They have done it before with seeds, but besides some lucky mutations due to space radiation, I can't see why the resulting crops should be more productive. If you want lots of mutations, it would seem a lot cheaper to irradiate it on earth, so my guess is that the gain is purely psychological, in that people would gladly eat "space crops", but wouldn't touch "radio-active crops".
The bottomline is, I don't think it's a very effective way to try and get new species (disclaimer: gut feeling).
No problem, just let your linux partition sit there for a while, it'll grow on you:). There will be some problems, but it's important to report those. Things will be fixed and nobody will have to be frustrated about them ever again. That's how you were able to be amazed about all those improvements in the first place!
I was countering the claim that "few, if any" things can't be done easily in Linux.
Oh, it's not that they cannot easily be done, your comments are about setting things up, which can sometimes be a pain I admit. Luckily, you only have to set things up once (Things have improved on that front too, eg. you don't have to edit modelines any mode, all hardware is probed).
"few, if any"? Well, at least you laid your bias out on the table.
It's not bias, it my experience.
1) Kontact will not do IMAP filtering, or at least wouldn't for my server running Cyrus IMAPd. I spent almost a whole day setting up the timsieved server and learning how to write sieve scripts just so I could filter my mail. Granted, I like having it done on the server-side, but I was about to stab KDE when I ran into this.
Can't help you here, I use POP. The configuration of kmail (the mail component of kontact) was a bit odd I remember, it should have improved in the meantime.
2) It took me the better part of a day to get my ATi drivers to work, not realizing SaX2 doesn't play nicely with it. Say what you want about ATi, but I'm too attached to my AIW 9600 Pro to give it up for some OS.
This seems to be SuSE specific, lately the only driver troubles I have encountered are all sound related.
3) I still don't have TV support working. I'm not about to dick around with gatos again. I suspect this just isn't going to work for me (luckily I still have a dual boot).
Mine works like a charm.
4) No WMV support yet.
mplayer
5) No MP3 support out of the box. I had to run YOU, and find the optional multimedia packs, which were stategically positioned in the middle of a list of about 30 optional language packs that I'll never need to install and thus scrolled through.
Ok, so you had to install an extra application to play mp3s.
6) No OTR support for GAIM. Yeah, I could compile it, or I could take my chance with one of the non-SuSE RPMs, but in Windows all I need to do is grab the installer and it works in any version of Windows I'm running.
google for gaim otr, with debian (which I use) there is a package called gaim-otr.
7) My dual-head desktop is running as one big ass desktop. I haven't figured out how to get the behaviour Windows has by default. This big ass desktop is close, except maximizing a window makes it span both screens, rather than just maximizing to one.
google for dual-head linux maximize
8) Unreal Tournament (old, I know) wasn't particularly easy to install. I had to Google around for a while before getting this one to work.
9) Doom3 and NWN could have been easier to install (why do I need to manually copy the data off the CDs when the Windows installer does it for me?)
So.. that's a linux problem?
10) No OpenVPN GUI.
I have openvpn running on my router for the wireless. Yes it took a full day to set it up, but in the meantime I learned alot about CA's and keypairs. And I'm quite confident that everything is secure.
11) My settings are not really saved, even though I click the "store" button.
What settings?
12) Firefox is using a huge ass font that I can't seem to tone down.
There must be an increase/decrease font size option somewhere.
There's plenty more. I'm not expecting it to run just like Windows. I know what Linux is and is not. However, some things could just be made a lot easier. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with how far the Linux desktop has come, but it's still not there yet, IMHO.
After using purely Linux for over 5 years, I'm having similar problems when I'm asked to look at a problem on a windows PC. It took ages until I finally managed to get to the network card settings.. Also, winipcfg was missing (Why? Was it too handy or what?). That XP is really weird.
By first having a dual-boot period, they can catalog each task that cannot easily be done with Linux (I bet there are few, if any). The experience gained would be very valuable.
Also as a competitor to Microsoft, running Windows could be considered a security risk.
I don't believe what you just said! Too much trouble using a non-standard port? -p 12345 is slowing you down? I bet you don't get much work done, with all those troubles you must be having.
> Drink 8 Glasses of Water a Day (does beer count?)
If you drink beer with 6% alcohol, you will only have drunk 7.52 glasses of water. So you would have to drink another half glass to compensate for the alcohol.
if some criminal organization in your city shot or strangled 50 people one night, would you still call it a non-event?
It's not a non-event, but the stupid reactions to the attack make me sick. It's as if the government would forbid selling rope after the hypothetical strangulation incident. Wow, I feel really safe now!
But why should an e-mail record be viewed only as something negative, you could also make your case of innocence with it. I think deleting e-mail creates an image that the company is using dirty tactics (maybe falsely). Isn't this mostly an irrational fear without a real basis? Or am I naive, and is every company trying to screw their competitors with every conceivable illegal tactic they can think of?
I recently installed a Debian system for some windows user. I was surprised how easily he managed to deal with it, he had only had a basic unix course at school.
I explained him by phone how to format an extra drive and put it in fstab, he did just fine after a minute of explanation.
In my opinion Debian is quite easy to manage once properly set up, then awaits the task of reading hundreds of man-pages and HOWTO's over the next couple of years. Imho that's the best way to get a profound understanding of GNU/Linux, and if you want to manage a server in a professional environment, a good understanding is what you should be aiming at. In the meantime, everything already installed just keeps working.
BTW, a system administrator shouldn't wet his pants when he has to change a setting in a config file. Most config files are very clear and are overly documented (and the ones that aren't usually don't need to be changed). In fact most of the time I prefer config files over graphical tools. Just give him some encouraging words and he'll get over that mental barrier.
I'll conclude with an article from linuxmagazine.com, you might find it interesting:
I used Suse until 2.5 years ago, but I switched to Debian because of the different 'flavors', professional, enterprise, whatnot. The problem was that once you installed a certain version, and then you wanted to update via the net, you then ended up with another 'free' flavor, messing up the setup in my case. So I switched to Debian and the upgrades through apt-get are really sensational for an admin.
I know it wasn't on your list of options, but because you didn't explain why you were limiting your options to two distro's, I'll just ignore it. If you knew why those two are 'right' and the others not, you wouldn't have a problem picking between the two either, right?
Why on earth would anyone want to delete e-mail? Mine isn't only preserved forever and ever (unless if it's spam), it's also backed up. You're not telling me you never wanted to search for an old e-mail sent to you a year ago.
All those thousands of mails won't take up 20$ worth of diskpace.
4 billion years, 148,847,000 km of surface area, an astronomical amount of life per m, let that be a start to comprehension.
And don't forget that the genetic code is quite modular, so a single mutation could give you an extra arm, without the need to "re-evolute" the thing. Just to give a silly example. A better , real-life example is an extra nipple, some people have them.
Coincidentally, our fellow mammal species have a large variation in the number of nipples, so maybe it's not so strange that an extra nipple is more common than an extra eye? (Just thinking out loud). Maybe some genes are less protected against mutation than others?
I second that. I must say it also came completely unexpected to me, it *great* news! I am developing an open source image stitching program I will be releasing Real Soon Now(tm), I'm pretty sure there are some patents out there that could have threatened my software I designed myself. I haven't checked, but who cares now!
So that means SCO will be dead by 2007 or so. I hope they hold a public selling of the furnishings. It would be fun to put together some money to buy Daryl's chair and donate it to Linus, for example.
There are so many harsh names in the/. reactions! This isn't an anarchist cyber-criminal mafioso terrorist, it's just a kid. At that age, I was mixing potassium nitrate with charcoal and sulphur, and I made some very nice craters with the resulting gunpowder. It's only later that I realized the full impact (pun intended) of what I was doing. At the time it was thrilling but there was no sense of real danger (if something had gone wrong, I'd be sitting in a wheelchair right now - best case scenario).
Slashdot Mirror
They have done it before with seeds, but besides some lucky mutations due to space radiation, I can't see why the resulting crops should be more productive. If you want lots of mutations, it would seem a lot cheaper to irradiate it on earth, so my guess is that the gain is purely psychological, in that people would gladly eat "space crops", but wouldn't touch "radio-active crops".
The bottomline is, I don't think it's a very effective way to try and get new species (disclaimer: gut feeling).
No problem, just let your linux partition sit there for a while, it'll grow on you :). There will be some problems, but it's important to report those. Things will be fixed and nobody will have to be frustrated about them ever again. That's how you were able to be amazed about all those improvements in the first place!
I was countering the claim that "few, if any" things can't be done easily in Linux.
Oh, it's not that they cannot easily be done, your comments are about setting things up, which can sometimes be a pain I admit. Luckily, you only have to set things up once (Things have improved on that front too, eg. you don't have to edit modelines any mode, all hardware is probed).
"few, if any"? Well, at least you laid your bias out on the table.
It's not bias, it my experience.
1) Kontact will not do IMAP filtering, or at least wouldn't for my server running Cyrus IMAPd. I spent almost a whole day setting up the timsieved server and learning how to write sieve scripts just so I could filter my mail. Granted, I like having it done on the server-side, but I was about to stab KDE when I ran into this.
Can't help you here, I use POP. The configuration of kmail (the mail component of kontact) was a bit odd I remember, it should have improved in the meantime.
2) It took me the better part of a day to get my ATi drivers to work, not realizing SaX2 doesn't play nicely with it. Say what you want about ATi, but I'm too attached to my AIW 9600 Pro to give it up for some OS.
This seems to be SuSE specific, lately the only driver troubles I have encountered are all sound related.
3) I still don't have TV support working. I'm not about to dick around with gatos again. I suspect this just isn't going to work for me (luckily I still have a dual boot).
Mine works like a charm.
4) No WMV support yet.
mplayer
5) No MP3 support out of the box. I had to run YOU, and find the optional multimedia packs, which were stategically positioned in the middle of a list of about 30 optional language packs that I'll never need to install and thus scrolled through.
Ok, so you had to install an extra application to play mp3s.
6) No OTR support for GAIM. Yeah, I could compile it, or I could take my chance with one of the non-SuSE RPMs, but in Windows all I need to do is grab the installer and it works in any version of Windows I'm running.
google for gaim otr, with debian (which I use) there is a package called gaim-otr.
7) My dual-head desktop is running as one big ass desktop. I haven't figured out how to get the behaviour Windows has by default. This big ass desktop is close, except maximizing a window makes it span both screens, rather than just maximizing to one.
google for dual-head linux maximize
8) Unreal Tournament (old, I know) wasn't particularly easy to install. I had to Google around for a while before getting this one to work.
9) Doom3 and NWN could have been easier to install (why do I need to manually copy the data off the CDs when the Windows installer does it for me?)
So.. that's a linux problem?
10) No OpenVPN GUI.
I have openvpn running on my router for the wireless. Yes it took a full day to set it up, but in the meantime I learned alot about CA's and keypairs. And I'm quite confident that everything is secure.
11) My settings are not really saved, even though I click the "store" button.
What settings?
12) Firefox is using a huge ass font that I can't seem to tone down.
There must be an increase/decrease font size option somewhere.
There's plenty more. I'm not expecting it to run just like Windows. I know what Linux is and is not. However, some things could just be made a lot easier. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with how far the Linux desktop has come, but it's still not there yet, IMHO.
After using purely Linux for over 5 years, I'm having similar problems when I'm asked to look at a problem on a windows PC. It took ages until I finally managed to get to the network card settings.. Also, winipcfg was missing (Why? Was it too handy or what?). That XP is really weird.
By first having a dual-boot period, they can catalog each task that cannot easily be done with Linux (I bet there are few, if any). The experience gained would be very valuable.
Also as a competitor to Microsoft, running Windows could be considered a security risk.
I switched distro's every two years on average until I found Debian. Nearly 4 years later, I'm still impressed by it's package management.
I don't believe what you just said! Too much trouble using a non-standard port? -p 12345 is slowing you down? I bet you don't get much work done, with all those troubles you must be having.
> now, if the military found that the enemy was using GPS to deliver bombs and such, of course they'd turn it off,
I wouldn't turn it off, I would re-route it 8-)
Where is this so called "globe" and is it a part of the USA?
How about Westvleteren 12%?
> Drink 8 Glasses of Water a Day (does beer count?)
If you drink beer with 6% alcohol, you will only have drunk 7.52 glasses of water. So you would have to drink another half glass to compensate for the alcohol.
Cheers!
> It's the same reason why you wouldn't put boiling water into a frozen glass container.
Great. Now I'll have to try that!
.. and I hope it will become a better success than the arctic winter solar car race.
if some criminal organization in your city shot or strangled 50 people one night, would you still call it a non-event?
It's not a non-event, but the stupid reactions to the attack make me sick. It's as if the government would forbid selling rope after the hypothetical strangulation incident. Wow, I feel really safe now!
Thanks for the reply.
But why should an e-mail record be viewed only as something negative, you could also make your case of innocence with it. I think deleting e-mail creates an image that the company is using dirty tactics (maybe falsely). Isn't this mostly an irrational fear without a real basis? Or am I naive, and is every company trying to screw their competitors with every conceivable illegal tactic they can think of?
I recently installed a Debian system for some windows user. I was surprised how easily he managed to deal with it, he had only had a basic unix course at school.
I explained him by phone how to format an extra drive and put it in fstab, he did just fine after a minute of explanation.
In my opinion Debian is quite easy to manage once properly set up, then awaits the task of reading hundreds of man-pages and HOWTO's over the next couple of years. Imho that's the best way to get a profound understanding of GNU/Linux, and if you want to manage a server in a professional environment, a good understanding is what you should be aiming at. In the meantime, everything already installed just keeps working.
BTW, a system administrator shouldn't wet his pants when he has to change a setting in a config file. Most config files are very clear and are overly documented (and the ones that aren't usually don't need to be changed). In fact most of the time I prefer config files over graphical tools. Just give him some encouraging words and he'll get over that mental barrier.
I'll conclude with an article from linuxmagazine.com, you might find it interesting:
http://www.linuxmagazine.com/content/view/45/115/
I used Suse until 2.5 years ago, but I switched to Debian because of the different 'flavors', professional, enterprise, whatnot. The problem was that once you installed a certain version, and then you wanted to update via the net, you then ended up with another 'free' flavor, messing up the setup in my case. So I switched to Debian and the upgrades through apt-get are really sensational for an admin.
I know it wasn't on your list of options, but because you didn't explain why you were limiting your options to two distro's, I'll just ignore it. If you knew why those two are 'right' and the others not, you wouldn't have a problem picking between the two either, right?
Why on earth would anyone want to delete e-mail? Mine isn't only preserved forever and ever (unless if it's spam), it's also backed up. You're not telling me you never wanted to search for an old e-mail sent to you a year ago.
All those thousands of mails won't take up 20$ worth of diskpace.
It should be km^2 and m^2, I used the special square char but /. stripped it out..
No need to panic, you can safely continue your life.
4 billion years, 148,847,000 km of surface area, an astronomical amount of life per m, let that be a start to comprehension.
And don't forget that the genetic code is quite modular, so a single mutation could give you an extra arm, without the need to "re-evolute" the thing. Just to give a silly example. A better , real-life example is an extra nipple, some people have them.
Coincidentally, our fellow mammal species have a large variation in the number of nipples, so maybe it's not so strange that an extra nipple is more common than an extra eye? (Just thinking out loud). Maybe some genes are less protected against mutation than others?
So in the future people will probably have a jar with nail clippings next to their computers? The future suddenly looks so disgusting..
I second that. I must say it also came completely unexpected to me, it *great* news! I am developing an open source image stitching program I will be releasing Real Soon Now(tm), I'm pretty sure there are some patents out there that could have threatened my software I designed myself. I haven't checked, but who cares now!
But were you blowing up stuff that belonged to other people?
;)
You can't prove anything! Now leave me alone!
So that means SCO will be dead by 2007 or so. I hope they hold a public selling of the furnishings. It would be fun to put together some money to buy Daryl's chair and donate it to Linus, for example.
And then we're not even talking about photocopiers! Man those were hot!
So you hire an anarchist criminal
/. reactions! This isn't an anarchist cyber-criminal mafioso terrorist, it's just a kid. At that age, I was mixing potassium nitrate with charcoal and sulphur, and I made some very nice craters with the resulting gunpowder. It's only later that I realized the full impact (pun intended) of what I was doing. At the time it was thrilling but there was no sense of real danger (if something had gone wrong, I'd be sitting in a wheelchair right now - best case scenario).
There are so many harsh names in the