SystemImager
on
Ghost for Unix
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
We have about 50 Debian boxes, all installed with
Systemimager.
Basically, it uses EtherBoot to
load a kernel/initrd over the network, then uses
rsync to do most of the heavy lifting.
We had to make a few local customizations, but it
has worked quite well for us.
Scientists the world over have to use windows for presentations because of this limitation.
That's really a bit of an overstatement...I just keep around an XF86Config file that's all set up for the XGA resolution, copy it into place, and restart the X server. After the presentation, I switch back. Yes, it's definitely a small hassle to set it up the first time, but it's not really a problem thereafter.
Not when it's executing in memory. I've yet to see RAM with clusters.
Well, they're typically called "pages" in that
context: the minimal unit of virtual-to-physical
address mapping. On x86 Linux, the page size
is 4096 bytes.
Well, Mr. al-Muhajir is right now receiving a hearing in a New York courtroom [...]
Unless you know something that I don't (my information comes from the
documents at findlaw.com), the administration's primary position at this hearing is that that they don't have to provide any evidence, and that the court should give complete deference to the President's judgment.
"I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk and (Al Muhajir's) coming in here obviously to plan further deeds."
It's pretty clear (read the government's court filings) that this case is intended to
establish a precedent that the executive branch can-based only on its word and with no judicial review-confine an individual in a military prison indefinitely without trial.
If you believe in basic human rights, that concept really ought to scare you.
On the other hand, I will agree that this has nothing to do with the USA Patriot act.:-)
1. Well, you can charge people less for running at lower resolutions like 640x480. See? It even sounds better than saying 'our higher res clientele will have to pay more'
Actually, you should charge more for running
at lower resolution so that the fonts aren't so
gosh-darn small.:-)
Southwest sometimes offers lower fares on the Web
site than you can get on the phone, and they
always give double frequent flyer credit for
booking online. So, you are missing out on something if you use their phone reservation service instead.
With that said, I just tried using southwest.com in
lynx. I was able to get through the first few pages of booking a reservation with no problem (picking cities and dates, choosing a fare; I stopped at the point where it asked for a credit card). Admittedly, I have a good bit of experience with where things are on their site, but it's not totally unusable with a text-mode browser. I can think of lots of companies with sites that are even less accessible...I wonder why this individual chose to sue Southwest first.
(there's other stuff, such as Mu-Metal, which is formulated with the specific goal of blocking EMI, and does work quite well. But it's expensive, and hard to find.)
I did a little experiment today; I downloaded all the source code for Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org], and moved all the GNU code into a directory. The uncompressed GNU code takes up 341648 bytes. The uncompressed Linux code (counting the kernel, the manpages, and modutils) takes up 155872 bytes.
I would guess that the system would be weighted such that someone who flies alot, paid with a well used credit card or corporate billing account, has an extensive credit history (implies they've been "in existence" for a while) [...]
will get "approved" [...]
Of course, the 9/11 hijackers would have been
given a free pass if these were the criteria,
since they had flown a lot. A friend who
works for US Airways told me that one of them
had a Dividend Miles Preferred card...
Re:New meaning to "Red" in Red Hat
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I think I may try Sarge soon.
Be careful: rumor has it that Debian will start
migrating to gcc 3.2 soon, so we're probably about to enter one of those periods where "unstable"
really means it...
The other side of the coin is that local phone calls between landline phones are free most places in the U.S. (Where I live now, there's a 10 cent per call charge, but no per minute charge.) That's how the crazy system came about: there is no infrastructure to bill the person making a call to a cell phone number in the local area.
Since Sigma Designs is a U.S. company, they should be subject to criminal prosecution under the No Electronic Theft (NET) act. The summary (copied from the linked page) is
The reproduction or distribution of 10 or more copies of 1 or more copyrighted works which have a total retail value of $2,500 or more constitutes a felony, with a maximum sentence of three years imprisonment and a fine of $250,000. The reproduction or distribution of 1 or more copies of 1 or more copyrighted works which have a total retail value of more than $1,000 constitutes a misdemeanor, with a one-year maximum sentence and a fine of up to $100,000.
The XVID developers should file a complaint with the U.S. FBI.
Definitely just politics--our measurement is clearly still limited by statistical rather than systematic errors. In the 2000 data that was just published, the statistical uncertainty was 0.7 ppm compared to about 0.4 ppm of systematics. That 0.4 ppm will almost certainly be reduced even further in the analysis of the 2001 data set, and presumably in any future data taking.
Additional running time for our experiment was endorsed last year by the BNL program advisory committee. The budget cut was at the Presidential level, and it affects all DOE-funded high-energy physics at the Brookhaven AGS. This includes not just our experiment but also one of the high-profile rare kaon decay search experiments.
Meanwhile, the experimenters have a more immediate worry: the Bush administration has decided to end their financing after this year.
The situation is a little more complicated that that. The President's budget did cut all funding through the Dept. of Energy for high-energy physics running at the Brookhaven AGS. This affects at least one other current experiment besides ours.
The House did not add any of this funding back into their version of the budget. There are credible rumours that the Senate will add $50 million to the Dept. of Energy Office of Science budget in their version, which could conceivably be directed to Brookhaven. So, there's still a reasonable hope for additional data-taking this fiscal year.
So why did they release it? I mean, the work isn't finished, so what gives?
What happened yesterday is that our collaboration announced our experimental result based on the data that we took in the winter of 2000. We have spent about two years staring at that data, and we are confident that we have extracted the right number from it. Consequently, we announced it yesterday and we are preparing a paper to submit to a journal.
However, there is another side to the story. Other groups do theoretical calculations of what the standard model predicts we should measure in the absence of any "new physics." The confusion at the moment is on their side.
I cannot find numbers on their home page but it appears from their plot that their measurement is around 2 standard deviations.
We compared the "world average" result against three recent published standard model evaluations by different authors. The discrepancies between our experimental result and these calculations range from 1.6 to 2.6 standard deviations.
We should have a preprint available very soon now, by the way; we finished debating the last few words at a teleconference a few hours ago.
I'm not a software engineer (although my undergraduate degree was in computer science); I'm a graduate student in nuclear physics. I work in a collaboration with about 50 active members. More than half of the younger people (graduate students and postdoctoral fellows) in the collaboration are non-US citizens. Of this group, about half are graduate students on student visas, and half are postdoctoral fellows on J-1 and H-1B visas. They are from lots of places, from western Europe to China and Russia. The J-1 visa is for a maximum of two years, which often isn't enough time to come up to speed and make a significant contribution. Without my foreign colleagues, we simply would not be able to do our experiment--there aren't nearly enough US citizens who are talented at their level. I know that the situation is similar for other nuclear and particle physics experiments.
Also, I look forward to working in Europe at some point in the next few years. If we make it difficult for their nationals to work here, then it will become more difficult for Americans to work abroad.
You can't prove to a judge that he's sleazy. You can prove he's engaged in certain acts that some people would consider sleazy, but the term is derogatory per se.
...which means that you don't have to prove it to a judge. At least
in the USA, a statement of pure opinion cannot constitute libel or slander. It has to be a false statement of "fact.
Of course you can't rotate EPS in MS-Office - you can't even import them.
Hmm? I don't use their stuff anymore (and haven't
for several years), but I certainly used to be able to import EPS figures into Word and PowerPoint.
I still see my research advisor doing it all the time. Was I using some extra plug-in? I don't know...
As far as sharing with your friends, share OpenOffice, do you really need the extras? Corps do, you and your friends probably don't. I think this is going to work just fine.
I agree with you. My response was directed to
fmaxwell's exhortations that everyone
should buy StarOffice rather than using
OpenOffice.
And how much need is there to modify a browser or office suite? Get real.
Well, I started working on adding the ability to
rotate EPS figures to OpenOffice. You can't do it
in MS Office (at least in Office 97, which is
the last one I've used). You can't do it in
StarOffice 5.2. It would have been very useful
for me on several occasions; I ended up having
to convert my figures to bitmaps to rotate them,
and they didn't look very good.
However, by the next build, someone else with
the same itch had already contributed this
feature, so I can't claim credit for it.
Nevertheless, that's why I personally have wanted
to modify an office suite.
And if you don't care about Microsoft having any competition in office suite software, then by all means download OpenOffice in lieu of buying StarOffice.
OpenOffice is guaranteed to be available in ten
years. StarOffice will disappear as soon as
Sun loses interest.
Slashdot Mirror
We have about 50 Debian boxes, all installed with Systemimager. Basically, it uses EtherBoot to load a kernel/initrd over the network, then uses rsync to do most of the heavy lifting. We had to make a few local customizations, but it has worked quite well for us.
That's really a bit of an overstatement...I just keep around an XF86Config file that's all set up for the XGA resolution, copy it into place, and restart the X server. After the presentation, I switch back. Yes, it's definitely a small hassle to set it up the first time, but it's not really a problem thereafter.
Well, they're typically called "pages" in that context: the minimal unit of virtual-to-physical address mapping. On x86 Linux, the page size is 4096 bytes.
Unless you know something that I don't (my information comes from the documents at findlaw.com), the administration's primary position at this hearing is that that they don't have to provide any evidence, and that the court should give complete deference to the President's judgment.
Please take note of this USA Today article in which Paul Wolfowitz is quoted as saying
"I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk and (Al Muhajir's) coming in here obviously to plan further deeds."
It's pretty clear (read the government's court filings) that this case is intended to establish a precedent that the executive branch can-based only on its word and with no judicial review-confine an individual in a military prison indefinitely without trial.
If you believe in basic human rights, that concept really ought to scare you.
On the other hand, I will agree that this has nothing to do with the USA Patriot act. :-)
Actually, you should charge more for running at lower resolution so that the fonts aren't so gosh-darn small. :-)
[toptail.gif] [1x1.gif] [reservations_mm0.gif] [1x1.gif]
[schedules_mm0.gif] [1x1.gif] [fares_mm0.gif] [1x1.gif]
[click_n_save_mm0.gif] [1x1.gif] [travel_center_mm0.gif] [1x1.gif]
[rapid_rewards_mm0.gif] [1x1.gif] [endmenu.gif]
With that said, I just tried using southwest.com in lynx. I was able to get through the first few pages of booking a reservation with no problem (picking cities and dates, choosing a fare; I stopped at the point where it asked for a credit card). Admittedly, I have a good bit of experience with where things are on their site, but it's not totally unusable with a text-mode browser. I can think of lots of companies with sites that are even less accessible...I wonder why this individual chose to sue Southwest first.
Not so hard to find...we get ours from The Magnetic Shield Corporation.
I think you mean "megabytes" instead of "bytes."
Of course, the 9/11 hijackers would have been given a free pass if these were the criteria, since they had flown a lot. A friend who works for US Airways told me that one of them had a Dividend Miles Preferred card...
Be careful: rumor has it that Debian will start migrating to gcc 3.2 soon, so we're probably about to enter one of those periods where "unstable" really means it...
The other side of the coin is that local phone calls between landline phones are free most places in the U.S. (Where I live now, there's a 10 cent per call charge, but no per minute charge.) That's how the crazy system came about: there is no infrastructure to bill the person making a call to a cell phone number in the local area.
The reproduction or distribution of 10 or more copies of 1 or more copyrighted works which have a total retail value of $2,500 or more constitutes a felony, with a maximum sentence of three years imprisonment and a fine of $250,000. The reproduction or distribution of 1 or more copies of 1 or more copyrighted works which have a total retail value of more than $1,000 constitutes a misdemeanor, with a one-year maximum sentence and a fine of up to $100,000.
The XVID developers should file a complaint with the U.S. FBI.
I agree that the New York Times article does not portray the situation accurately. I actually think that USA Today did a better job: their article.
Additional running time for our experiment was endorsed last year by the BNL program advisory committee. The budget cut was at the Presidential level, and it affects all DOE-funded high-energy physics at the Brookhaven AGS. This includes not just our experiment but also one of the high-profile rare kaon decay search experiments.
The situation is a little more complicated that that. The President's budget did cut all funding through the Dept. of Energy for high-energy physics running at the Brookhaven AGS. This affects at least one other current experiment besides ours.
The House did not add any of this funding back into their version of the budget. There are credible rumours that the Senate will add $50 million to the Dept. of Energy Office of Science budget in their version, which could conceivably be directed to Brookhaven. So, there's still a reasonable hope for additional data-taking this fiscal year.
What happened yesterday is that our collaboration announced our experimental result based on the data that we took in the winter of 2000. We have spent about two years staring at that data, and we are confident that we have extracted the right number from it. Consequently, we announced it yesterday and we are preparing a paper to submit to a journal.
However, there is another side to the story. Other groups do theoretical calculations of what the standard model predicts we should measure in the absence of any "new physics." The confusion at the moment is on their side.
Thanks! (I'm a grad student on this experiment.)
I cannot find numbers on their home page but it appears from their plot that their measurement is around 2 standard deviations.
We compared the "world average" result against three recent published standard model evaluations by different authors. The discrepancies between our experimental result and these calculations range from 1.6 to 2.6 standard deviations.
We should have a preprint available very soon now, by the way; we finished debating the last few words at a teleconference a few hours ago.
Also, I look forward to working in Europe at some point in the next few years. If we make it difficult for their nationals to work here, then it will become more difficult for Americans to work abroad.
[IANAL...]
Hmm, I bet slashdot just got served with a FISA warrant for their log files...
Hmm? I don't use their stuff anymore (and haven't for several years), but I certainly used to be able to import EPS figures into Word and PowerPoint. I still see my research advisor doing it all the time. Was I using some extra plug-in? I don't know...
I agree with you. My response was directed to fmaxwell's exhortations that everyone should buy StarOffice rather than using OpenOffice.
Thanks!
Well, I started working on adding the ability to rotate EPS figures to OpenOffice. You can't do it in MS Office (at least in Office 97, which is the last one I've used). You can't do it in StarOffice 5.2. It would have been very useful for me on several occasions; I ended up having to convert my figures to bitmaps to rotate them, and they didn't look very good. However, by the next build, someone else with the same itch had already contributed this feature, so I can't claim credit for it. Nevertheless, that's why I personally have wanted to modify an office suite.
And if you don't care about Microsoft having any competition in office suite software, then by all means download OpenOffice in lieu of buying StarOffice.
OpenOffice is guaranteed to be available in ten years. StarOffice will disappear as soon as Sun loses interest.