Forget analyzing code or time spent working or any of those, and use a decent "real-life" parameter. Measure how much coffee the coders drink!
If you want a rough outline, just visually monitor the coders. Whoever *seems* to be drinking the most coffee wins.
Of course if you're into statistics (and which self-respecting geek isn't?) you're going to have to go high-tech. Each coder is issued a magnetic-swipe card that uniquely identifies them-- to the coffee machines! You'll instantly be able to weed the slackers from the true workers, and also help identify those with "problems" early. If you set it up right, you can even determine who works better at what part of the day, and prioritize access to the coffee accordingly.
Hell, this seems like such a good idea that we've got to patent it! Anyone know of any prior art?
As long as there was enough warning by the people at SourceForge, I don't think the loss of their service would be too tragic (well, we *would* miss them, and mourn their demise here on slashdot!).
Most projects would take a bit of time to deal with the transition, but the way I see it, within a week each project would be worked on in a "pre-SF" way. Larger projects have enough people working on them that *someone* is bound to have a box with enough horsepower and bandwidth available to set up a decent cvs server (and possibly mirror their own private SF-type site, as others have suggested). Smaller projects would be fine regardless; they usually are just a bunch of friends or aquaintances workign on something that could just as easily be done on email. And those projects that just aren't being worked on, they'd die with SF. (This is a good thing; one of my pet peeves is thinking I found a program I really needed but didn't have the time to work on myself, only to find out it hasn't been updated in 18 months).
...However aren't all the script and pages of SourceForge part of a tarball on their site? Couldn't someone just download this and recreate another identical (or almost) site?
Yes, of course, but the real fear is that SourceForge *suddenly* shuts down. What would you do if you had a project on it, and when you tried to access it tomorrow all that appeared was a message stating that they're having "difficulties", and would be back on line as soon as they've been bought or something. If you have no way of accessing your current data (and are foolish enough not to back it up regularly!), you'd be screwed.
I'm not trying to sound elitist here, though I am beginning to wonder what exactly the criteria are for having a question posted to Ask Slashdot.
You see, this question is such a basic one, such a FAQ, that it has been answered countless times before. A simple google search using the terms "remote", "X" and "howto" as parameters will pull up more than enough resources, including the ever-so-popular "Remote X HOWTO" on many sites across the internet.
Now, don't think I'm into bashing newbies, only slashdot editors;). We were *all* there once before, so I think a much more appropriate question for this forum would be more along the lines of "what are currently the best on-line resources for a newbie to learn Linux" or something like that. That way, we could get answers much more useful to a larger segment of the "Linux population", myself included.
Unfortunately, I doubt an "open" system where there is a community of developers/users could get very big. Of the gaming population, only a small number are skilled programmers. Of these programmers, even fewer would actually have the time to contribute to a large-ish software product for their own entertainment. I'm sure many things would get started, but I'd be very surprised if a single game got finished to the point where it was actually playable. Compare this to Linux (or any other open-source project that's fairly functional). How many developers and years were involved in getting that far?
Unless recent changes in crypto laws have changed this, you'll need to patch ghostscript to be able to deal with encrypted pdf files. This isn't a problem very often, but I remember gs choking on a pdf file because of this in the past more than once.
It might be enough to change the sounds played on all of these events. Some sounds just are really "abrasive", and get annoying fast. That quickly makes them sound louder than they actually are. Experiment with what works best.
If that still doesn't help, just take your favourite sound editor and modify the sounds so they're at half-volume on disk. Either way, you've got a solution that can be set up in a short period of time for no money at all.
I don't believe for a second that that many mice could wear out in that short of a time span. Could it possibly be that you're confusing "broken" with "dirty"? Mice do pick up a lot of crap from their surroundings, and some *do* die after an unreasonable amount of time, but these sorts of stats make me wonder if the mice really are irreperably boken.
Personally, the only mice I've had die on me are a logictec that came oem on a compaq after 4 years, and a cheap trackball after one year. Both were used heavily in dusty environments where all kinds of crap got spilled on them (college!).
Others have already suggested it, and even though you're looking for a method that will keep the drive intact and usable, I think the best way is to completely annihilate the drive. With drive prices being as low as they are, it'd probably be cheaper and more secure to do this occasionally than it would be to invest in software to do it, and still not be sure that the data *really* is gone.
Implicit in the article through Behlendorf's comments is that Microsoft views open source as a fascist idea and ideal. Now, I'm neither a political scientist nor an economist, but the Oxford English dictionary defines Fascism as:
...any system of extreme right-wing or authoritarian views...
Based on this, "fascist" is a term much more suited to the description of Microsoft. One could possibly argue that open source is somewhat communist (or at least socialilst), but fascist? Get real.
The language is a tool, though. Some are much more appropriate for a given task or job. Consider an analogy of eating. Using a fork to eat is good. Using a chainsaw probably is a bad idea.
*prefix* notation makes much more sense than either postfix or infix. Consider: "multiply two and four" vs. "two multiply four" and "two four multiply". Which sounds more natural?
Granted, 25 megs is a pretty big download (it was a *huge* download not all that long ago), but that's the kernel *source* tree, not the kernel you actually run on your system. If you're downloading, you're obviously compiling. You then have the option of *not* including any of the optional things that don't apply to you. For me, kernel sizes haven't changed significantly since I started with 1.0.??.
Re:They're missing one point
on
Beer In Space
·
· Score: 1
...and if not, there is an alternate channel for releasing excess gas. May not be too popular in a recycled atmosphere, though.
I don't think that's quite true. In general, scientific papers are written by scientists for other scientists. In many cases, theories *are* stated in a way that sounds like they are factual. Often the author actually does believe them, and the scientific community as a whole recognizes them as being just theories unless they're backed up with sufficient references. This really helps the readability of papers too. If you read a paragraph that uses the word "putative" more than three times, you end up with a headache, whether you understood it or not.
The real problem occurs when the media picks up on science. In this case, their audience has no way of telling fact from proposed theories. Even if magazines and others were to include references with their stories, most people wouldn't know what they were or what to do with them. Too many people believe everything they read in the papers or see on TV to be true, indisputable facts.
Who's to blame? Directly, nobody (or possibly everybody!), but it is somewhat irresponsible of the media to present information as facts when we don't know that they necessarily are. Stating that something is only a theory, or that some scientists believe that $X may be true isn't really "news"-like enough, and just won't sell. Ultimately, it all comes down to the marketability of the so-called news story.
Of course, we (as consumers of the news stories) are also at fault. If everybody were just a tiny bit more skeptical and thought critically about what was presented to them by the media and other people, the world would probably be a much saner place.
Hey Wills, you've been posting this to a few threads now. The info on xcmsdb seems to be fairly useful, but do you or anyone else know more about how to use it? A quick google search turned up little more than links to the man pages already on my system.
I'm just wondering-- how well does it work? Will it work with all apps making Xlib calls (i.e. essentially everything at some level of abstraction), or do apps have to be compiled with support? Are there decent utilities out there for setting this up, or do i have to play with the CLI interface to it?
That only changes monitor resolution. If you start with a 1024x768 desktop and zoom in with this, you still have a 1024x768 desktop. It's kind of handy if you want to zoom in on an image or something, but absolutely useless (IMO) if you are trying to do work. This method is little more than a neat hack added to X. For resolution changing to be useful in X, the desktop would need to be automagically resized to match the screen resolution. I don't see this being possible without major changes to the X infrastructure-- or without having to restart X and all apps currently running (a move that's almost windowish). Maybe this is another indication that X is flawed and we should ditch it completely in favour of something new...
Unfortunately most X servers don't do anything with these options. They're there for compatibility with those servers that *do*, but passing a gamma value (single channel or overall) to X usually results in nothing new happening. I haven't had a chance to play with Xfree 4 yet, but I'd be surprised if too much has changed there. It doesn't seem to be on the priority list of too many people.
I sincerely hope that he's not so far out there that he has never heard of the PS2 or DirectX or any of the other things he claims. Unfortunately, if he *has* heard of them, I think he's being just plain arrogant and condescending to get a point across. However, if he hasn't, I feel that's pretty ignorant of him. Either way, I'm not too sure this is the type of person we want as one of our leaders in the Free Software world.
Most of the answers seemed to be written in a style meant for dealing with the press and "dumb public" as a whole, and not for geeks/nerds reading slashdot. From my perspective, most of what he says seems pretty vague and possibly even somewhat condescending. Maybe he didn't even write all of this, but got a secretary to put together and edit answers he quickly dictated or something.
Right; I think that his reply to this was purposely vague. Assuming the conspiracy theorists *are* correct, you'd better believe the powers that be are reading all his answers to questions here, and all of our replys.
If he had come up with an answer that stated that he *would* go against the FBI and anyone else trying to cover up the final report, I doubt they'd even give him much of a chance to put his input into the report-- i.e. "We're sorry, Mr. Perrit, but you're now responsible for checking grammar and spelling of the background section of the report!"
That would also solve problems with the user interface. IMO, many web discussion boards are just plain ugly and put together so poorly that they are almost impossible to use effectively. Also, you'd have the option to set up your own kill-files to limit what posts you see and don't see. Now *that* is something I'd love to be able to do here on/. every other day!
Slashdot Mirror
Forget analyzing code or time spent working or any of those, and use a decent "real-life" parameter. Measure how much coffee the coders drink!
If you want a rough outline, just visually monitor the coders. Whoever *seems* to be drinking the most coffee wins.
Of course if you're into statistics (and which self-respecting geek isn't?) you're going to have to go high-tech. Each coder is issued a magnetic-swipe card that uniquely identifies them-- to the coffee machines! You'll instantly be able to weed the slackers from the true workers, and also help identify those with "problems" early. If you set it up right, you can even determine who works better at what part of the day, and prioritize access to the coffee accordingly.
Hell, this seems like such a good idea that we've got to patent it! Anyone know of any prior art?
As long as there was enough warning by the people at SourceForge, I don't think the loss of their service would be too tragic (well, we *would* miss them, and mourn their demise here on slashdot!).
Most projects would take a bit of time to deal with the transition, but the way I see it, within a week each project would be worked on in a "pre-SF" way. Larger projects have enough people working on them that *someone* is bound to have a box with enough horsepower and bandwidth available to set up a decent cvs server (and possibly mirror their own private SF-type site, as others have suggested). Smaller projects would be fine regardless; they usually are just a bunch of friends or aquaintances workign on something that could just as easily be done on email. And those projects that just aren't being worked on, they'd die with SF. (This is a good thing; one of my pet peeves is thinking I found a program I really needed but didn't have the time to work on myself, only to find out it hasn't been updated in 18 months).
...However aren't all the script and pages of SourceForge part of a tarball on their site? Couldn't someone just download this and recreate another identical (or almost) site?
Yes, of course, but the real fear is that SourceForge *suddenly* shuts down. What would you do if you had a project on it, and when you tried to access it tomorrow all that appeared was a message stating that they're having "difficulties", and would be back on line as soon as they've been bought or something. If you have no way of accessing your current data (and are foolish enough not to back it up regularly!), you'd be screwed.
I'm not trying to sound elitist here, though I am beginning to wonder what exactly the criteria are for having a question posted to Ask Slashdot.
;). We were *all* there once before, so I think a much more appropriate question for this forum would be more along the lines of "what are currently the best on-line resources for a newbie to learn Linux" or something like that. That way, we could get answers much more useful to a larger segment of the "Linux population", myself included.
You see, this question is such a basic one, such a FAQ, that it has been answered countless times before. A simple google search using the terms "remote", "X" and "howto" as parameters will pull up more than enough resources, including the ever-so-popular "Remote X HOWTO" on many sites across the internet.
Now, don't think I'm into bashing newbies, only slashdot editors
If *I* was using emacs, I'd also need something to help me attain inner calm! ;)
Unfortunately, I doubt an "open" system where there is a community of developers/users could get very big. Of the gaming population, only a small number are skilled programmers. Of these programmers, even fewer would actually have the time to contribute to a large-ish software product for their own entertainment. I'm sure many things would get started, but I'd be very surprised if a single game got finished to the point where it was actually playable. Compare this to Linux (or any other open-source project that's fairly functional). How many developers and years were involved in getting that far?
Unless recent changes in crypto laws have changed this, you'll need to patch ghostscript to be able to deal with encrypted pdf files. This isn't a problem very often, but I remember gs choking on a pdf file because of this in the past more than once.
It might be enough to change the sounds played on all of these events. Some sounds just are really "abrasive", and get annoying fast. That quickly makes them sound louder than they actually are. Experiment with what works best.
If that still doesn't help, just take your favourite sound editor and modify the sounds so they're at half-volume on disk. Either way, you've got a solution that can be set up in a short period of time for no money at all.
I don't believe for a second that that many mice could wear out in that short of a time span. Could it possibly be that you're confusing "broken" with "dirty"? Mice do pick up a lot of crap from their surroundings, and some *do* die after an unreasonable amount of time, but these sorts of stats make me wonder if the mice really are irreperably boken.
Personally, the only mice I've had die on me are a logictec that came oem on a compaq after 4 years, and a cheap trackball after one year. Both were used heavily in dusty environments where all kinds of crap got spilled on them (college!).
Others have already suggested it, and even though you're looking for a method that will keep the drive intact and usable, I think the best way is to completely annihilate the drive. With drive prices being as low as they are, it'd probably be cheaper and more secure to do this occasionally than it would be to invest in software to do it, and still not be sure that the data *really* is gone.
Implicit in the article through Behlendorf's comments is that Microsoft views open source as a fascist idea and ideal. Now, I'm neither a political scientist nor an economist, but the Oxford English dictionary defines Fascism as:
...any system of extreme right-wing or authoritarian views...
Based on this, "fascist" is a term much more suited to the description of Microsoft. One could possibly argue that open source is somewhat communist (or at least socialilst), but fascist? Get real.
Come on.... OO is an aproach, not a language.
The language is a tool, though. Some are much more appropriate for a given task or job. Consider an analogy of eating. Using a fork to eat is good. Using a chainsaw probably is a bad idea.
The isbn is 0122005503. Check your favourite online bookstores. Then check amazon.
*prefix* notation makes much more sense than either postfix or infix. Consider: "multiply two and four" vs. "two multiply four" and "two four multiply". Which sounds more natural?
Granted, 25 megs is a pretty big download (it was a *huge* download not all that long ago), but that's the kernel *source* tree, not the kernel you actually run on your system. If you're downloading, you're obviously compiling. You then have the option of *not* including any of the optional things that don't apply to you. For me, kernel sizes haven't changed significantly since I started with 1.0.??.
...and if not, there is an alternate channel for releasing excess gas. May not be too popular in a recycled atmosphere, though.
I don't think that's quite true. In general, scientific papers are written by scientists for other scientists. In many cases, theories *are* stated in a way that sounds like they are factual. Often the author actually does believe them, and the scientific community as a whole recognizes them as being just theories unless they're backed up with sufficient references. This really helps the readability of papers too. If you read a paragraph that uses the word "putative" more than three times, you end up with a headache, whether you understood it or not.
The real problem occurs when the media picks up on science. In this case, their audience has no way of telling fact from proposed theories. Even if magazines and others were to include references with their stories, most people wouldn't know what they were or what to do with them. Too many people believe everything they read in the papers or see on TV to be true, indisputable facts.
Who's to blame? Directly, nobody (or possibly everybody!), but it is somewhat irresponsible of the media to present information as facts when we don't know that they necessarily are. Stating that something is only a theory, or that some scientists believe that $X may be true isn't really "news"-like enough, and just won't sell. Ultimately, it all comes down to the marketability of the so-called news story.
Of course, we (as consumers of the news stories) are also at fault. If everybody were just a tiny bit more skeptical and thought critically about what was presented to them by the media and other people, the world would probably be a much saner place.
Hey Wills, you've been posting this to a few threads now. The info on xcmsdb seems to be fairly useful, but do you or anyone else know more about how to use it? A quick google search turned up little more than links to the man pages already on my system.
I'm just wondering-- how well does it work? Will it work with all apps making Xlib calls (i.e. essentially everything at some level of abstraction), or do apps have to be compiled with support? Are there decent utilities out there for setting this up, or do i have to play with the CLI interface to it?
That only changes monitor resolution. If you start with a 1024x768 desktop and zoom in with this, you still have a 1024x768 desktop. It's kind of handy if you want to zoom in on an image or something, but absolutely useless (IMO) if you are trying to do work. This method is little more than a neat hack added to X. For resolution changing to be useful in X, the desktop would need to be automagically resized to match the screen resolution. I don't see this being possible without major changes to the X infrastructure-- or without having to restart X and all apps currently running (a move that's almost windowish). Maybe this is another indication that X is flawed and we should ditch it completely in favour of something new...
Unfortunately most X servers don't do anything with these options. They're there for compatibility with those servers that *do*, but passing a gamma value (single channel or overall) to X usually results in nothing new happening. I haven't had a chance to play with Xfree 4 yet, but I'd be surprised if too much has changed there. It doesn't seem to be on the priority list of too many people.
I sincerely hope that he's not so far out there that he has never heard of the PS2 or DirectX or any of the other things he claims. Unfortunately, if he *has* heard of them, I think he's being just plain arrogant and condescending to get a point across. However, if he hasn't, I feel that's pretty ignorant of him. Either way, I'm not too sure this is the type of person we want as one of our leaders in the Free Software world.
Most of the answers seemed to be written in a style meant for dealing with the press and "dumb public" as a whole, and not for geeks/nerds reading slashdot. From my perspective, most of what he says seems pretty vague and possibly even somewhat condescending. Maybe he didn't even write all of this, but got a secretary to put together and edit answers he quickly dictated or something.
If he had come up with an answer that stated that he *would* go against the FBI and anyone else trying to cover up the final report, I doubt they'd even give him much of a chance to put his input into the report-- i.e. "We're sorry, Mr. Perrit, but you're now responsible for checking grammar and spelling of the background section of the report!"
Sounds like they're becoming so advanced they can breed them like real dogs!
That would also solve problems with the user interface. IMO, many web discussion boards are just plain ugly and put together so poorly that they are almost impossible to use effectively. Also, you'd have the option to set up your own kill-files to limit what posts you see and don't see. Now *that* is something I'd love to be able to do here on /. every other day!