Being a UNIX guru is very castrating. For the ignorant, look up "Eunuch" on Yahoo.
If you're feeling really brave, you might also look up Eunice. It was a UNIX-like environment running under VMS. There used to be entries in some early versions of autoconf that ran something along the lines of "checking for eunice... not found, fortunately".
What if instead of just passively dropping off the network, the US nodes started broadcasting null routes?
At a guess, any US entity that started doing that on a regular basis would be fairly swiftly cut off by the rest of the world, and life would carry on as normal.
Of course, I can't tell from your original question. Who knows? Maybe you're an American.
Indeed. The UK is full of providers that'll give you completely free internet access (remember, though, that over here you don't get free local calls).
Does anyone know if this IBM Linux commercial has been on the air anywhere yet?
Not that I know of, but I really, really hope it is. That would do wonders for the adoption of Linux by businesses. IBM is a big name, and technologically challegened management types tend to do what the big names tell them...
Like it or not, DVD manufacuters aren't allowed to make "region-free" DVD
Since when? Certainly in the UK, they're fairly common. Virtually all of the Samsung players, for example, can have region coding and macrovision disabled with a programmable remote. I just wish the Extiva 2000 was available over here (it's their Nuon-enabled DVD player).
Long answer: no, unless there are tools for converting TeX/METAFONT fonts to Adobe Type 1 [...] or TrueType
Yes and no. In order to use Metafont, you need to either provide your X server with a metafont rasterizer, or you need to convert your fonts to a format for which a rasterizer already exists. For the latter option, you mentioned Type1 and TrueType, but as another poster said, there's also bitmap fonts. Note that converting to Type1 or TrueType will be non-trivial. They're both outline fonts, where the shape of a glyph within the font is defined by a set of curves (cubic for Type1, quadratic for TrueType) that describe the outline of that glyph. Metafont, on the other hand, describes a glyph by defining a path along which a notional brush is dragged, and varying the size and shape of the brush along that path.
Either ay, the only option that exists today (that I'm aware of) for using metafont, is to convert to bitmap fonts (either BDF or PCF).
Well, our 'official' emulator at work is Teemtalk, by Pericom. [...] Teemtalk is pretty useful, with a lot of configuration options and a wide emulation range.
Poor you. I tried Teemtalk recently (or rather, TeemX, the X11 version) because I needed something that gave me DG Dasher terminal emulation. It msotly worked, but it had far too many glitches to be useful, the default attributes for inverse video were unreadable, and you couldn't even change them:-(
You can also get buy with MI/X, which used to be free
It still is. Install v2 as normal. then when the 14 day trial period expires, use regedit to delete any regsitry entries that contain the word microimages. Start up MI/X again, and voila -- no more 14 day restrictions. Not that I'd advocate such things, of course... In the end, though, I decided to go with Exceed anyway. MI/X is fine for basic tasks, but performance really sucks for anything more than displaying a bunch of xterms. Thankfully, this is all now irrelevant for me, 'coz they've given me a Linux box on my desk:-)
In the last month alone we've played London twice, Leipzig in Germany and Oporto in Portugal. Fitting that in around work is a nightmare though.
Or at least, the band have played, even if you haven't -- you've been strangely absent the last couple of times I've seen KM! (at Gotham and supporting Christian Death).
Basically, you put the script on a boot diskette and put the cdrom in the cd drive and off you go...
This demonstrates the problem with Ask Slashdot questions like this -- small town mentality. Yes, the method described above will work, but it simply isn't practical in an enterprise environment. If you need to put a CD in each machine to install it, it's going to be a very long and tedious process. Of course, I don't see a reason why the kickstart method couldn't be used for a network install, too, but I've never tried it myself...
Some english company is maintaining it and will cost you lots of £££ if you want a copy.
That'd be the imaginatively named Research Software Ltd., in Canterbury. That's basically a trading name for David Turner, the guy that created Miranda (and one of my lecturers at University). I guess he's still making at least a token amount of money from Miranda. There's no other reason to keep it closed, particularly given free alternatives like Orwell and Haskell.
The fact that GTK+ hasn't been *successfully* ported to another system
That depends on your definition of success. The BeOS port is reportedly pretty flaky at the moment, but I'd say the Win32 port is almost there. Certainly it's usable today (it's good enough to run gimp under Win32), even if it's not yet quite as stable as the X version.
Ummm... but GTK+ and Qt are built on top of X. You would still need an emulation layer for Xlib in any new windowing system.
I can't speak for Qt, but GTK+ is not built on X. It's built on gdk, and GTK+ apps will run on any platform that gdk does. Yes, gdk was originally built on X, but it has since been ported to Win32 and BeOS, and work is underway porting it to Microwindows/Nano-X.
Due to tight project schedules, the Corel WINE team has been working pretty much in isolation for the last few months. With the graphics release behind us
What graphics release? Yes, Photo-Paint is now supposedly complete, and is available for download, but I'm still waiting for CorelDRAW 9. Beta 2 is OK, and mostly usable, but it's far from a finished, released product.
Indeed, particularly when the Diablo games are such poor implementations of the original roguelike genre. If you want that sort of game, go an get a copy of angband/zangband/*band from http://thangorodrim.angband.org.
You need some form of trusted out of band authentication to implement internet voting.
You would hope so, but compare the situation with traditional voting techniques. Here in the UK, I can turn up at a polling station and vote, just by giving my name. No ID needed, no proof of name or address, no voting slip, nothing. All I need to do is turn up with a valid name that's on the electoral register (a quick look through the phone book should turn up quite a few to use). I assume the only reason the system isn't abused more is that it takes time and effort to get to the polling station to vote. With online voting, that is no longer an issue, so authentication is critical.
Sigh. The OR has a bad enough image problem as it is, without you advertising them in your trolling posts. Please either remove the OR URL, or preferably grow up and stop trolling...
Why doesn't AMD get some overclockable motherboards, and sell those under a contract? Say something to the effect (and in legaleese) "We understand these can be overclocked, and in fact, expect you too. By signing this, you're saying you will, and thus void the warranty- no more responsibility for us"?
Nice idea. But that would mean AMD getting into the motherboard business (which, AFAIK, they don't do now). They could come to some arrangement with an existing company (e.g., Asus, Abit, GVP etc.), but there would still be the problem of people using the chips on motherboards other than the ones with which they were sold. Yes, they could make a physically different connector for overclockable chips to prevent this, but the market size wouldn't justify it.
If everyone on Slashdot donated $500 to NASA for BPP research, that would be a serious hell of a lot of money - probably close to $50 million dollars - definitely not paltry research money!
It's sad to say, but $50m isn't a huge research budget, particularly when it comes to space research. It's enough to get some work done, but not enough to sustain a decent research program.
There is a genuine problem with people reselling overclocked systems without the buyer knowing that they're getting a less reliable system. AMD have to protect their brand name, and having hordes of people claiming that AMD chips are unreliable because they've been sold overclocked systems is not a good way to stay in business long. Yes, it will prevent the hobbyist that knows the risks and accepts them. That said, most overclockers I've met don't fall into that category -- they tend to have the mentality "wow, I can make my machine go faster" without knowing how it works, and where the extra speed is coming from (hint: your safety margin before things start breaking).
Having been a SysAdmin for a two small newspapers, a Win, and a Mac shop. [...] Postscript and AppleShare dominate all high end printers.
Ermmm, no. PostScript dominates the high end, yes, but AppleShare doesn't have much of a showing any more. It's all TCP/IP over ethernet. In fact, at the high end, such as the larger newspapers (the ones I was working on sold in excess of 4 million copies/day), PostScript printers aren't found anywhere. PostScript is ripped to bitmap on a regular computer, and the bitmap is sent to an imager that prints a negative (or these days, direct to plate with a CTP machine). Similarly, proofs are ripped to bitmap, and then converted to a suitable format for the proofer in question, usually PCL.
can people really patent and copyright this kind of stuff (genes, and the like)?
Yep, they can (and do). The logic being that it costs a lot of money to do the research, and that without patent protection, they wouldn't be able to recoup that investment. This is, in fact, pretty much what patent law was designed for in the first place -- to stimulate progress by providing financial incentives to do so. The only problem with this theory is that they're patenting things that they didn't invent. And in the case of the human genome, the stimulating progress argument doesn't hold. The HGP was doing the work already. IMHO, the human genome is too important to allow any company to control.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're feeling really brave, you might also look up Eunice. It was a UNIX-like environment running under VMS. There used to be entries in some early versions of autoconf that ran something along the lines of "checking for eunice... not found, fortunately".
At a guess, any US entity that started doing that on a regular basis would be fairly swiftly cut off by the rest of the world, and life would carry on as normal.
Great, then maybe you can fix the fscking fonts so I can read it sensibly on a non-MS platform.
Indeed. The UK is full of providers that'll give you completely free internet access (remember, though, that over here you don't get free local calls).
Not that I know of, but I really, really hope it is. That would do wonders for the adoption of Linux by businesses. IBM is a big name, and technologically challegened management types tend to do what the big names tell them...
Since when? Certainly in the UK, they're fairly common. Virtually all of the Samsung players, for example, can have region coding and macrovision disabled with a programmable remote. I just wish the Extiva 2000 was available over here (it's their Nuon-enabled DVD player).
Yes and no. In order to use Metafont, you need to either provide your X server with a metafont rasterizer, or you need to convert your fonts to a format for which a rasterizer already exists. For the latter option, you mentioned Type1 and TrueType, but as another poster said, there's also bitmap fonts. Note that converting to Type1 or TrueType will be non-trivial. They're both outline fonts, where the shape of a glyph within the font is defined by a set of curves (cubic for Type1, quadratic for TrueType) that describe the outline of that glyph. Metafont, on the other hand, describes a glyph by defining a path along which a notional brush is dragged, and varying the size and shape of the brush along that path.
Either ay, the only option that exists today (that I'm aware of) for using metafont, is to convert to bitmap fonts (either BDF or PCF).
BDF is the Adobe Bitmap Distribution Format for fonts. You can get a copy of the spec at http://www.wotsit.org.
Poor you. I tried Teemtalk recently (or rather, TeemX, the X11 version) because I needed something that gave me DG Dasher terminal emulation. It msotly worked, but it had far too many glitches to be useful, the default attributes for inverse video were unreadable, and you couldn't even change them :-(
It still is. Install v2 as normal. then when the 14 day trial period expires, use regedit to delete any regsitry entries that contain the word microimages. Start up MI/X again, and voila -- no more 14 day restrictions. Not that I'd advocate such things, of course... In the end, though, I decided to go with Exceed anyway. MI/X is fine for basic tasks, but performance really sucks for anything more than displaying a bunch of xterms. Thankfully, this is all now irrelevant for me, 'coz they've given me a Linux box on my desk :-)
Or at least, the band have played, even if you haven't -- you've been strangely absent the last couple of times I've seen KM! (at Gotham and supporting Christian Death).
This demonstrates the problem with Ask Slashdot questions like this -- small town mentality. Yes, the method described above will work, but it simply isn't practical in an enterprise environment. If you need to put a CD in each machine to install it, it's going to be a very long and tedious process. Of course, I don't see a reason why the kickstart method couldn't be used for a network install, too, but I've never tried it myself...
That'd be the imaginatively named Research Software Ltd., in Canterbury. That's basically a trading name for David Turner, the guy that created Miranda (and one of my lecturers at University). I guess he's still making at least a token amount of money from Miranda. There's no other reason to keep it closed, particularly given free alternatives like Orwell and Haskell.
That depends on your definition of success. The BeOS port is reportedly pretty flaky at the moment, but I'd say the Win32 port is almost there. Certainly it's usable today (it's good enough to run gimp under Win32), even if it's not yet quite as stable as the X version.
I can't speak for Qt, but GTK+ is not built on X. It's built on gdk, and GTK+ apps will run on any platform that gdk does. Yes, gdk was originally built on X, but it has since been ported to Win32 and BeOS, and work is underway porting it to Microwindows/Nano-X.
What graphics release? Yes, Photo-Paint is now supposedly complete, and is available for download, but I'm still waiting for CorelDRAW 9. Beta 2 is OK, and mostly usable, but it's far from a finished, released product.
Nobody cares!
Indeed, particularly when the Diablo games are such poor implementations of the original roguelike genre. If you want that sort of game, go an get a copy of angband/zangband/*band from http://thangorodrim.angband.org.
You would hope so, but compare the situation with traditional voting techniques. Here in the UK, I can turn up at a polling station and vote, just by giving my name. No ID needed, no proof of name or address, no voting slip, nothing. All I need to do is turn up with a valid name that's on the electoral register (a quick look through the phone book should turn up quite a few to use). I assume the only reason the system isn't abused more is that it takes time and effort to get to the polling station to vote. With online voting, that is no longer an issue, so authentication is critical.
Sigh. The OR has a bad enough image problem as it is, without you advertising them in your trolling posts. Please either remove the OR URL, or preferably grow up and stop trolling...
Huh? What's this? A Noise records-aware slashdotter? Yaaaaaay! I'm not alone. Cheese metal forever :-)
Nice idea. But that would mean AMD getting into the motherboard business (which, AFAIK, they don't do now). They could come to some arrangement with an existing company (e.g., Asus, Abit, GVP etc.), but there would still be the problem of people using the chips on motherboards other than the ones with which they were sold. Yes, they could make a physically different connector for overclockable chips to prevent this, but the market size wouldn't justify it.
It's sad to say, but $50m isn't a huge research budget, particularly when it comes to space research. It's enough to get some work done, but not enough to sustain a decent research program.
There is a genuine problem with people reselling overclocked systems without the buyer knowing that they're getting a less reliable system. AMD have to protect their brand name, and having hordes of people claiming that AMD chips are unreliable because they've been sold overclocked systems is not a good way to stay in business long. Yes, it will prevent the hobbyist that knows the risks and accepts them. That said, most overclockers I've met don't fall into that category -- they tend to have the mentality "wow, I can make my machine go faster" without knowing how it works, and where the extra speed is coming from (hint: your safety margin before things start breaking).
Ermmm, no. PostScript dominates the high end, yes, but AppleShare doesn't have much of a showing any more. It's all TCP/IP over ethernet. In fact, at the high end, such as the larger newspapers (the ones I was working on sold in excess of 4 million copies/day), PostScript printers aren't found anywhere. PostScript is ripped to bitmap on a regular computer, and the bitmap is sent to an imager that prints a negative (or these days, direct to plate with a CTP machine). Similarly, proofs are ripped to bitmap, and then converted to a suitable format for the proofer in question, usually PCL.
Yep, they can (and do). The logic being that it costs a lot of money to do the research, and that without patent protection, they wouldn't be able to recoup that investment. This is, in fact, pretty much what patent law was designed for in the first place -- to stimulate progress by providing financial incentives to do so. The only problem with this theory is that they're patenting things that they didn't invent. And in the case of the human genome, the stimulating progress argument doesn't hold. The HGP was doing the work already. IMHO, the human genome is too important to allow any company to control.