Perhaps. Spit into a cup of water. Leave it for a while. It'll probably get mouldy. Hell, there might be several different kinds of mould. They might compete. If there's a source of food, they'll continue to grow. (If there isn't, you may need to throw a few bits and pieces into the cup every so often. Life doesn't survive without nutrition of some sort or another.) If there's competeition, natural selection will come into play. You'll possibly end up with a slightly better mould than you started with - one that can compete for food more effectively. Keep this up for a billion years. Varying conditions every so often will help keep things moving along nicely. It's difficult to say what you'd end up with after a billion years - but it'd almost certainly not be what you started with.
Also, theories while have no proof, also do not encounter proof AGAINST it like evolution does.
Of course they do. It leads to refinement of the theory to better explain what's going on. It's called scientific progress.
Darwin had no proof
Of course he didn't. You don't tend to find proof of theories lying around. You find evidence. You form a hypothesis from this evidence. You attempt to disprove the hypothesis. If you do, then you try to figure out a better hypothesis. If you don't, then you accept the hypothesis as a theory. Evolution is a pretty good explanation for the evidence we have. It doesn't explain everything - neither did Newtonian physics. Better theories that explain more evidence will come along, but I'd tend to think that they'll be based on current theories of evolution in the same way that Einsteinian physics builds on Newtonian.
And as for "You can't disprove God, so he might exist"? You're right. God can't be disproven. However, there is a large body of evidence that suggests creationism isn't correct. And given the choice between two world views (the scientific one, or "things happen because of certain basic patterns of behaviour" and the religious one, or "things happen because God makes them happen") I'll pick the one that explains the way I perceive the universe more accurately. You, of course, are free to do the same.
The main problem here is that you're confusing the theory of evolution with one of its logical applications. Evolution itself says nothing about whether or not we evolved from apes. The suggestion that we did is one that comes from the theory. It's a logical extension. But even if we didn't evolve from lower life forms, that doesn't invalidate evolution.
Even the foremost scientists in evolution are now pointing to a meteor that came down to Earth and brought life with it. Why? because they concluded the Earth is too small to possibly have enough reactions to create a protein molecule in a billion-billion years.
The suggestion that life here was triggered by an extra-terrestrial source of protein/DNA isn't a new one. It's a fairly obvious hypothesis that would be somewhat hard to disprove, and it does make rather a lot of questions easier to answer. But the simple problem here is that we still don't know precisely what happened on this planet for several billion years of its existence. Extra-terrestrial DNA is one possibility. Spontaneous generation is another. Whatever it was that kick-started life on Earth is fairly irrelevant when it comes to evolution. The general starting point (a planet with self-replicating material on it) is the same.
Secondly, it has been discovered that the first single-celled life came an instant after the waters in the ocean stopped boiling.
Interesting. I haven't heard that one before. I don't suppose you could point me at some references?
Thirdly, in another instant (in geologic time) the Cambrian Explosion brought every body form in existance and no significant changes have been made since.
An instant in geological time is not necessarily an instant in genetic. Evolution can be demonstrated in much less than 1000 years.
Fourthly, the DNA molecule is so complex, had it been transmitted in radio form to SETI, it would qualify as evidence for intelligent life.
A 4 tone sequence several million bases long? I'd hope it would. I'm not sure what your point is here?
To go to the title of my post, many people say that life came into existance for many reasons and are acted upon with different purposes. Evolution leaves its believers either deceived or to trust by faith in its Random Chance. Belief by faith in something that created life and continues to act on it is a religion.
I don't "believe" in evolution. I accept it as a good (currently the best) explanation of observed evidence. If something else comes along that explains the evidence in a better fashion, then I'll probably accept that instead. This is how science works - the formation of hypothoses, the testing of them, the replacement of them with better hypothoses. Science is not a medium of blind faith, which is what distinguishes it from religion.
So you push the problem back to the scale of the universe. The problem still exists.
Nonsense. At the scale of the universe, entropy is increasing. Logic points out quite clearly that the same is true of our solar system, which can be assumed to be a pretty closed system. The increase in order brought about by life is somewhat less than the increase in disorder brought about by everything else that goes on around here.
If they don't release enough documentation to allow drivers to be written by anyone, then I'm not interested. Sure, I can stick it in my Linux box and use it - but what if I decide to change to BSD instead? What if the manufacturer goes bust and doesn't release updated drivers to deal with changes in the kernel? I use Linux not only because I find it more stable and usable than Windows, but also because I like the concept.
In a nutshell, I'm not going to buy a piece of highly propriatory hardware just because it works in Linux as well as Windows. It's still a piece of highly propriatory hardware. .
Over the space of three months, I had 2 XP 40s break on me and a third break on a friend. The choice of transparant plastic of some description may appeal to the kiddies, but it means the water tanks fracture with annoying ease with the result that the damn things leak all over the place.
Still, I've had good experiences with my CPS 1000 (pretty much the biggest I can afford - they're significantly more expensive over here in the UK) which seems a damn sight better built. The sheer ugliness of the thing suggests that it's been designed with function ahead of form and as a result it hasn't failed me once. I'm a member of the Cambridge University assassin's guild so we tend to go through a lot of them - the XP20 is very nice and pleasingly concealable, but sadly nobody in the area seems to sell them. XP110s are just about hideable inside a coat, and with anything above that any thoughts of subtlty go out the window. I've never really liked the 50 series for their size/usefulness ratio, but the 55s were pretty solid.
Still, I may be forced to upgrade when the new range appears - someone I know has modified a 2500 (damn big thing about a metre long) and added 12 litres of extra capacity. The temptation to push him gently backwards when he's carrying it is something I may be forced to give in to at some point in the future...
At an anticipated opening price of US$6 a share, I'd say yes. There is plenty of real poverty in the US, but we are talking about people who can afford computers and ISPs. And Penguin Mints.
With a minimum of 100 shares to be bought and the cost of opening an E*Trade account in the first place? I could get (and have done, in the past) an RS/6000 for less, and I'd probably prefer it. But even so - do you believe that every single recipient of this is going to want to buy shares in Redhat? All of them? Without exception?
If not, people are paying for something they didn't want and had no choice as to whether or not they received. This is spam.
Yup, it does. And on this part of the planet it costs roughly US$20/month flat rate. If it costs more on your part of the planet, take it up with Tony Blair, Lester Bird, Ryutaro Hashimoto, the Masons or whoever runs your grubby little country.
Irrespective of how much your network traffic costs, it's more expensive than it would be without spam. And the difference between spam and other bandwidth consumption is that the first is not requested by those who are paying, while the second is. That's the crux of the matter.
I think you'd have to be pretty stupid (even more stupid than you) to think that everyone who posts to comp.unix.aix is even remotely interested in actually buying RS/6000's. Most people can't afford them, even discounted.
But most people can afford to invest (reasonably heavily) in Redhat's shares, I suppose?
Now, I know what you're going to say (after "duh") you are going to say that you need to indicate your interest in email in some public way before you should get it. Well, at least 75% of the email I get is unsolicited in this way. It is sent directly to me by people who think that I want to get it or should get it for some reason. Sometimes they're wrong, but I don't make a big fuss over it. Take a valium, people.
Unsolicited mail is fine, as long as it's personal. I'm happy to receive mail that is in some way relevant to something I've posted or attached my email address to - I wouldn't have put the email address there otherwise. There's a difference between mailing one person about something they've written (which is unsolicited (possibly) and email, but not bulk) and a company related to something I've written only insomuch as they sell and develop open-source software sending me (and a large number of other people, without overly rigorous checking as to who gets it) an advert trying to sell me stuff. The major difference is that the second is bulk, and thus the second is spam.
If I ask questions on comp.unix.aix, that doesn't mean I want to buy an RS/6000. If I attach my email address to the open-source movement in some way, that doesn't mean I want to buy Redhat shares.
This raises an interesting question. How could they have asked? By sending email? Wouldn't that have been SPAM? I guess that could have telephoned everybody. Now that would be so much less annoying. The truth is, these people attached their email addresses to Open Source projects so that people could contact them with respect to their work. This mailing was in regards to their work, although not directly.
One fairly obvious solution would be to provide a form on their website for interested people who could then list their contributions. Once these had been checked, they'd have been given the information. True, this would mean more difficulty for Redhat. But that's not the issue - the onus is on them to make sure that the only people paying for receiving this information are the ones who are interested.
Y'know, telecommunications tarriffing in Europe is, put simply, TOTALLY FUCKED. It's really a subject for totally different thread, but stop whining. You have a lousy cost structure for data communication. We have an overabundance of uncontrolled firearms. Count your fuckin' blessings.
Hell, I know the telecommunications industry in Europe is far from optimal. That's not the point. Network traffic costs money no matter where you are on the planet. Spam increases network traffic. Spam costs money. Universities have to pay for their network traffic, and so spam costs them money. In the UK, universities are paid for by taxes. Every person in the UK who pays taxes pays for spam.
Re:Dont be so paranoid about anyones actions.
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Red Hat IPO Surprise
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I am surprised that a company trying to do good and pass on benifits to the developer community is being held responsible from spam. Cmon guys dont be so paranoid. There is a human side to Redhat.
A few months ago, Oxfam (a well known British charity generally held in fairly high regard) was planning on sending unsolicited mail asking for donations. They were trying to do good. The fact that it would cost the recipients far more than it would cost them to send the mail in the first place was apparantly ignored by them, but eventually public reaction forced them to change their mind.
Should this have been acceptable?
A line needs to be drawn somewhere regarding spam. There are two places this can be done - one allowing all unsolicited bulk email, and one allowing none. Making "special cases", and letting people away with it due to "good intentions" is unworkable. If you make one special instance, you'll make another. And at that point, it's open season for spammers.
Given a choice between the two (all or none), which would you prefer?
Most of the people i know in the "community" despise SPAM.
I'm sure that most of the people you know also think girls are icky.
Overly juvenile.
The Internet is clogged with spam.
Yes, and unlike RedHat's mailing, Spam is indiscriminate. You get it because you have an email address and for no other reason. That's why it's annoying. I've never wanted to sell crap in my spare time, see hot shaved teens (well, not on a computer), and I've heard the Good News(tm) about Jesus(r) more times than I can remember.
By your definition, the junk I get offering me cheap RS/6000 hardware is perfectly justified because I've made a couple of posts to comp.unix.aix. I don't care how carefully they've chosen the addresses (obviously not carefully enough, judging by people claiming that they aren't eligable), the people mailed were not asked if they wanted to be mailed beforehand. This was not opt-in - it was an unsolicited mailing to a large group of people based on the tenuous assumption that they're all in some way linked to Linux development. Their motives may have been good, but it's still spam.
I use all spamblock methods I can, and STILL get tons of the crap.
Yeah, me too. And y'know what? When some spam slips through, I hit the DEL key and get on with my life. But I guess a "life" is something I have that you don't. Well, that and pubic hair.
Due to the way university education is funded here in the UK, each individual item of spam costs the university, the government and as an end result the taxpayers. For an individual mail, this may not be much. But it adds up to real money, money that could be better spent elsewhere. And once I've finished my education, I'll be one of the people paying for it.
Oddly enough, the prospect doesn't thrill me.
In short, I think it reflects poorly on RedHat.
Fine... and your smug pettiness reflects well on Debian? Unfortunately, smug pettiness seems de rigeur for people with debian.org addresses.
Oops. Better not go outside - there's a non-zero risk that you'll be hit by a bus. Mind you, there's a non-zero risk that the roof will fall on you if you stay inside.
Nothing is perfectly safe. However, the chances of this creating a black hole that will wipe out the planet are significantly less than that of a nuclear holocaust at midnight on December the 31st. Or of a race of war-like aliens suddenly materialising and enslaving the entire human race next week, for that matter...
He's referring to AmigaOS versions 1-3, which all lacked such nicities as memory protection. The new systems aren't supposed to have anything to do with the code base of the old ones, and basing it on the Linux kernel does pretty much guarantee that memory protection will be there.
Although the old AmigaOS may have been a toy, it was a nice toy. Let's see if they can keep the niceness while losing the toy aspect...
(2) Holger Kruse took the BSD stack (undoubtedly from one of the above) and made it into a closed-source product for Amiga. (free of charge, but closed source none the less). And now he is complaining about Linux's TCP/IP which is under the GPL...
Not free of charge, unless the license has changed recently. There's a time limit on connections unless you pay to register.
Despite this, it is a very polished piece of software. I played with various versions of it before buying a different stack, and it was certainly one of the easiest setup jobs I've ever had. It's a pity about the "interesting features", really.
I can't see how they'd be able to fulfil some of their stated aims without modifying the kernel, which should mean modifications being released. Deciding to use the Linux kernel for this sort of project does show some sort of commitment - if they were going to be obsessive about keeping stuff closed, they'd probably have chosen something different.
Having said that, I'd be surprised if a great deal of the userspace stuff is open-source - to begin with, at least. Most OS companies seem to have a broadly similar mindset in this regard.
I'd interpret that as meaning adding a GUI to the OE, rather than to the kernel itself. If my memory serves me correctly, the traditional Amiga GUI was in ROM but not in the kernel.
www.*.demon.co.uk are all hosted by Demon Internet, a fairly large UK ISP. Are you suggesting that because Demon runs FreeBSD on their webserver, all their customers run it as well?
I don't know.....just took a look at some of the Amiga newsgroups and they are NOT a bunch of happy campers. Terms like "betrayal" are being bandied about.
And since when has anything happened in the Amiga market without terms like "betrayal" being bandied about?
What's kept the Amiga alive for the past 7 years has been the tireless efforts of many dedicated people. The antics of the "Amiga rulez, PCs suck!" crowd counteract that to a large degree. It's depressing that a single statement that can be construed in any way to be anti-Amiga will still tend to attract a wave of hate mail. It's that sort of behaviour that means I'm not using one at the moment...
This would be the Amiga OS 5 that isn't out yet, right? It's this sort of statement that drove a large number of people (including myself) away from the Amiga to a large degree - I don't know about anywhere else, but "Amiga user" is pretty synonymous with "Whining childish hatemonger" for a lot of people in the UK. While other platforms have advocates, they never seem quite so... vocal.
Pity, really - there are several very sane people still involved with the Amiga, they just tend to get overwhelmed by the idiots. Still, I'm certainly interested in what AI come up with - at some point in the future it's likely to be a choice between that and an Alpha box running Linux...
Even Linux suffers from the issue of spec though. Have you run dselect on a 486/33 recently, ugh.
I've used dselect on a 386/16 recently. Slow, but usable.
Just.
Is this consistent with common carrier status?
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ISP Sues Spammer
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This is an important point - spam has nothing to do with content. Whether it's peddling child pornography or requesting charitable donations, it's still not the sender paying the vast majority of the cost that occurs without giving anyone else a say in the matter. And this is why people should object.
The vast majority of people use the terms "weight" and "mass" interchangeably. Despite this, their technical meaning is still recognised and everyone that needs to know the difference between the two does.
In much the same way, does it really matter if the popular definition of hacker is something other than what we take it to mean? The people that it matters to know the difference. It may well grate to hear the term being abused, but I also get irrationally annoyed with TV car safety adverts talking about the "force of an elephant". We're not going to be able to change the popular meaning, so why worry about it?
I've just installed Debian 2.1 on a PS/2 386/16 with 4 megs of RAM - there's a low memory installation floppy that sets up swap, copies the full installation floppy to hard drive and then lets you boot that. Not awfully elegant, but it works (and gives the impression that it'll work on 2 meg systems - I don't plan on testing this in the near future)
The only problem I had was that I had to extract the image from the boot disk, uncompress it, create the device notes for the ESDI drive, recompress it, copy it back to floppy and then boot. No other hitches - the module for the network card went in happily, and the rest of the installation went over NFS. It does take 10 minutes to boot and I haven't dared try compiling anything yet, but it's now a perfectly usable email terminal....
Slashdot Mirror
So what, in 1 Billion years, my spit will be me?
Perhaps. Spit into a cup of water. Leave it for a while. It'll probably get mouldy. Hell, there might be several different kinds of mould. They might compete. If there's a source of food, they'll continue to grow. (If there isn't, you may need to throw a few bits and pieces into the cup every so often. Life doesn't survive without nutrition of some sort or another.) If there's competeition, natural selection will come into play. You'll possibly end up with a slightly better mould than you started with - one that can compete for food more effectively. Keep this up for a billion years. Varying conditions every so often will help keep things moving along nicely. It's difficult to say what you'd end up with after a billion years - but it'd almost certainly not be what you started with.
Also, theories while have no proof, also do not encounter proof AGAINST it like evolution does.
Of course they do. It leads to refinement of the theory to better explain what's going on. It's called scientific progress.
Darwin had no proof
Of course he didn't. You don't tend to find proof of theories lying around. You find evidence. You form a hypothesis from this evidence. You attempt to disprove the hypothesis. If you do, then you try to figure out a better hypothesis. If you don't, then you accept the hypothesis as a theory. Evolution is a pretty good explanation for the evidence we have. It doesn't explain everything - neither did Newtonian physics. Better theories that explain more evidence will come along, but I'd tend to think that they'll be based on current theories of evolution in the same way that Einsteinian physics builds on Newtonian.
And as for "You can't disprove God, so he might exist"? You're right. God can't be disproven. However, there is a large body of evidence that suggests creationism isn't correct. And given the choice between two world views (the scientific one, or "things happen because of certain basic patterns of behaviour" and the religious one, or "things happen because God makes them happen") I'll pick the one that explains the way I perceive the universe more accurately. You, of course, are free to do the same.
The main problem here is that you're confusing the theory of evolution with one of its logical applications. Evolution itself says nothing about whether or not we evolved from apes. The suggestion that we did is one that comes from the theory. It's a logical extension. But even if we didn't evolve from lower life forms, that doesn't invalidate evolution.
Even the foremost scientists in evolution are now pointing to a meteor that came down to Earth and brought life with it. Why? because they concluded the Earth is too small to possibly have enough reactions to create a protein molecule in a billion-billion years.
The suggestion that life here was triggered by an extra-terrestrial source of protein/DNA isn't a new one. It's a fairly obvious hypothesis that would be somewhat hard to disprove, and it does make rather a lot of questions easier to answer. But the simple problem here is that we still don't know precisely what happened on this planet for several billion years of its existence. Extra-terrestrial DNA is one possibility. Spontaneous generation is another. Whatever it was that kick-started life on Earth is fairly irrelevant when it comes to evolution. The general starting point (a planet with self-replicating material on it) is the same.
Secondly, it has been discovered that the first single-celled life came an instant after the waters in the ocean stopped boiling.
Interesting. I haven't heard that one before. I don't suppose you could point me at some references?
Thirdly, in another instant (in geologic time) the Cambrian Explosion brought every body form in existance and no significant changes have been made since.
An instant in geological time is not necessarily an instant in genetic. Evolution can be demonstrated in much less than 1000 years.
Fourthly, the DNA molecule is so complex, had it been transmitted in radio form to SETI, it would qualify as evidence for intelligent life.
A 4 tone sequence several million bases long? I'd hope it would. I'm not sure what your point is here?
To go to the title of my post, many people say that life came into existance for many reasons and are acted upon with different purposes. Evolution leaves its believers either deceived or to trust by faith in its Random Chance. Belief by faith in something that created life and continues to act on it is a religion.
I don't "believe" in evolution. I accept it as a good (currently the best) explanation of observed evidence. If something else comes along that explains the evidence in a better fashion, then I'll probably accept that instead. This is how science works - the formation of hypothoses, the testing of them, the replacement of them with better hypothoses. Science is not a medium of blind faith, which is what distinguishes it from religion.
So you push the problem back to the scale of the universe. The problem still exists.
Nonsense. At the scale of the universe, entropy is increasing. Logic points out quite clearly that the same is true of our solar system, which can be assumed to be a pretty closed system. The increase in order brought about by life is somewhat less than the increase in disorder brought about by everything else that goes on around here.
If they don't release enough documentation to allow drivers to be written by anyone, then I'm not interested. Sure, I can stick it in my Linux box and use it - but what if I decide to change to BSD instead? What if the manufacturer goes bust and doesn't release updated drivers to deal with changes in the kernel? I use Linux not only because I find it more stable and usable than Windows, but also because I like the concept.
In a nutshell, I'm not going to buy a piece of highly propriatory hardware just because it works in Linux as well as Windows. It's still a piece of highly propriatory hardware. .
Still, I've had good experiences with my CPS 1000 (pretty much the biggest I can afford - they're significantly more expensive over here in the UK) which seems a damn sight better built. The sheer ugliness of the thing suggests that it's been designed with function ahead of form and as a result it hasn't failed me once. I'm a member of the Cambridge University assassin's guild so we tend to go through a lot of them - the XP20 is very nice and pleasingly concealable, but sadly nobody in the area seems to sell them. XP110s are just about hideable inside a coat, and with anything above that any thoughts of subtlty go out the window. I've never really liked the 50 series for their size/usefulness ratio, but the 55s were pretty solid.
Still, I may be forced to upgrade when the new range appears - someone I know has modified a 2500 (damn big thing about a metre long) and added 12 litres of extra capacity. The temptation to push him gently backwards when he's carrying it is something I may be forced to give in to at some point in the future...
At an anticipated opening price of US$6 a share, I'd say yes. There is plenty of real poverty in the US, but we are talking about people who can afford computers and ISPs. And Penguin Mints.
With a minimum of 100 shares to be bought and the cost of opening an E*Trade account in the first place? I could get (and have done, in the past) an RS/6000 for less, and I'd probably prefer it. But even so - do you believe that every single recipient of this is going to want to buy shares in Redhat? All of them? Without exception?
If not, people are paying for something they didn't want and had no choice as to whether or not they received. This is spam.
Yup, it does. And on this part of the planet it costs roughly US$20/month flat rate. If it costs more on your part of the planet, take it up with Tony Blair, Lester Bird, Ryutaro Hashimoto, the Masons or whoever runs your grubby little country.
Irrespective of how much your network traffic costs, it's more expensive than it would be without spam. And the difference between spam and other bandwidth consumption is that the first is not requested by those who are paying, while the second is. That's the crux of the matter.
But most people can afford to invest (reasonably heavily) in Redhat's shares, I suppose?
Now, I know what you're going to say (after "duh") you are going to say that you need to indicate your interest in email in some public way before you should get it. Well, at least 75% of the email I get is unsolicited in this way. It is sent directly to me by people who think that I want to get it or should get it for some reason. Sometimes they're wrong, but I don't make a big fuss over it. Take a valium, people.
Unsolicited mail is fine, as long as it's personal. I'm happy to receive mail that is in some way relevant to something I've posted or attached my email address to - I wouldn't have put the email address there otherwise. There's a difference between mailing one person about something they've written (which is unsolicited (possibly) and email, but not bulk) and a company related to something I've written only insomuch as they sell and develop open-source software sending me (and a large number of other people, without overly rigorous checking as to who gets it) an advert trying to sell me stuff. The major difference is that the second is bulk, and thus the second is spam.
If I ask questions on comp.unix.aix, that doesn't mean I want to buy an RS/6000. If I attach my email address to the open-source movement in some way, that doesn't mean I want to buy Redhat shares.
This raises an interesting question. How could they have asked? By sending email? Wouldn't that have been SPAM? I guess that could have telephoned everybody. Now that would be so much less annoying. The truth is, these people attached their email addresses to Open Source projects so that people could contact them with respect to their work. This mailing was in regards to their work, although not directly.
One fairly obvious solution would be to provide a form on their website for interested people who could then list their contributions. Once these had been checked, they'd have been given the information. True, this would mean more difficulty for Redhat. But that's not the issue - the onus is on them to make sure that the only people paying for receiving this information are the ones who are interested.
Y'know, telecommunications tarriffing in Europe is, put simply, TOTALLY FUCKED. It's really a subject for totally different thread, but stop whining. You have a lousy cost structure for data communication. We have an overabundance of uncontrolled firearms. Count your fuckin' blessings.
Hell, I know the telecommunications industry in Europe is far from optimal. That's not the point. Network traffic costs money no matter where you are on the planet. Spam increases network traffic. Spam costs money. Universities have to pay for their network traffic, and so spam costs them money. In the UK, universities are paid for by taxes. Every person in the UK who pays taxes pays for spam.
and pass on benifits to the developer community is being held responsible from spam. Cmon guys dont be so paranoid. There is a
human side to Redhat.
A few months ago, Oxfam (a well known British charity generally held in fairly high regard) was planning on sending unsolicited mail asking for donations. They were trying to do good. The fact that it would cost the recipients far more than it would cost them to send the mail in the first place was apparantly ignored by them, but eventually public reaction forced them to change their mind.
Should this have been acceptable?
A line needs to be drawn somewhere regarding spam. There are two places this can be done - one allowing all unsolicited bulk email, and one allowing none. Making "special cases", and letting people away with it due to "good intentions" is unworkable. If you make one special instance, you'll make another. And at that point, it's open season for spammers.
Given a choice between the two (all or none), which would you prefer?
I'm sure that most of the people you know also think girls are icky.
Overly juvenile.
The Internet is clogged with spam.
Yes, and unlike RedHat's mailing, Spam is indiscriminate. You get it because you have an email address and for no other reason. That's why it's annoying. I've never wanted to sell crap in my spare time, see hot shaved teens (well, not on a computer), and I've heard the Good News(tm) about Jesus(r) more times than I can remember.
By your definition, the junk I get offering me cheap RS/6000 hardware is perfectly justified because I've made a couple of posts to comp.unix.aix. I don't care how carefully they've chosen the addresses (obviously not carefully enough, judging by people claiming that they aren't eligable), the people mailed were not asked if they wanted to be mailed beforehand. This was not opt-in - it was an unsolicited mailing to a large group of people based on the tenuous assumption that they're all in some way linked to Linux development. Their motives may have been good, but it's still spam.
I use all spamblock methods I can, and STILL get tons of the crap.
Yeah, me too. And y'know what? When some spam slips through, I hit the DEL key and get on with my life. But I guess a "life" is something I have that you don't. Well, that and pubic hair.
Due to the way university education is funded here in the UK, each individual item of spam costs the university, the government and as an end result the taxpayers. For an individual mail, this may not be much. But it adds up to real money, money that could be better spent elsewhere. And once I've finished my education, I'll be one of the people paying for it.
Oddly enough, the prospect doesn't thrill me.
In short, I think it reflects poorly on RedHat.
Fine... and your smug pettiness reflects well on Debian? Unfortunately, smug pettiness seems de rigeur for people with debian.org addresses.
Keep picking nits. The grownups have work to do.
Gagh. (Dies)
Oops. Better not go outside - there's a non-zero risk that you'll be hit by a bus. Mind you, there's a non-zero risk that the roof will fall on you if you stay inside.
Nothing is perfectly safe. However, the chances of this creating a black hole that will wipe out the planet are significantly less than that of a nuclear holocaust at midnight on December the 31st. Or of a race of war-like aliens suddenly materialising and enslaving the entire human race next week, for that matter...
He's referring to AmigaOS versions 1-3, which all lacked such nicities as memory protection. The new systems aren't supposed to have anything to do with the code base of the old ones, and basing it on the Linux kernel does pretty much guarantee that memory protection will be there.
Although the old AmigaOS may have been a toy, it was a nice toy. Let's see if they can keep the niceness while losing the toy aspect...
Not free of charge, unless the license has changed recently. There's a time limit on connections unless you pay to register.
Despite this, it is a very polished piece of software. I played with various versions of it before buying a different stack, and it was certainly one of the easiest setup jobs I've ever had. It's a pity about the "interesting features", really.
I can't see how they'd be able to fulfil some of their stated aims without modifying the kernel, which should mean modifications being released. Deciding to use the Linux kernel for this sort of project does show some sort of commitment - if they were going to be obsessive about keeping stuff closed, they'd probably have chosen something different.
Having said that, I'd be surprised if a great deal of the userspace stuff is open-source - to begin with, at least. Most OS companies seem to have a broadly similar mindset in this regard.
I'd interpret that as meaning adding a GUI to the OE, rather than to the kernel itself. If my memory serves me correctly, the traditional Amiga GUI was in ROM but not in the kernel.
www.*.demon.co.uk are all hosted by Demon Internet, a fairly large UK ISP. Are you suggesting that because Demon runs FreeBSD on their webserver, all their customers run it as well?
And since when has anything happened in the Amiga market without terms like "betrayal" being bandied about?
What's kept the Amiga alive for the past 7 years has been the tireless efforts of many dedicated people. The antics of the "Amiga rulez, PCs suck!" crowd counteract that to a large degree. It's depressing that a single statement that can be construed in any way to be anti-Amiga will still tend to attract a wave of hate mail. It's that sort of behaviour that means I'm not using one at the moment...
This would be the Amiga OS 5 that isn't out yet, right? It's this sort of statement that drove a large number of people (including myself) away from the Amiga to a large degree - I don't know about anywhere else, but "Amiga user" is pretty synonymous with "Whining childish hatemonger" for a lot of people in the UK. While other platforms have advocates, they never seem quite so... vocal.
Pity, really - there are several very sane people still involved with the Amiga, they just tend to get overwhelmed by the idiots. Still, I'm certainly interested in what AI come up with - at some point in the future it's likely to be a choice between that and an Alpha box running Linux...
I've used dselect on a 386/16 recently. Slow, but usable.
Just.
This is an important point - spam has nothing to do with content. Whether it's peddling child pornography or requesting charitable donations, it's still not the sender paying the vast majority of the cost that occurs without giving anyone else a say in the matter. And this is why people should object.
The vast majority of people use the terms "weight" and "mass" interchangeably. Despite this, their technical meaning is still recognised and everyone that needs to know the difference between the two does.
In much the same way, does it really matter if the popular definition of hacker is something other than what we take it to mean? The people that it matters to know the difference. It may well grate to hear the term being abused, but I also get irrationally annoyed with TV car safety adverts talking about the "force of an elephant". We're not going to be able to change the popular meaning, so why worry about it?
I've just installed Debian 2.1 on a PS/2 386/16 with 4 megs of RAM - there's a low memory installation floppy that sets up swap, copies the full installation floppy to hard drive and then lets you boot that. Not awfully elegant, but it works (and gives the impression that it'll work on 2 meg systems - I don't plan on testing this in the near future)
The only problem I had was that I had to extract the image from the boot disk, uncompress it, create the device notes for the ESDI drive, recompress it, copy it back to floppy and then boot. No other hitches - the module for the network card went in happily, and the rest of the installation went over NFS. It does take 10 minutes to boot and I haven't dared try compiling anything yet, but it's now a perfectly usable email terminal....