Please Mister, don't take my Karma. Its all I have left
LOL, no seriously, it's not about the karma (despite me reading/. for more than 3 years I have very little, being mostly a lurker) it's that a couple of time it happened that my posts were thought to be flamebait, when I was just trying to spark a discussion.
I do know that the 'flamebait' threshold is different for different people, so since this post is sure to be a bit controversial, I tried to show that I was aware of it and wasn't just mindlessly trying to start a fanboys war.
Thanks for the laugh, though, if I had mod points left I would mod you up as funny;)
Subject says it all, the V5 is hardly news: the post smells only of 'the other day we posted GeForce 2 MX and G400 now we gotta post something about the V5 otherwise the 3dfx fanboys are gonna get upset'.
Come on, now you only have to post info about the Radeon and we're all set.
OTOH I wonder why Anand pitted the MX against the G400, maybe he didn't want to piss off Matrox too much ? If the MX totally destroyed the G400 can you imagine what the GeF2 would have done ?
To the moderators: please resist the urge to mod this as flamebait. I have used the V1 (owned), the V3(work), the V5(work), the G400(own a Max) and the GeForce2(work), so I feel I am fairly neutral here.
I want it for my garage ! the coolness factor of this would be awesome.
Not to mention that if a neighbour has it, and if it works via any type of hackable radio communication, one would be able to reprogram their torque/speed settings on the fly.
Watch those bolts fly;););)
Now if they only hurried up with Planescape 2...
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Baldur's Gate 2 Gold
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· Score: 1
I meant of course Planescape: Torment 2, but there is a limit on the subject length.
I haven't played BG1 since it was supposed to be mostly a clickfest, that's why I loved PS:T, even if there were some combat areas, mostly one could go on with intelligence and wisdom, if one so chose, instead of being forced to hack'n'slash one's way through.
Anybody knows if BG2 is going to have some more plot than BG1 or is it going to be another kill-everything-in-sight type of thing ?
Also, anybody know if there *is* going to be a PS:T 2 or if they are going to do something else ? I seem to recall having read they don't want to do it, but I would love it if they did, maybe setting it after TNO comes back from the blood war, maybe stripped of all his powers etc. and in need to complete some further mission
That why I was thinking of having a two or even three level meta-moderation scheme, and having only registered people be able to vote (if one were to be draconian one could also make it that you have to register with your provider's email address, rather than with yahoo, hotmail etc.)
I know that the potential for abuse is there, but hopefully with some tuning I think it could be made to work.
Well, while there are user-submitted lists of sites (yahoo,whatever) I think it's just about time for a moderated search engine.
The users could submit links in different subjects or categories with different keywords adding them to the harvested ones and, most important, registered users would be able to get x moderator points a week and vote down spam links or links that don't make much sense with the search one conducted.
Add a healthy dose of meta-moderation (maybe three levels) and some obvious anti-cheat prevention techniques and it should work much better than a normal search engine.
God knows many times even on google obviously poisonous sites come up in the search, it would be so nice to have a button to click to moderate down the page or the domain itself...
Yes, it happens to me too: once a couple of months ago I was trying to find the official site for a particular type of ski, and like 80 hits out of 100 where to the fscking epinions pages.
I was thinking as well about epinions poisoning google, but who knows. Anyways think about this, if they made their urls fairly random, *and* had a lot of pages, *and* every one of those pages had links to the main epinions page and the main page had some dynamic link that sent you back to the other page, this might influence google's rating of the page itself.
OTOH this line of reasoning might just be a byproduct of my overworked little mind;)
I don't want to inflame the situation even more, but if I was a KDE developer and I was given the spotlight on slashdot, I would have used it to discuss the relative technical merits of KDE and Gnome.
It's fairly obvious, to me at least, that KDE will always have problems stemming from the licensing issues, the only way out of this would be, paradoxically, if a Big Company (tm) decided to buy off Trolltech and re-release Qt as GPL.
It is also obvious that even if at this point KDE is more polished, better etc. Gnome will have more and more exposure because of this announcement and because it's pushed heavily by RedHat which, whether we like it or not, is most of the time thought to be the 'Real' Linux by most of the not-so-informed rest of the world.
This part strikes me as a case of *really* bad sour grapes:
This somehow brings me to the another question that has been frequently asked: Will KDE ever have a corporate-backed "foundation" deciding it's future? While I'm not arrogant enough to think I can guarantee what the future will hold, I am still reasonably secure in saying that pigs will probably fly first. A board like that flies square in the face of everything that the KDE project stands for
basically it reads as if the author wishes that those pigs started to fly, but he knows that due to the licensing issues it won't ever happen.
In fact, if you were Sun, what would you choose ?
- A desktop which, though not as polished or probably a little bit technically inferior, shows promise and is licensed under a very clear license
- A desktop which is very polished, professional and everything but that is licensed under unclear terms and is dependent more or less from the whims of an external company ?
Note that I don't imply that Trolltech is in bad faith, but I do know from experience that the bigger the company, the usually more paranoid it is, and if I was Sun I would take exactly their same decision, and only because of the licensing issues without regards to technical merit.
Note, I just got here to work, and I am still sleepy, if the above doesn't make sense, chalk it up to the lack of sleep:)
Please help: series tapes question
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 1
Since you probably have seen the series please help me: I used to watch Hokuto No Ken in Italy, and I remember that the whole series available there was *VERY* long (6 times a week for several months, episodes were about 30 mins or so) and I wonder how they could compress it on only 36 episodes.
What was shown in Italy was everything from the start to the final battle with Caio but from people I met, it seems that in Japan the series went even further.
Please help ! Where does the series availabe on tapes (I could find online vol.1-9 but I'd like to wait for an answer before ordering) start from and, most important, where does it end ?
It's refreshing to finally hear something from the horse's mouth so to speak. I'm sure that a lot of people will pick on some inaccuracies in this interview (mp3s are much lower quality than a digital master, especially if they have been encoded at 128) but let's not forget the big picture.
Before I read this interview, I have to say I was not very impressed by Metallica's behaviour in this whole affair, and now I wonder how much of that impression was caused by the fact that nobody really seemed interested in what they had to say, but rather in the 300,000 names etc.
Like Lars said, the issue here is not the money the artists are losing (which he admitted is peanuts *right now*) but Intellectual Property itself. Or, why should somebody have the right to make an mp3 of Metallica and share it with everybody without the consent of Metallica themselves.
It would now be nice to see what can be done about this issue: one interesting experiment would be, for example, for Metallica to put up a page at, say, mp3.com with mp3s created from bootlegs and see how many people download them and, most important, what kind of comments people have.
I am sure that a significant part of Napster users use Napster just to avoid paying for the music they listen to (come on, be honest) but I am also sure that others have different reasons. For example, if you are an immigrant, sometimes it's *REALLY* hard to find music from your own country (ask me, I had to dig around for 4 *MONTHS* to be able to buy a CD I wanted) and it's just easier to fire up napster and see if you're going to be so lucky as to find what you were looking for to tie you over while the damn CD crosses the Atlantic strapped to a whale's back;)
I am really interested to see in what the/. population will say about this interview, and I hope that they will forget their preconceived opinions, and keep an open mind. From the tone of this interview, it looks fairly apparent that Lars is being honest, so please try to keep this mature ok ?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my point is slightly different, if this person is right the following scenarion could happen, I think.
a) I write something really cool for b) I assign the rights to the FSF and/or release it under the GPL c) it spreads everywhere d) I change my mind, and I REVOKE my previous license e) now people have to stop incorporating my piece in the gpl'd software I was talking about before.
It seems that this guy is implying that a license can be changed retroactively, and this is what scares me (hopefully I got it right though, I really hope I'm wrong)
These are the lines the previous poster was referring to:
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, said that Mattel might be able to argue that the GPL is invalid because users don't pay for the free software.
"Nonexclusive licenses given for free are generally revocable, even if they purport to be irrevocable," Volokh said. "Even if the GPL license in cphack is treated as signed and is covered by 205(e), it might still be revocable by Mattel as the new owners of the cphack copyright."
this is a big issue, I mean, if this is the truth then what is the point of doing the usual 'sign the papers to the EFF' thing ? Any day <insert name of evil corporation here> could buy the rights, for example, to a crucial piece of Emacs, and then effectively preventing further distribution until somebody untangles the mess.
Maybe I should give you a couple of facts that will help you change your mind regarding exactly how much more stressful for the environment is to support a meat based diet:
a typical hamburger.
12 Pounds of Grain
It takes about 12 pounds of grain to produce one pound of hamburger. This could make 8 loaves of bread, or 24 plates of spaghetti. Grain consumption by livestock is increasing twice as fast as grain consumption by people. Cattle consume 70% of all US grain.
55 Square Feet of Rainforest
While not all hamburgers come from the rainforest, for every pound of rainforest beef, approximately 660 pounds of precious living matter is destroyed, including 20-30 different plant species, and dozens of birds, mammals and reptiles.
2,500 Gallons of Water
It takes up to 2,500 gallons of water in the state of California to produce one pound of hamburger. This could be used to grow more than 50 pounds of fruits and vegetables. Half of all water consumed in the US is used to grow feed and provide drinking water for cattle and other livestock.
as you can see, if all the world switched to a plant based vegan diet, there would be less strain on the planet, I know this is counter intuitive, and meat and milk boards want it to remain this way.
two of them seem to be vegan, two of them are not (since like somebody noticed above, they contain caseinate which is a milk byproduct).
* Regarding sugar:
Besides the fact that a significant percentage of sugar processing plant use bone char to whiten the sugar (an inherently non-vegan process) even non vegans should really really read this book:
this will explain a lot why many people are finally saying 'no' to more or less poorly disguised sugar (molasses, cane juice, brown sugar,...).
Fortunately there are many alternatives, it just takes a little bit more label reading when shopping, for example, for an extremely yummy vegan friendly ice cream, one should try Sweet Nothings besides being very low cal and non fat and no white sugar it tastes extremely delicious.
* Regarding vegans who are paranoid about items that even touched meat.
I am one of those, if there is even a slight suspicion that something either contains or might have come in contact with animal products, I won't eat it, it's as simple as that. At first this was a learned behaviour, since I was definitely not born vegan, but now it's completely automatic. Just thinking about eating non vegan makes me sick, and even some vegan foods like boca burgers don't satisfy me as much, because they taste too much like meat (which is a plus for meat eaters trying to make the transition).
Last but not least, I invite all of you to read a passage of this translation of the Bhagavad Gita which might shed some more light on the fact that many people pay a lot of attention not only to the results (i.e. the food that one eats) but to the means also (i.e. how the food is prepared and where).
peace
"Arjuna! Food is the chief formative force. The soiled mind dulls the brilliance of moral excellence; how can a muddy lake reflect clearly? The Divine cannot be reflected in the wicked or vicious mind. Food makes man strong in body; the body is intimately connected with the mind. Strength of mind depends upon strength of body too. Moral conduct, good habits, spiritual effort, depend upon the quality of the food; diseases, mental weakness, spiritual slackness- all are produced by faulty food".
"Krishna?" asked Arjuna, "pray, tell me the constituents of satvic, rajasic and tamasic foods".
"Arjuna! Food, to be satvic, should be capable of strengthening the mind as well the body It should not be too salty, too hot, too bitter, too sweet or too sour. It should not be taken while steaming hot. Food which fans the flames of thirst should be avoided. The general principle is that there should be a limit, a restraint. Food cooked in water should not be used the next day: it becomes harmful. Even fried articles should be consumed before they develop unpleasant odours Rajasic food is the opposite of satvic. It is too salty, too sweet, too hot, too sour, too odorous. Such food excites and intoxicates"
"Lord, excuse me if I appear impertinent; I ask with a desire to know, that is all. By merely a change in food habits, can character be changed from one guna to another? Or has something more to be done to supplement the purification process? Tell me if there is anything more".
"My dear brother-in-law, if transformation of character were so easy, wickedness and vice, so characteristic of the danava nature, could have been wiped off the surface of the earth in a trice. Of course, there are more things to be done. Listen.
There are three kinds of purities to be observed: purity of provision, purity of the vessel in which the food is prepared, and purity of the persons serving the prepared food.
It is not enough if the provisions are pure and of good quality. They should have been procured by fair means; no unfair, unjust, untrue earnings should be used for one's maintenance. These are fouled at the very source The source as well as the course and the goal must all be equally pure The vessel must be clean, free from tarnish. The person who serves must not only be clean in dress, but clean in habits, character and conduct. He should be free from hate, anger, worry and indifference while serving the dishes; he should be cheerful and fresh. And he must be humble and full of love. While attending upon those who are eating he should not allow his mind to dwell on wicked or vicious ideas. Mere physical cleanliness or charm is no compensation for evil thoughts and habits. The sadhaka who has to secure concentration has to be careful about these restrictions. Otherwise, during dhyanam, the subtle influences of the wicked thoughts of the cook and the servers will haunt the sadhaka. Care should be taken to have only virtuous individuals around. Outer charm, professional excellence, reduced wages, these should not be allowed to prejudice you in favour of harmful cooks and attendants. Examine carefully their habits and their character.
The food you eat is such important constituent of the physical and mental stuff with which you have to struggle in the spiritual field. Purity of mind can be and has to be supplemented by bodily purity as well as purity in its important function, speech That is the real tapas- physical, mental and vocal. The mind should be free from anxiety and worry, hate and fear, greed and pride. lt should be saturated with love for all beings.
It has to dwell in God. It has to be restrained from pursuing objective pleasures. No lower thought should be allowed to creep in; all thoughts must be directed towards the elevation of the individual to higher planes. This is the proper tapas of the mind, or manas.
Now for physical tapas. Use the body and its strength and capabilities for the service of others, for the worship of the Lord, for the singing of His Glory, for visiting places hallowed by His Name, for regulated exercises in breath control, for holding the senses away from deleterious paths, and for treading the path of God. The service of the sick and the distressed, the observance of moral codes and such beneficial acts must make it sacrosanct.
Vocal tapas too has to be engaged in. Avoid talking too much: desist from false statements, do not take delight in back-biting and in scandal-mongering; never speak harshly; speak softly and sweetly; speak with the memory of Madhava ever in the background of the mind. Of these three, physical tapas, mental tapas and vocal tapas, even if one is absent, the atmic effulgence (atmajyoti) cannot radiate light. The lamp, the wick and the oil are all essential for a light; the body is the lamp, the mind is the oil, and the tongue is the wick. All three must be in good order.
Some pious people consider that acts of charity are also physical tapas. It is good that they think so, but, when doing charity, one has to do so after pondering over the place, the time and the nature of the recipient. For example, charities for schools should be given at places where there have been no schools until then; hospitals have to be established in areas where diseases are rampant; hunger has to be appeased where famine conditions have been caused by floods or droughts. The nature and condition of the recipients have to be considered while imparting teaching of dharma and Brahmavidya, and while doing service of various kinds.
The charitable act that removes from a person the deficiency that is most harmful to his progress is called satvic".
"Krishna", interrupted Arjuna, "May I ask a question here? Charity, however done, is charity, is it not? Why do you distinguish them by satvic, rajasic and tamasic? Are there any such? "
Krishna answered, "Of course there are. Among those who donate for charities, most are anxious to get name and fame; that is the motive for the act. They are after something in return for what they offer. Very few desire the grace of the Lord, and nothing else. Gifts made with that one end in view. to receive the grace of the Lord, are satvic. Gifts made expecting something in return, like fame and publicity, esteem and power, or made in a huff, or made reluctantly under pressure, these are to be classed as rajasic"
"Charity should be given with reverence and faith. It should not be just thrown in the face of the recipient. Nor should it be given to an undeserving person or at an inopportune moment. Food for the overfed is a burden, not a boon. Hospitals in places that are inaccessible are as good as charity thrown away. Such benefitless and wasteful charity is called tamasic. While engaged in dana, or charity, one has to be very vigilant. You should not scatter it to whomsoever pleads for it; nor can you shower it on all kinds of places. Be careful that you remember the three types mentioned by Me and then do as seems most proper. The gift you make must not be for name or fame; it should have no motive of pomp or publicity; it should be purposeful and useful. In all acts, the satvic attitude is best. This attitude must permeate all acts, seeing, hearing or speaking".
I keep hearing about the 'Blockbuster won't want to pass on late fees' argument, and I would like to know, is there anybody here that knows what percentage of a video store revenue comes from late fees ?
I've been renting for 10 years at least, and I have been late no more than twice, am I the only one ?
I might be mistaken, but read this: International users who have Netscape Communicator do not need to download a new version of Netscape Communicator to take advantage of the strong encryption capabilities being announced today. Negotiation of the strong encryption between International versions of Netscape Communicator and Netscape SuiteSpot servers approved for export to banks occurs through a unique mechanism based on a special-use digital certificate. Approval of this certificate based mechanism is the culmination of months of effort between Netscape and numerous government agencies. Netscape and VeriSign have worked closely together to develop digital certificates that allow Netscape SuiteSpot servers to initiate strong communications sessions with Netscape Communicator. VeriSign will issue special-use digital certificates pending final approval from the United States Department of Commerce. Banks around the world can obtain Netscape Communicator and Netscape SuiteSpot servers with strong encryption immediately.
this seems to imply that in order for users to use 128bit, they have to be talking with a netscape suitespot server, which means that general 128bit encryption has not really been legalized, but only 128bit encryption between two software programs created by the same software house
Ok, thanks for the pointer, but why isn't this linked from somewhere obvious, like www.debian.org ?
I mean, when I was searching for 3.3.5 for slink I searched everywhere for about a week, and I couldn't find any pointers and, if I couldn't find anything for a week, there surely is a problem here.
Thanks for the interesting link, your comment has been constructive but let me ask you one thing why hasn't XFree 3.3.5 released for slink ?
I don't buy the crap that it's not stable, it's actually needed to get some stuff running, and since it's been released for redhat 5.2 (glibc 2.07) it's just a repackaging job so why don't the powers-that-be get off their high horse and repackage this for slink like it had been done for 3.3.4 which was just an interim release ?
I'm sure that many slink users would appreciate that.
your apt isn't new enough for that, you might want to ask how to get the newest version of apt for slink on a mailing-list. Debian's user community is pretty strong -- did you ever bother to take advantage of it or just decided to rant on/.?
Like I said in another follow up, I am subscribed to debian user, and approximately twice a week somebody complains that the upgrade to glibc 2.1 hosed their system.
Then somebody else posts that to upgrade to potato, you need the new version of dpkg/apt-get/foo-baah something, and even then there might be problems.
Look, I need this system to work, I don't use it for fun, but to actually put the bread on the table, while it's true that I am in a ranting mood because of the XFree 3.3.5 screwup (read in the other post) I still find the debian development model to be fairly wrong.
You can't have an extremely old, out of date, unsupported (for new software) distribution and a bleeding edge, sometimes screwed-up (anybody remembers the perl problems in potato a little while ago ? ) distribution that only developers use.
People need to wake up and realize that a significant part of Linux's user base doesn't want to use Linux but use Linux to get some work done.
I knew that I would be moderated down, because it seems that nobody can say anything about Debian/FSF/etc. without being grilled.
I am very supportive of the open source model, heck, I started putting stuff I wrote under the GPL several years ago, so I have the feeling that I have the right to say that the emperor is naked when I see that it is.
agree with the moderation. Read some of the rebuttals, the man is basically just saying 'Debian sucks because it sucked for me and I didn't try to fix it'.
I did try to fix it, but couldn't because, like I said, there is no document anywhere that explains how to update slink to glibc 2.1 without risking to hose the system I am subscribed to debian-user, and many, many, many times there are posts from people that tried this upgrade, failed, and wanted to revert only to find out that the dependency system didn't allow them to.
Another thing that I tried to say, is that I just want to use linux, not to have to chase everywhere left and right to get something working: read below for my experience with X.
I buy this matrox G400, I know that I need XFree 3.3.5 to get it to work and I thing, ok, no prob, I'll download as usual the X server from xfree86.org, stick it in/usr/X11/bin and I'll be set.
Problem #1, the server on x.org is compiled against glibc 2.1 and segfaults on 2.0, this is the first time that this happens.
Problem #2 NOBODY in the debian camp tried to create a slink, 2.0 version of the package, since everybody is so busy making potato so good.
Now, after much looking here and there, I remember that redhat 5.2 used glibc 2.0, I fire up rpmfind.net and, look, there is a new 3.3.5 package for a distribution 1 major and 1 minor version old. I fire up alien, and now I'm up and running.
I don't like red hat, like I said, but hats off to their support, I just wish that debian developers realized that not everybody runs the latest unstable revision just to be able to use X.
Slashdot Mirror
Please Mister, don't take my Karma. Its all I have left
/. for more than 3 years I have very little, being mostly a lurker) it's that a couple of time it happened that my posts were thought to be flamebait, when I was just trying to spark a discussion.
;)
LOL, no seriously, it's not about the karma (despite me reading
I do know that the 'flamebait' threshold is different for different people, so since this post is sure to be a bit controversial, I tried to show that I was aware of it and wasn't just mindlessly trying to start a fanboys war.
Thanks for the laugh, though, if I had mod points left I would mod you up as funny
Subject says it all, the V5 is hardly news: the post smells only of 'the other day we posted GeForce 2 MX and G400 now we gotta post something about the V5 otherwise the 3dfx fanboys are gonna get upset'.
Come on, now you only have to post info about the Radeon and we're all set.
OTOH I wonder why Anand pitted the MX against the G400, maybe he didn't want to piss off Matrox too much ? If the MX totally destroyed the G400 can you imagine what the GeF2 would have done ?
To the moderators: please resist the urge to mod this as flamebait. I have used the V1 (owned), the V3(work), the V5(work), the G400(own a Max) and the GeForce2(work), so I feel I am fairly neutral here.
I want it for my garage ! the coolness factor of this would be awesome.
;););)
Not to mention that if a neighbour has it, and if it works via any type of hackable radio communication, one would be able to reprogram their torque/speed settings on the fly.
Watch those bolts fly
I meant of course Planescape: Torment 2, but there is a limit on the subject length.
I haven't played BG1 since it was supposed to be mostly a clickfest, that's why I loved PS:T, even if there were some combat areas, mostly one could go on with intelligence and wisdom, if one so chose, instead of being forced to hack'n'slash one's way through.
Anybody knows if BG2 is going to have some more plot than BG1 or is it going to be another kill-everything-in-sight type of thing ?
Also, anybody know if there *is* going to be a PS:T 2 or if they are going to do something else ? I seem to recall having read they don't want to do it, but I would love it if they did, maybe setting it after TNO comes back from the blood war, maybe stripped of all his powers etc. and in need to complete some further mission
Oh well, I can always dream...
That why I was thinking of having a two or even three level meta-moderation scheme, and having only registered people be able to vote (if one were to be draconian one could also make it that you have to register with your provider's email address, rather than with yahoo, hotmail etc.)
I know that the potential for abuse is there, but hopefully with some tuning I think it could be made to work.
Well, while there are user-submitted lists of sites (yahoo,whatever) I think it's just about time for a moderated search engine.
The users could submit links in different subjects or categories with different keywords adding them to the harvested ones and, most important, registered users would be able to get x moderator points a week and vote down spam links or links that don't make much sense with the search one conducted.
Add a healthy dose of meta-moderation (maybe three levels) and some obvious anti-cheat prevention techniques and it should work much better than a normal search engine.
God knows many times even on google obviously poisonous sites come up in the search, it would be so nice to have a button to click to moderate down the page or the domain itself...
Yes, it happens to me too: once a couple of months ago I was trying to find the official site for a particular type of ski, and like 80 hits out of 100 where to the fscking epinions pages.
;)
I was thinking as well about epinions poisoning google, but who knows. Anyways think about this, if they made their urls fairly random, *and* had a lot of pages, *and* every one of those pages had links to the main epinions page and the main page had some dynamic link that sent you back to the other page, this might influence google's rating of the page itself.
OTOH this line of reasoning might just be a byproduct of my overworked little mind
I don't want to inflame the situation even more, but if I was a KDE developer and I was given the spotlight on slashdot, I would have used it to discuss the relative technical merits of KDE and Gnome.
:)
It's fairly obvious, to me at least, that KDE will always have problems stemming from the licensing issues, the only way out of this would be, paradoxically, if a Big Company (tm) decided to buy off Trolltech and re-release Qt as GPL.
It is also obvious that even if at this point KDE is more polished, better etc. Gnome will have more and more exposure because of this announcement and because it's pushed heavily by RedHat which, whether we like it or not, is most of the time thought to be the 'Real' Linux by most of the not-so-informed rest of the world.
This part strikes me as a case of *really* bad sour grapes:
This somehow brings me to the another question that has been frequently asked: Will KDE ever have a corporate-backed "foundation" deciding it's future? While I'm not arrogant enough to think I can guarantee what the future will hold, I am still reasonably secure in saying that pigs will probably fly first. A board like that flies square in the face of everything that the KDE project stands for
basically it reads as if the author wishes that those pigs started to fly, but he knows that due to the licensing issues it won't ever happen.
In fact, if you were Sun, what would you choose ?
- A desktop which, though not as polished or probably a little bit technically inferior, shows promise and is licensed under a very clear license
- A desktop which is very polished, professional and everything but that is licensed under unclear terms and is dependent more or less from the whims of an external company ?
Note that I don't imply that Trolltech is in bad faith, but I do know from experience that the bigger the company, the usually more paranoid it is, and if I was Sun I would take exactly their same decision, and only because of the licensing issues without regards to technical merit.
Note, I just got here to work, and I am still sleepy, if the above doesn't make sense, chalk it up to the lack of sleep
Since you probably have seen the series please help me: I used to watch Hokuto No Ken in Italy, and I remember that the whole series available there was *VERY* long (6 times a week for several months, episodes were about 30 mins or so) and I wonder how they could compress it on only 36 episodes.
What was shown in Italy was everything from the start to the final battle with Caio but from people I met, it seems that in Japan the series went even further.
Please help ! Where does the series availabe on tapes (I could find online vol.1-9 but I'd like to wait for an answer before ordering) start from and, most important, where does it end ?
TIA
It's refreshing to finally hear something from the horse's mouth so to speak. I'm sure that a lot of people will pick on some inaccuracies in this interview (mp3s are much lower quality than a digital master, especially if they have been encoded at 128) but let's not forget the big picture.
;)
/. population will say about this interview, and I hope that they will forget their preconceived opinions, and keep an open mind. From the tone of this interview, it looks fairly apparent that Lars is being honest, so please try to keep this mature ok ?
Before I read this interview, I have to say I was not very impressed by Metallica's behaviour in this whole affair, and now I wonder how much of that impression was caused by the fact that nobody really seemed interested in what they had to say, but rather in the 300,000 names etc.
Like Lars said, the issue here is not the money the artists are losing (which he admitted is peanuts *right now*) but Intellectual Property itself. Or, why should somebody have the right to make an mp3 of Metallica and share it with everybody without the consent of Metallica themselves.
It would now be nice to see what can be done about this issue: one interesting experiment would be, for example, for Metallica to put up a page at, say, mp3.com with mp3s created from bootlegs and see how many people download them and, most important, what kind of comments people have.
I am sure that a significant part of Napster users use Napster just to avoid paying for the music they listen to (come on, be honest) but I am also sure that others have different reasons. For example, if you are an immigrant, sometimes it's *REALLY* hard to find music from your own country (ask me, I had to dig around for 4 *MONTHS* to be able to buy a CD I wanted) and it's just easier to fire up napster and see if you're going to be so lucky as to find what you were looking for to tie you over while the damn CD crosses the Atlantic strapped to a whale's back
I am really interested to see in what the
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my point is slightly different, if this person is right the following scenarion could happen, I think.
a) I write something really cool for
b) I assign the rights to the FSF and/or release it under the GPL
c) it spreads everywhere
d) I change my mind, and I REVOKE my previous license
e) now people have to stop incorporating my piece in the gpl'd software I was talking about before.
It seems that this guy is implying that a license can be changed retroactively, and this is what scares me (hopefully I got it right though, I really hope I'm wrong)
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, said that Mattel might be able to argue that the GPL is invalid because users don't pay for the free software.
"Nonexclusive licenses given for free are generally revocable, even if they purport to be irrevocable," Volokh said. "Even if the GPL license in cphack is treated as signed and is covered by 205(e), it might still be revocable by Mattel as the new owners of the cphack copyright."
this is a big issue, I mean, if this is the truth then what is the point of doing the usual 'sign the papers to the EFF' thing ? Any day <insert name of evil corporation here> could buy the rights, for example, to a crucial piece of Emacs, and then effectively preventing further distribution until somebody untangles the mess.
And what about the Linux kernel itself ?
this sucks.
It is in fact hard to find decent things on mp3.com, but for whomever likes latin music (bossa) I do have two recommendations:
Cilico+Amigos=Parceria
and
Rio Bahia
I absolutely loved the first (Cilico...), and I bought their CD, hopefully others will do it as well.
Here is the correct link:
Appendix E: Standard-Library Exception Safety
Maybe I should give you a couple of facts that will help you change your mind regarding exactly how much more stressful for the environment is to support a meat based diet:
a typical hamburger.
12 Pounds of Grain
It takes about 12 pounds of grain to produce one pound of hamburger. This could make 8 loaves of bread, or 24 plates of spaghetti. Grain consumption by livestock is increasing twice as fast as grain consumption by people. Cattle consume 70% of all US grain.
55 Square Feet of Rainforest
While not all hamburgers come from the rainforest, for every pound of rainforest beef, approximately 660 pounds of precious living matter is destroyed, including 20-30 different plant species, and dozens of birds, mammals and reptiles.
2,500 Gallons of Water
It takes up to 2,500 gallons of water in the state of California to produce one pound of hamburger. This could be used to grow more than 50 pounds of fruits and vegetables. Half of all water consumed in the US is used to grow feed and provide drinking water for cattle and other livestock.
as you can see, if all the world switched to a plant based vegan diet, there would be less strain on the planet, I know this is counter intuitive, and meat and milk boards want it to remain this way.
* Regarding these snacks:
two of them seem to be vegan, two of them are not (since like somebody noticed above, they contain caseinate which is a milk byproduct).
* Regarding sugar:
Besides the fact that a significant percentage of sugar processing plant use bone char to whiten the sugar (an inherently non-vegan process) even non vegans should really really read this book:
Sugar Blues
this will explain a lot why many people are finally saying 'no' to more or less poorly disguised sugar (molasses, cane juice, brown sugar,...).
Fortunately there are many alternatives, it just takes a little bit more label reading when shopping, for example, for an extremely yummy vegan friendly ice cream, one should try Sweet Nothings besides being very low cal and non fat and no white sugar it tastes extremely delicious.
* Regarding vegans who are paranoid about items that even touched meat.
I am one of those, if there is even a slight suspicion that something either contains or might have come in contact with animal products, I won't eat it, it's as simple as that. At first this was a learned behaviour, since I was definitely not born vegan, but now it's completely automatic. Just thinking about eating non vegan makes me sick, and even some vegan foods like boca burgers don't satisfy me as much, because they taste too much like meat (which is a plus for meat eaters trying to make the transition).
Last but not least, I invite all of you to read a passage of this translation of the Bhagavad Gita which might shed some more light on the fact that many people pay a lot of attention not only to the results (i.e. the food that one eats) but to the means also (i.e. how the food is prepared and where).
peace
"Arjuna! Food is the chief formative force. The soiled mind dulls the brilliance of moral excellence; how can a muddy lake reflect clearly? The Divine cannot be reflected in the wicked or vicious mind. Food makes man strong in body; the body is intimately connected with the mind. Strength of mind depends upon strength of body too. Moral conduct, good habits, spiritual effort, depend upon the quality of the food; diseases, mental weakness, spiritual slackness- all are produced by faulty food".
"Krishna?" asked Arjuna, "pray, tell me the constituents of satvic, rajasic and tamasic foods".
"Arjuna! Food, to be satvic, should be capable of strengthening the mind as well the body It should not be too salty, too hot, too bitter, too sweet or too sour. It should not be taken while steaming hot. Food which fans the flames of thirst should be avoided. The general principle is that there should be a limit, a restraint. Food cooked in water should not be used the next day: it becomes harmful. Even fried articles should be consumed before they develop unpleasant odours Rajasic food is the opposite of satvic. It is too salty, too sweet, too hot, too sour, too odorous. Such food excites and intoxicates"
"Lord, excuse me if I appear impertinent; I ask with a desire to know, that is all. By merely a change in food habits, can character be changed from one guna to another? Or has something more to be done to supplement the purification process? Tell me if there is anything more".
"My dear brother-in-law, if transformation of character were so easy, wickedness and vice, so characteristic of the danava nature, could have been wiped off the surface of the earth in a trice. Of course, there are more things to be done. Listen.
There are three kinds of purities to be observed: purity of provision, purity of the vessel in which the food is prepared, and purity of the persons serving the prepared food.
It is not enough if the provisions are pure and of good quality. They should have been procured by fair means; no unfair, unjust, untrue earnings should be used for one's maintenance. These are fouled at the very source The source as well as the course and the goal must all be equally pure The vessel must be clean, free from tarnish. The person who serves must not only be clean in dress, but clean in habits, character and conduct. He should be free from hate, anger, worry and indifference while serving the dishes; he should be cheerful and fresh. And he must be humble and full of love. While attending upon those who are eating he should not allow his mind to dwell on wicked or vicious ideas. Mere physical cleanliness or charm is no compensation for evil thoughts and habits. The sadhaka who has to secure concentration has to be careful about these restrictions. Otherwise, during dhyanam, the subtle influences of the wicked thoughts of the cook and the servers will haunt the sadhaka. Care should be taken to have only virtuous individuals around. Outer charm, professional excellence, reduced wages, these should not be allowed to prejudice you in favour of harmful cooks and attendants. Examine carefully their habits and their character.
The food you eat is such important constituent of the physical and mental stuff with which you have to struggle in the spiritual field. Purity of mind can be and has to be supplemented by bodily purity as well as purity in its important function, speech That is the real tapas- physical, mental and vocal. The mind should be free from anxiety and worry, hate and fear, greed and pride. lt should be saturated with love for all beings.
It has to dwell in God. It has to be restrained from pursuing objective pleasures. No lower thought should be allowed to creep in; all thoughts must be directed towards the elevation of the individual to higher planes. This is the proper tapas of the mind, or manas.
Now for physical tapas. Use the body and its strength and capabilities for the service of others, for the worship of the Lord, for the singing of His Glory, for visiting places hallowed by His Name, for regulated exercises in breath control, for holding the senses away from deleterious paths, and for treading the path of God. The service of the sick and the distressed, the observance of moral codes and such beneficial acts must make it sacrosanct.
Vocal tapas too has to be engaged in. Avoid talking too much: desist from false statements, do not take delight in back-biting and in scandal-mongering; never speak harshly; speak softly and sweetly; speak with the memory of Madhava ever in the background of the mind. Of these three, physical tapas, mental tapas and vocal tapas, even if one is absent, the atmic effulgence (atmajyoti) cannot radiate light. The lamp, the wick and the oil are all essential for a light; the body is the lamp, the mind is the oil, and the tongue is the wick. All three must be in good order.
Some pious people consider that acts of charity are also physical tapas. It is good that they think so, but, when doing charity, one has to do so after pondering over the place, the time and the nature of the recipient. For example, charities for schools should be given at places where there have been no schools until then; hospitals have to be established in areas where diseases are rampant; hunger has to be appeased where famine conditions have been caused by floods or droughts. The nature and condition of the recipients have to be considered while imparting teaching of dharma and Brahmavidya, and while doing service of various kinds.
The charitable act that removes from a person the deficiency that is most harmful to his progress is called satvic".
"Krishna", interrupted Arjuna, "May I ask a question here? Charity, however done, is charity, is it not? Why do you distinguish them by satvic, rajasic and tamasic? Are there any such? "
Krishna answered, "Of course there are. Among those who donate for charities, most are anxious to get name and fame; that is the motive for the act. They are after something in return for what they offer. Very few desire the grace of the Lord, and nothing else. Gifts made with that one end in view. to receive the grace of the Lord, are satvic. Gifts made expecting something in return, like fame and publicity, esteem and power, or made in a huff, or made reluctantly under pressure, these are to be classed as rajasic"
"Charity should be given with reverence and faith. It should not be just thrown in the face of the recipient. Nor should it be given to an undeserving person or at an inopportune moment. Food for the overfed is a burden, not a boon. Hospitals in places that are inaccessible are as good as charity thrown away. Such benefitless and wasteful charity is called tamasic. While engaged in dana, or charity, one has to be very vigilant. You should not scatter it to whomsoever pleads for it; nor can you shower it on all kinds of places. Be careful that you remember the three types mentioned by Me and then do as seems most proper. The gift you make must not be for name or fame; it should have no motive of pomp or publicity; it should be purposeful and useful. In all acts, the satvic attitude is best. This attitude must permeate all acts, seeing, hearing or speaking".
I keep hearing about the 'Blockbuster won't want to pass on late fees' argument, and I would like to know, is there anybody here that knows what percentage of a video store revenue comes from late fees ?
I've been renting for 10 years at least, and I have been late no more than twice, am I the only one ?
It's not a perl-ism, but a simple *nix-ism, check the ctime(3) manpage (or, if you have it, the localtime one)
No, I don't agree, from the localtime manpage:
tm_year
The number of years since 1900.
which starting 1/1/2000, is going to be in fact 100
I might be mistaken, but read this:
International users who have Netscape Communicator do not need to download a new version of Netscape Communicator to take advantage of the strong encryption capabilities being announced today. Negotiation of the strong encryption between International versions of Netscape Communicator and Netscape SuiteSpot servers approved for export to banks occurs through a unique mechanism based on a special-use digital certificate. Approval of this certificate based mechanism is the culmination of months of effort between Netscape and numerous government agencies. Netscape and VeriSign have worked closely together to develop digital certificates that allow Netscape SuiteSpot servers to initiate strong communications sessions with Netscape Communicator. VeriSign will issue special-use digital certificates pending final approval from the United States Department of Commerce. Banks around the world can obtain Netscape Communicator and Netscape SuiteSpot servers with strong encryption immediately.
this seems to imply that in order for users to use 128bit, they have to be talking with a netscape suitespot server, which means that general 128bit encryption has not really been legalized, but only 128bit encryption between two software programs created by the same software house
What do you think ?
Debian has had (and currently has) the largest number of packages available in ANY distribution.
pity that sometimes actually finding these packages is next to impossible, see getting XFree 3.3.5 for slink.
I searched for it for about a week and then gave up and alienized the Redhat 5.2 packages.
Ok, thanks for the pointer, but why isn't this linked from somewhere obvious, like www.debian.org ?
I mean, when I was searching for 3.3.5 for slink I searched everywhere for about a week, and I couldn't find any pointers and, if I couldn't find anything for a week, there surely is a problem here.
Thanks for the interesting link, your comment has been constructive but let me ask you one thing why hasn't XFree 3.3.5 released for slink ?
I don't buy the crap that it's not stable, it's actually needed to get some stuff running, and since it's been released for redhat 5.2 (glibc 2.07) it's just a repackaging job so why don't the powers-that-be get off their high horse and repackage this for slink like it had been done for 3.3.4 which was just an interim release ?
I'm sure that many slink users would appreciate that.
your apt isn't new enough for that, you might want to ask how to get the newest version of apt for slink on a mailing-list. /.?
Debian's user community is pretty strong -- did you ever bother to take advantage of it or just decided to rant on
Like I said in another follow up, I am subscribed to debian user, and approximately twice a week somebody complains that the upgrade to glibc 2.1 hosed their system.
Then somebody else posts that to upgrade to potato, you need the new version of dpkg/apt-get/foo-baah something, and even then there might be problems.
Look, I need this system to work, I don't use it for fun, but to actually put the bread on the table, while it's true that I am in a ranting mood because of the XFree 3.3.5 screwup (read in the other post) I still find the debian development model to be fairly wrong.
You can't have an extremely old, out of date, unsupported (for new software) distribution and a bleeding edge, sometimes screwed-up (anybody remembers the perl problems in potato a little while ago ? ) distribution that only developers use.
People need to wake up and realize that a significant part of Linux's user base doesn't want to use Linux but use Linux to get some work done.
I knew that I would be moderated down, because it seems that nobody can say anything about Debian/FSF/etc. without being grilled.
I am very supportive of the open source model, heck, I started putting stuff I wrote under the GPL several years ago, so I have the feeling that I have the right to say that the emperor is naked when I see that it is.
agree with the moderation. Read some of the rebuttals, the man is basically just saying 'Debian sucks because it sucked for
/usr/X11/bin and I'll be set.
me and I didn't try to fix it'.
I did try to fix it, but couldn't because, like I said, there is no document anywhere that explains how to update slink to glibc 2.1 without risking to hose the system I am subscribed to debian-user, and many, many, many times there are posts from people that tried this upgrade, failed, and wanted to revert only to find out that the dependency system didn't allow them to.
Another thing that I tried to say, is that I just want to use linux, not to have to chase everywhere left and right to get something working: read below for my experience with X.
I buy this matrox G400, I know that I need XFree 3.3.5 to get it to work and I thing, ok, no prob, I'll download as usual the X server from xfree86.org, stick it in
Problem #1, the server on x.org is compiled against glibc 2.1 and segfaults on 2.0, this is the first time that this happens.
Problem #2 NOBODY in the debian camp tried to create a slink, 2.0 version of the package, since everybody is so busy making potato so good.
Now, after much looking here and there, I remember that redhat 5.2 used glibc 2.0, I fire up rpmfind.net and, look, there is a new 3.3.5 package for a distribution 1 major and 1 minor version old. I fire up alien, and now I'm up and running.
I don't like red hat, like I said, but hats off to their support, I just wish that debian developers realized that not everybody runs the latest unstable revision just to be able to use X.