Actually, in the embedded computing space, there may well be no GNU code on the box. Both of my most recent PDAs have used Busybox utilities in place of the huge (and therefore featureful, but not ideal for a machine with small amounts of permanent storage) GNU utilities.
And you know what? A Linux distribution based on Busybox that follows the Linux filesystem standards feels a lot like any other Linux distribution (GNU-based or not). And it doesn't feel very much like a Solaris distribution when/usr/local/gnu is at the front of my PATH. And I've never played with GNU/Hurd, but I bet it doesn't feel much like GNU/Hurd, unless GNU/Hurd has deliberately adopted standards from the Linux community. All of that is part of why I call Linux distros Linux distros. It feels more accurate and more descriptive to me.
People routinely refer to Slackware Linux as Slackware, and to Debian [GNU/]Linux as Debian. If Richard and the FSF want to increase the public mindshare of the term GNU, one good way to do it would be either to encourage Debian to rename their project "GNU Linux" ("GNU" being the name of the distribution), or to start their own Linux-based distribution which they refer to from the start as "GNU Linux". And people would routinely refer to it as GNU, and maybe make the connection that the same people who put it together produced the GNU utilities that show up in other Linux-based distros. That would be a lot more effective than arguing with people about terminology. After all, it's been something like thirty years that people have been encouraging gender-neutral language, a change in terminology that benefits half the population of the planet rather than a small fraction of geeks, and changes in that area are still far from complete. If the FSF wants widespread mindshare for the phrase "GNU", and widespread understanding of what it represents, and if they want it while POSIX-like operating systems and semiconductor-based computing are still relevant, they need marketing methods that work faster than that.
There's an awful lot of ice in the world that isn't floating, though. It's supported by solid land. Like, f'rinstance, a huge chunk of the antarctic ice cap. And lots of landlocked ice in Canada and Russia. And lots of mountain tops. If that ice melts, it will flow down to the sea and raise the sea level.
I'm not a climatologist, but I'm guessing that's why the sea level has lowered during previous ice ages and risen during previous thaws. I don't have a reference for that fact, but I've seen it written in lots of different books and magazine, journal, and newspaper articles without any hint of controversy surrounding it.
I have no idea of the magnitude of the effect. I thought I had a quote from an article I read a few years ago giving the rise in the sea level at the end of the last major ice age, but I can't find it now. I remember being surprised at how large it was, though, which makes me think it must have been on the order of hundreds of feet rather than on the order of tens of feet. (I do remember it was given in feet, which means it must have been in the popular press.:-)
Also, somebody might download two or three songs from an artist to see if they like them, and then go out and buy two or three albums. (Of course, you might also discover you don't like the artist's music, and then not buy CDs you otherwise would have. But that's at most one lost CD sale, whereas the other case could be several additional CD purchases and might create a lifelong fan.)
I don't actually download music illegally (although I do subscribe to emusic.com, which lets me download it legally), but if I were willing to browse and download illegal copies of music, if I were a part of the filesharing culture, I'm sure I would actually buy more CDs than I do now, just because I'd be exposed to more music and artists that I liked.
To be fair to Congress, that does mean going home to one's constituents. Not all constituents can hop on a plane to Washington as easily as an RIAA lobbyist.:-)
Of course, the U.S. Constitution also prohibits the president and vice president from being from the same state. The Constitution seems to be less and less relevant these days (one of the few areas in which I imagine the average gun nut would agree with me:-).
Wouldn't it be great if some opensource calendaring program decided to call themselves iCal?
Actually, there is (albeit spelt ical), and it predates both the iCal standard and Apple's iCal. It was originally written by Sanjay Ghemawat at Sun (I think, might be wrong about where he was when he started it) as a standalone app, but then he decided to rewrite the UI in [incr Tcl], an object-oriented version of Tcl/Tk. He stopped maintaining it a few years ago, and I think a couple other groups of people had picked up maintenance again at various times, but I'm not sure if there's anybody actively working on it at this point. (If anybody out there knows of a version that builds with the current versions of Tcl and Tk, I'd love to hear about it.)
Well, I believe the folks at Xiph sell one, and there's also a free one (a fork of the Xiph libraries) for ARM processors, so you can play Vorbis files on your Zaurus or iPAQ under Linux. The iPAQ version is at http://ipaq.vmlinuz.org/ogg/. (I use it all the time.) So yes, there are now two integerized decoders (after a long delay during which I could only play Oggs on my desktop).
The app(s) could be smart enough to clone the contents of the window on another display on request. It wouldn't be the same X connection (not literally the same window) but if it were identical and had all the same state, it would amount to the same thing. Obviously, you really want that integrated at a pretty low level (at the toolkit level or below), so individual apps didn't need to care, but it would be pretty easy to implement for an individual app at a higher level.
And in 5 years I'll still be asking how the hell the ability to play an mpeg clip helps me organize my schedule.
Unfortunately, in 5 years your boss is probably going to be forwarding you an mpeg clip of the salesdroid you were supposed to meet at 3:30 saying s/he won't be there until 4:15. (Except that it might be in a Windows-proprietary format rather than MPEG.)
In addition to the SNOW/non-SNOW issue, there were some horribly inefficient things going on in the code to the "schedule" app (the calendar) - such as division and multiplication being done to extract bit-slices, and repeated calls to localtime() on the same time, rather than caching the result. Ulrich Pfeiffer has fixed versions (including an "xdelta" patch for the 1.1.1S romdisk) at http://www.wait.de/agenda/.
Windows (3.1 and 95, anyway) will overwrite the contents of any Linux partitions unless you use this trick. There may be some fancy way of starting the Windows installer to cause it not to do that, but I wasn't able to find it. I got to a point where the choices were (paraphrased) "Yes, use all my hard drive for Windows" and "No, cancel installing Windows". Setting the partition types to DOS R/O caused Windows to silently ignore those partitions and not overwrite them.
Actually, when I've had to install Win 3.1 or Win 95 after installing Linux without having it overwrite Linux, I've had success by setting all the partitions to be type "DOS R/O" with Linux fdisk before installing Windows. Then I just have to boot from a Linux floppy or bootable CD and re-run LILO. Linux actually doesn't care what the partition types are, although most Linux install tools do, so you'll need to set them back before you reinstall/upgrade Linux.)
Um, no. On this planet, the ocean environment is at least as varied and full of weirdness as the land and the sky, and probably much more so. The deep sea floor is nothing like the surface. The area around geothermal vents is still more different. There are areas with lots of oxygen in the water and areas with almost none. Temperatures range from well below (surface-pressure freshwater) freezing to well above boiling. Somebody who actually knew something about this could go on way longer than I can; I've just seen my partners' scuba-diving videos.:-)
Look at fish. They're all pretty much the same.
Again, no. They strike me as a lot more varied than mammals (if perhaps not more varied than all land animals - but then, fish are not all sea life, either).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, in the embedded computing space, there may well be no GNU code on the box. Both of my most recent PDAs have used Busybox utilities in place of the huge (and therefore featureful, but not ideal for a machine with small amounts of permanent storage) GNU utilities.
/usr/local/gnu is at the front of my PATH. And I've never played with GNU/Hurd, but I bet it doesn't feel much like GNU/Hurd, unless GNU/Hurd has deliberately adopted standards from the Linux community. All of that is part of why I call Linux distros Linux distros. It feels more accurate and more descriptive to me.
A previous version of the Linux distro for the iPAQ used the full GNU utilities, but they switched to Busybox a while back for space reasons.
And you know what? A Linux distribution based on Busybox that follows the Linux filesystem standards feels a lot like any other Linux distribution (GNU-based or not). And it doesn't feel very much like a Solaris distribution when
People routinely refer to Slackware Linux as Slackware, and to Debian [GNU/]Linux as Debian. If Richard and the FSF want to increase the public mindshare of the term GNU, one good way to do it would be either to encourage Debian to rename their project "GNU Linux" ("GNU" being the name of the distribution), or to start their own Linux-based distribution which they refer to from the start as "GNU Linux". And people would routinely refer to it as GNU, and maybe make the connection that the same people who put it together produced the GNU utilities that show up in other Linux-based distros. That would be a lot more effective than arguing with people about terminology. After all, it's been something like thirty years that people have been encouraging gender-neutral language, a change in terminology that benefits half the population of the planet rather than a small fraction of geeks, and changes in that area are still far from complete. If the FSF wants widespread mindshare for the phrase "GNU", and widespread understanding of what it represents, and if they want it while POSIX-like operating systems and semiconductor-based computing are still relevant, they need marketing methods that work faster than that.
There's an awful lot of ice in the world that isn't floating, though. It's supported by solid land. Like, f'rinstance, a huge chunk of the antarctic ice cap. And lots of landlocked ice in Canada and Russia. And lots of mountain tops. If that ice melts, it will flow down to the sea and raise the sea level.
I'm not a climatologist, but I'm guessing that's why the sea level has lowered during previous ice ages and risen during previous thaws. I don't have a reference for that fact, but I've seen it written in lots of different books and magazine, journal, and newspaper articles without any hint of controversy surrounding it.
I have no idea of the magnitude of the effect. I thought I had a quote from an article I read a few years ago giving the rise in the sea level at the end of the last major ice age, but I can't find it now. I remember being surprised at how large it was, though, which makes me think it must have been on the order of hundreds of feet rather than on the order of tens of feet. (I do remember it was given in feet, which means it must have been in the popular press. :-)
Also, somebody might download two or three songs from an artist to see if they like them, and then go out and buy two or three albums. (Of course, you might also discover you don't like the artist's music, and then not buy CDs you otherwise would have. But that's at most one lost CD sale, whereas the other case could be several additional CD purchases and might create a lifelong fan.)
I don't actually download music illegally (although I do subscribe to emusic.com, which lets me download it legally), but if I were willing to browse and download illegal copies of music, if I were a part of the filesharing culture, I'm sure I would actually buy more CDs than I do now, just because I'd be exposed to more music and artists that I liked.
To be fair to Congress, that does mean going home to one's constituents. Not all constituents can hop on a plane to Washington as easily as an RIAA lobbyist. :-)
Of course, the U.S. Constitution also prohibits the president and vice president from being from the same state. The Constitution seems to be less and less relevant these days (one of the few areas in which I imagine the average gun nut would agree with me :-).
Actually, there is (albeit spelt ical), and it predates both the iCal standard and Apple's iCal. It was originally written by Sanjay Ghemawat at Sun (I think, might be wrong about where he was when he started it) as a standalone app, but then he decided to rewrite the UI in [incr Tcl], an object-oriented version of Tcl/Tk. He stopped maintaining it a few years ago, and I think a couple other groups of people had picked up maintenance again at various times, but I'm not sure if there's anybody actively working on it at this point. (If anybody out there knows of a version that builds with the current versions of Tcl and Tk, I'd love to hear about it.)
Well, I believe the folks at Xiph sell one, and there's also a free one (a fork of the Xiph libraries) for ARM processors, so you can play Vorbis files on your Zaurus or iPAQ under Linux. The iPAQ version is at http://ipaq.vmlinuz.org/ogg/ . (I use it all the time.) So yes, there are now two integerized decoders (after a long delay during which I could only play Oggs on my desktop).
The app(s) could be smart enough to clone the contents of the window on another display on request. It wouldn't be the same X connection (not literally the same window) but if it were identical and had all the same state, it would amount to the same thing. Obviously, you really want that integrated at a pretty low level (at the toolkit level or below), so individual apps didn't need to care, but it would be pretty easy to implement for an individual app at a higher level.
In addition to the SNOW/non-SNOW issue, there were some horribly inefficient things going on in the code to the "schedule" app (the calendar) - such as division and multiplication being done to extract bit-slices, and repeated calls to localtime() on the same time, rather than caching the result. Ulrich Pfeiffer has fixed versions (including an "xdelta" patch for the 1.1.1S romdisk) at http://www.wait.de/agenda/ .
-j.
Windows (3.1 and 95, anyway) will overwrite the contents of any Linux partitions unless you use this trick. There may be some fancy way of starting the Windows installer to cause it not to do that, but I wasn't able to find it. I got to a point where the choices were (paraphrased) "Yes, use all my hard drive for Windows" and "No, cancel installing Windows". Setting the partition types to DOS R/O caused Windows to silently ignore those partitions and not overwrite them.
Actually, when I've had to install Win 3.1 or Win 95 after installing Linux without having it overwrite Linux, I've had success by setting all the partitions to be type "DOS R/O" with Linux fdisk before installing Windows. Then I just have to boot from a Linux floppy or bootable CD and re-run LILO. Linux actually doesn't care what the partition types are, although most Linux install tools do, so you'll need to set them back before you reinstall/upgrade Linux.)