that someone else can't also put out a program named CUPS? The later I can live with, but I'm going to get suspicious if it's so the trademark can only be used in "approved" ways without them specifying what an "approved use" is. Some clarification on their website would seem to be in order...
Oh, one other great quote:
The Internet Printing Protocol is an exciting new network protocol that provides a common set of network printing services.
I get suspicious whenever a network protocol is described as "exciting"...
Oh, and one more:
One of the many potential applications of IPP is Internet Facsimile services - you can print a document from any machine in the world to any printer in the world using IPP!
Yikes! Gods help us all...
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Castro taking over Cuba
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait
It took us quite some time to build up the necessary forces to liberate Kuwait. Give this, what would be the value of knowing it was going to occur a day or two earlier than we did? For that matter, what makes you think we didn't know ahead of time? The fact that the NSA didn't give a press conference about it two days before it happened? The NSA is not a public information service. The fact that the world at large did not know ahead of time that is was going to happen is not evidence that the NSA didn't tell a select few people that it was going to happen ahead of time.
The India/Pakistani nuclear tests
Again, why in the world do you believe the NSA did not inform certain people of this before it happened? And for that matter, what value is this intelligence? Were we supposed to bomb India or Pakistan to prevent the tests from occuring or something? It just makes no sense to consider this a "failure" on anybody's part.
North Korean Missile tests ("3 stages?" oops)
The location of Chinese embassies
I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the job the NSA does or not.
and I'm sure others can supply more examples.
Actually, anyone who claims to be able to supply examples is full of shit. If you don't work for the NSA (and even for most who do), you don't know enough about their involvement in any of these affairs or any others for that matter to know whether any perceived failures, if there were any, where the fault of the NSA or not.
Give me just one good example where intelligence gathered by the NSA has done the world any substantial good.
If I could do that, it would be a failure on the NSA's part. Again, the NSA is a secret intelligence agency, not a public information service. Anytime I can tell you anything about what the NSA does, it's a failure on the NSA's part.
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man zsh
(Replace 'zsh' with whatever shell you wish...)
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As someone who recently reformatted the Solaris 7 installation on my SPARCstation and installed RedHat 6.0 instead, I find this highly unlikely. I'm not going back, that's for darn sure...
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Besides, this really is more an FSF thing than an OSI thing. This would be more up RMS's alley than ESR's...
Anyways, I don't care. As long as someone is on top of it. RMS can work on policy statements and ESR can work on press releases while Bruce sorts it all out...
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Now, I'm not a lawyer, so feel free to jump in if you are and correct me, but...
Contracts and licenses are NOT trademarks. If I don't vigorously enforce my trademark, I may loose it. But if I have a contract with someone, and they do something in violation of the contract, but I decide to look the other way, the contract does not "dissolve" or "erode". I can still choose to pursue legal action later for a different violation, or the same violation if I get fed up with them violating it, no?
In short, if those who issue the licenses for their copyrighted software decide to allow Corel to do what it's doing without making a fuss, I don't see how this "erodes the validity of the GPL" in any way...
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I'm not the original poster, but I've got a similar problem and would be interested in a solution along the lines he proposes.
For a start, you can't seriously be advocating that spare blocks from a variety of machines be used to provide unique bits and pieces of storage for virtual files distributed across those machines, I hope. This would make the availability and reliability of those files extremely low, ie. as low as the weakest link in the system.
He can seriously be suggesting that. I am. I have a small LAN in my home. I'm not running a bank. Furthermore, none of my local machines has ever gone down. Either I'm lucky or I don't run NT.
Secondly, what happens when one of the contributing filestores requires more space, but can't use it because it's been allocated to one of those distributed files? You could no longer just delete something from the machine concerned without going through that hypothetical distributed filestore manager, because it would be the only party that would know whether the item in question is part of a distributed file and hence whether it can be deleted. (This assumes that it creates real files in the local filespace for allocating to distributed files, which it would have to do otherwise the space it allocates would evaporate if the distributing daemon died.) In other words, *all* of your storage becomes dependent on this new manager, slows to a crawl, and probably loses a lot of the reliability of your native filesystem to boot. No, no, no
First of all, the amount of free space on most of my machines is fairly constant. My webserver, for example, doesn't suddenly up and decide to create a few dozen extra megabytes of files for no reason. What happens when a machine runs out of room? The same thing that happens when a machine NOT using this system runs out of room. A system not using a DFS, a system unconnected to a network at all, can run out of room. So your "problem" is one that's not unique (and in fact has nothing to do with) this question. As always, one must be aware of how much disk space is required for a system, and not provide less than that. For all but one of my systems, these numbers are fairly constant and very well determined. I'd be more than happy to just dedicate half a gig of diskspace my mailserver has never used and never will, plus nearly another half gig by webserver never touches, to such a scheme. This will introduce no problems that everyone hasn't faced before when setting up partitions. Just make sure the space you dedicate for local use is sufficient, same thing you do every time you partition a drive. There's no problem here that we didn't already face without this scheme being proposed.
If the new distributed filesystem manager actually *does* make space on one machine as requested, it would clearly have to push out the data onto some other machine to compensate. If you think about it, the policy issues in this area are "interesting". (Aka "horrid".)
The original poster quite clearly said he was doing this in his home. I've found policy issues on my own home LAN remarkably easily to resolve and completely uncontroversial.
Finally, since the first point (unavailability cased by one machine going down) makes the idea completely untenable in most cases, you'd have to be talking about a system in which blocks are allocated in multiple places for each virtual file block. That's great, but notice that such a scheme is *not* storage-efficient, yet your requirement is based on not wanting to waste storage space!!!
You've obviously completely missed the original poster's point. You'd be an idiot to suggest allocating blocks in multiple places. That's a completely inappropriate suggestion, considering the original goals. Having each block in only one place, far from being untenable, is in fact exactly what is called for under the circimstances and is every bit as reliable as is required, under the circumstances.
No, I don't think you've thought this requirement through.
No, it's more like you didn't read the original question very carefully. But that's par for the course. A couple of people have suggested using network block devices and 'md'. (The opinions are that this would be slow, but in my book a slow drive is better than no drive at all.) Nearly everyone else has gone on and on about NFS issues that are admittedly interesting but have almost nothing at all to do with what the original poster's problem. We're quite clearly NOT looking for something like Coda or Arla or anything like that. Right off the bat, if you think keep the same data at multiple locations is a good idea, you're profoundly confused about what the problem is. If you're worried about what happens if a machine goes down, or the new virtual drive fills up, or one of the local drives fills up, you're worrying about things completely unrelated to the problem. Perhaps you should understand the requirements before you decide to criticize them.
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Doumo arigatou gozaimasu!
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Thankfully, since then, RedHat has vowed to stop making silent upgrades (what they should have done is release this as RedHat 5.1.1, what they decided to do instead is stop shipping CD's with updates already applied -- which is lame but better than the original situation). And with any luck the kernel people will start making stable branches that are actually stable (i.e. after the feature freeze, nothing goes in but bug fixes -- if you want to have new features, run the odd series kernels).
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The only thing thing C++ gets you with regards to OOP that doesn't find easy expression in C is multiple inheritence. This can be accomplished in C as well, but it's ugly. If you need it, go with C++. If you don't, C is perfectly adequate for OOP.
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Of course. People who admit it are data that fit with the theory. People who deny it are in denial, so they fit with the theory too. I just love unfalsifiable theories.
This also ignores the reams of evidence that this is due to genetic or pre-natal influence. Certain monkeys display introversion to the point of social phobia -- and they can usually be identified as such within a couple of days of their birth, with about 100% accuracy.
For many, it ain't upbringing...
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Keep in mind that having a disorder is frequently defined (and rightly so, IMNSHO) as having problems to a degree that you cannot cope with ordinary life. I don't care what your symptom is, from fear of other people to actually hearing voices, if it doesn't interfere with your ability to live your life, it's not actually a problem! It's just a personality quirk. So, if the voices don't bother you and you have no difficulties interacting with people, holding a job, etc, it's not a "disorder". That may be an extreme example, but you get the idea...
Thus, you may have gotten the correct impressions of the IQ levels of the mentally ill people you've met (or you may not have, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that you did). However, you may also have met much more intelligent people with the same symptoms to the same degree, and not realized they had the same symptoms because, by the definition above, they don't have a problem! Being of higher IQ has helped them cope with the same symptoms with the same severity, so that they lead a normal life despite them. So, even if your impressions of the mentally ill you've met are correct, it means nothing to the original question. It may be that many people of high IQ have these same symptoms, they're just not labelled as having the disorder, nor should they be, since it shouldn't be considered a disorder unless you're unable to cope with it.
Either that, or I'm just biased because I'm nuts...
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Thus, intelligent people tend to recognize "common sense" as vast collection of "facts" that are epistemically suspect. Thus, we tend to reject or pay no attention to "common sense" notions of this or that. And when we witness things, we tend to reject or at least not give over much credence to "common sense explanations", knowing that the real reasons for things often differ from common sense explanations.
So it's not that common sense dribbles out one ear as real information comes in, it's just that common sense never takes hold in the first place because we're too skeptical of it to believe it when we hear it.
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Incidently, I'm a big fan of WoD and Storyteller games. But I'm also a big fan of Ars Magica, so I'm rather overjoyed that it finally landed in the hands of a company willing to do it justice with far better respect for the game than White Wolf ever had...
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% cat
#!/bin/sh
exec wmaker -nodock -noclip
What are they for, anyways? I've never grokked docks/wharfs/panels. It seems like an annoying way to duplicate the same functionality already available by right clicking on the desktop or (on my system) hitting the Menu key under WM.
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