The main reason for/boot is that some ancient BIOSes can't read past 1024 (IIRC) cylinders. So placing files used by the bootloader at the end of a 500GB disk wouldn't work, even if Linux could handle the disk fine once it booted.
The other reason is that people keep coming up with fancy filesystems, and it's difficult for the bootloader to support every FS with each possible option. For instance, when ReiserFS was new, GRUB couldn't deal correctly with tail packing. Having/boot on say, ext3, or reiserfs without packing solved that issue. This way, you don't have to worry about your bootloader not being able to read from btrfs, or getting confused by extents in ext4.
Note that this last part applies to GRUB specifically, since LILO doesn't really understand the filesystem. But LILO runs into another issue: Since it doesn't know the FS and follows the offsets that were determined when it was installed, it can't possibly deal with something like a filesystem that defragments itself.
Assumption: For there to be a soul, it has to be located somewhere.
So we can try to figure out where it is by ruling out the places where it isn't.
It can't be in the body surrounding the brain. We can currently replace any part of it without making a human "soulless" according to a religious authority. I've never heard a priest declare somebody with a leg prothesis to lack a soul, for instance. So it's not in the leg, arm, heart, veins, liver, kidneys, etc. There have been humans with artificial replacements for all of those, but I've never heard for anybody to claim they lacked a soul because of it. Surely if the soul disappeared with the disappearance of a body part it'd make some noticeable difference.
So a place left: the brain. However there are cases of humans who managed to retain quite normal functioning with a hemisphere missing, and AFAIK either half can be missing. The resulting human won't be completely normal to be sure, but I still haven't heard of anybody referring as somebody with half a brain as lacking a soul.
Two conclusions may be made from this.
The first one is that since that the lack of no part of the human body seems to cause a "soulless" condition, there's no such thing.
The second one is that the soul is integrated into the brain over all its area, so having a brain means having "half a soul". In that case, how much soul is needed? Does having any brain damage imply you have "less soul" and are therefore less human? Also brain size and weight changes with age. Does that mean that a child has less soul than an adult? And the decrease in mass with age would imply having less of it as you get older. That would also imply that a machine using a part of a human brain would automatically acquire the amount of the soul present in it.
So it seems to me that either there's no such thing, or a machine can be made with it easily.
The other option is to suppose the soul isn't attached anywhere, and not implicit in a human body, but external and granted by a deity. In which case the answer would be "yes", since an all-powerful deity could always attach one to a robot if it felt like it.
A monitor is originally black, so to get colors light has to be emitted. Colors add up, with R+G+B resulting in white.
A sheet of paper is originally white, to get colors you have to absorb some of them. Cyan for instance reflects blue and green, and absorbs red. C+M+Y in theory should equal black, but in reality doesn't, so printers have an extra black color.
I find it great human arrogance to assume that we can to any large degree upset the natural balance of the earth to a level that it will not recover itself.
Where does this "arrogance" nonsense come from? It would have been true in say, the middle ages, but today we're more than capable of something like this. Currently we can go against pretty much any natural process.
Golf course in the middle of a desert? Been done. Building a city under the water table? Yep, New Orleans, and the only problem was incompetence. Changing the weather in an area? Yes, can be done to a large extent. Driving species into extinction? Trivial, can do it without even trying.
We can do even greater things. Ending civilization as we know it? Sure, there's plenty nuclear weaponry for that. If we set to flattening the Everest for some reason, we could do it, and slicing off a mountain is something that's been done before (open mining)
It's ridiculous in this day and age to think that humanity is incapable of making changes of monumental size.
Besides the only thing to lose is our existence should such a calamity be triggered. Myself, I'm not to concerned about that. I live a decent life and have nothing to fear concerning death.
Why do you think your death will be quick and easy? It's much more likely that your death, if caused by an upset of balance in nature will be a slow and extremely unpleasant process. You could die of drowning, or of thirst and hunger, or of skin cancer. You could die of malaria if the climate changes enough for it to spread to wherever you live. In case of big enough problems you could experience the breakdown of society with all it entails.
If for instance an ecological disaster manages to greatly damage food production, whole cities will experience starvation on an unprecedented level. People won't just drop dead, it'll be years of torment, both for you and your friends and relatives.
I don't doubt that the planet will recover from anything we throw at it, even if we annihilate the human race. But that's not the problem. The problem is that there are ways for things to get extremely unpleasant, and that once some things get started it may take years or decades to fix.
They used to do that. You can find sockets on ancient cards, like a S3 ViRGE.
The problem in my understanding is that current cards push memory as far as it will go, and a socket would impose a limit on it. Besides, it's hard to put a heatsink on the RAM then.
You see this from a quite different point of view as the residents of the country.
Go talk to some russians who lived there during communism and its fall. You'll find that a large amount of them don't like Gorbachov at all, and like Putin, which is near the reverse of how the rest of the world thinks it should be.
Why? Because to most citizens practical matters vasty outweigh everything else. I suspect that if you walk to enough people, you'll find that a large amount of them wish Russia to be large, rich and powerful, civil liberties and openness be damned. People like Putin because he brings the country closer to that ideal, and are willing to ignore some things for it.
In places like Iraq and Afghanistan I suspect that however bad things were, a large amount of people didn't think they were doing too badly. Sure there's a dictator, and there are no liberties to speak of, but even under such conditions many people can get by fairly well. When you barge in, start blowing up things, burn their field and kill their children, you might be surprised to learn that they're not going to thank you for it.
Same can go for the US, btw. Many Europeans currently think you're completely nuts, the "land of the free" idea is long dead, and were it a smaller and less powerful country it'd probably be looked at in the same way as Iraq with Saddam in power. Now think a little, were somebody now to invade the US to remove Bush from power, citing the decreasing civil liberties, attacks to other countries, torture in Guantanamo and so on, would you welcome them?
The election of Obama seems to have been received with relief and surprise at that "they finally elected somebody sane".
Very good remake. Good graphics, runs on pretty much any hardware, Linux and Windows version, multiplayer. And seeing half the island disappear after firing something very overkill is really awesome.
With an internal server, the mail you got it stays there so you can still read it, and compose replies. With an internal SMTP you can queue emails for delivery even if they don't get out (nice for laptops that may not stay around until the connection comes back). With an internal IM server you keep being able to talk to people inside the company, and can depending on the server, can queue messages until the connection comes back.
Now if you happen to use say, gmail, then you're out of luck. You can't read your mail, can't compose replies, can't IM people in the next room. All you can do is sit there and wait for somebody to fix the problem.
Second Life allows users to create and sellp roducts and take advantage of the imposed scarcity, but will skim profits by controlling the conversion rate between linden dollars and USD. It looks like a real economy, but it's more like a pyramid scheme, as the profits will inevitably trickle up. It's like a casino. The house cannot lose as long as people keep coming.
How's that any different from the real world? Your "casino" scheme is precisely the way land works in the real world -- whether you make any profit or not, you have to pay taxes. Same goes for webhosting, or renting an establishment, or...
SL has very little to do with a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes are bound to collapse at some point, while SL doesn't really have to, just like a webhost or any other business that operates on the same model
It appears to me as a fairly long term, casual SL user, that people who make money in Second Life are obsessive enough to take the extreme lengths of time it takes to make a perfect skin / item of clothing / dance animation / etc, and are talented enough to make something that people want. Or they got in there first, eg xcite and sensations for sex attachments, who have been around for years. Or got there first before the "gold rush" days and bought up huge amounts of land and now make money renting to suckers or casual users.
And that's different from the real world how? Hell, Microsoft got started by being there at the right time and getting a lucrative contract.
On the other hand, there appear to be poor saps who get suckered in to paying huge amounts of money for a sim or an island. They build a club with the standard host / DJ / dancer setup, pay them virtual currency, and hope to get people who come and tip their dancers and their club, and then...??? Profit!
And that's different from the real world how? There are lots and lots of poor saps who pay huge amounts of money on an establishment and setting up a business because they think they can run a successful bar, turns out they can't, and go bankrupt.
In summary, the Second Life economy is funded by poor saps who fork out huge amounts of real currency to either pay pittances to virtual employees, who therefore don't really give a fuck, and just do it for fun, or pay the long established people who have all the land or have cornered the virtual niche market.
Sounds a lot like a large part of the real world to me
If there's DRM, I don't buy it. The message finally got through to MP3 stores, so it will eventually reach gaming companies, no matter how much you or they insist it won't. If enough people get sick of it, it'll finally show up as a big red number on the balance sheet. I bought several copies of NWN 1 (for myself and friends) because it works on Linux and doesn't have DRM, but won't pay a cent for say, Spore.
Linux may not have many games, but it's sure nice. I've yet to see one with annoying restrictions. No stupid CD/DVD requirements. No hardware lockin. I can easily copy the game from one box to another without issues.
And no, being too big to easily copy is not a copy prevention method. That doesn't work for very long.
It doesn't matter whether it's the filename, or a field that takes tabs separated by whitespace.
I repeat, the percentage of people who will consistently describe a document with such an amount of information is very, very low. And those who do are not the people who have trouble finding their stuff because they file it under a bad name in a random location, which happens to be the specific case we're talking about here.
And that solves problems with people who can't find their documents how exactly?
I'm not arguing tags in general don't work. I'm arguing that tags need consistent, well thought handling, which will not improve matters any for those people who couldn't be bothered to save their documents under a name and location they could find a week later.
You can't fix a lack of organization with technology. If users don't bother to tag, stuff their papers into the nearest folder to then shove it into the nearest drawer, save their files with names like "asdf.doc", etc, then giving them a comprehensive tagging system isn't going to improve matters any. Sometimes, the user is in fact being stupid and needs training.
And you don't need tags for tagging emails with people's names, that information already comes in the email's headers. When people talk about tags, in my experience, they don't generally talk about things that already can be found (mail from Alice from the past week), but a comprehensive classification system for all sorts of documents. This mostly works for mail since it has lots of metadata, much worse for office documents (which may have tags but very rarely do), and sucks for any sort of image data (try finding pictures of tabby cats lying on a chair unless somebody went through the photo archive and tagged every picture with every characteristic possible)
Why reinvent GPG? Cryptographic signatures already include a checksum, and once setup, verification is easily automated.
The difference is that with GPG, the signature can't be faked by breaking into the main server, you need the actual private key, which can be safely kept far away from the internet-facing servers.
There are places full of ads, but then there are plenty of those that don't have any. Also recently they're starting to make rules against placement of obnoxious ads.
Don't like #1, at all. Users already fear that they're going to break something. This would make it a certainty. Under this sort of paradigm, the user will accidentally delete the content or reformat it with some horrible font, and will find that even drastically uplugging the box doesn't prevent their changes from being saved.
So you introduce an undo history, now the file grows huge, plus anybody who gets the document now gets to see all the embarrassing mistakes made during the document's creation. Who wants their boss to see they spent an hour fiddling with fonts?
You also lose the distinction between good content and temporary content. Saving can be used to indicate that what is saved is good, your way will contain whatever was last there, including half done reorganizations and the cat walking on the keyboard.
Don't like #2. How do you identify a photo by content? By looking at a grid of 5000 photos and trying to find the right one? What if you're editing and made slight changes like size, cropping, red eye reduction, format changes that are hard to see on a thumbnail?
Don't like #3 either. In any office you'll end up with several screens worth of documents soon enough.
#4 partly implemented in KDE. Usefulness is limited for anything besides images or documents with very distinctive appearance on the first page
Yeah, I can imagine an average person's reaction when confronted with the requirement to fit their description of a document in some taxonomy database. Won't be a pretty one.
Look, such things are fine, good and useful when you're being paid to do them. The average user will however uttery hate anything of the sort. Things like "drafting policies" and "taxonomy" are completely foreign to most people outside your environment.
Err, no. MD5/SHA checks provide no security. They only let you verify that a file wasn't corrupted in transit. Such things are generally freak accidents and very uncommon, and are mainly useful for checking things like that yep, that CD image was indeed 300MB in size and nothing got cut off anywhere.
If you find a shady site, and download a.rpm or.deb from there, nothing stops them from providing the matching checksum.
Who gives documents names like "Class assignment for the first term of Digital Electronics in 2007"? Nobody I know bothers to type half of that. They'll have something like "Documents/DE/Assignment1.doc" usually.
But this isn't even a normal user. If you want a bad case, take my mother, who names documents things like "letter.doc", then keeps several related documents as different pages inside the same document. Invoice #1 and #2 might be in invoice.doc as two pages, invoice #3 is going to be in the middle of a related document sent to a co-worker which includes the invoice on page 5.
Not that well, you can see many problems right there.
For instance, photos about DragonCon in 2008 are going to be tagged as: "DragonCon 2008"; "dragoncon2008"; "dragoncon" and "2008", "dc2008", "dc", "dragon", plus include typos ("dargon"), and so on.
And this is an easy example, with a distinctive name. Searching for keywords that are not so unique is a lot more challenging.
Also, the first convention was probably just tagged as "dragoncon", making it hard to filter out of the rest. And which such a large amounts of variations you never can be 100% sure you searched all that's searchable, because maybe that one cool photo of Dr. Octopus was tagged as "dc2008" and you didn't think to try that one.
With personal files you also have the problem that you need it to work 100%. It is fine if my search for convention photos, or some landmark misses 10% of them due to them being badly tagged. It's NOT fine when that happens with my office documents, however.
You think it's going to be any better for people who can't find things they saved?
They can't find it because they didn't care at the time of saving to attach enough information to the file to be able to find it later. Instead, they saved it under a name like "letter5", or even worse, "asdf", and possibly left it in a random directory as well.
Tags won't be just as bad, they'll be worse. They require a considerable effort to tag consistently. You also have to think of all the possible tags that could be related to the file. Is it "friends", "acquaintances", "buddies", etc? Is it singular or plural? Will "birthdays" be enough, or you also have to file it under "parties", "celebrations" and "events" in case you remember the file you need was related to some sort of celebration but you can't remember which?
What happens with categories that are diffuse, change meaning, or their contents? For instance, take emails from Alice, that initially get tagged with "acquaintances", then progresses to "friends", then "significant other", then "ex". If you search for something that was mentioned in a friend's email, are Alice's emails tagged as they were initially (in which case after the upgrade from acquaintances to friends her previous mail needs an extra keyword to find), or have they all been updated to "ex", in which case the search might fail since she was a friend back then?
Coming up with a good keywords system is something that only geeks and secretaries are going to do. Your average person will at best pick a couple keywords, then complain they can't find stuff because they didn't use the right keywords, or that every single document comes up because all the mail is tagged as "email" and nothing else.
No levels, but then no skill points either. You can actually acquire a skill like scripting or building and get respect and even money for it. Want to try your diplomacy skills? Well, that's what all the other users are for. You can play games but can never be really killed. Find enough similar people and you could probably organize an in-world roleplay session, with GM and all.
Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
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Art can be useful. For instance, here's a translated quote from an old russian cartoon:
"Well, what is the picture on the wall good for, for instance?" "It's a very useful picture -- it covers the hole on the wallpaper!"
You mean like these ones where ext2 beats reiserfs in most cases and is at least as fast in the others?
Look at the bottom of the page. That's from 2003. Of kernel 2.6.0. A lot of code changed since then.
Believe it or not, the world does not revolve around huge mail servers. Some of us actually run Linux on a desktop, and so don't really care about how well an fs handles a million maildir mailboxes. Latency is the most important criteria, and reiserfs is just too complicated to deliver it, as well as being a largely fringe fs. Especially now with Hans gone, it would become even more fringe.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by this. Latency is mostly influenced by the hard disk. And on a desktop the disk shouldn't be a bottleneck anyway.
Yup, I'd like to have efficient small file handling. But really, it is better to avoid having many small files in the first place. Use compressed archives to store such things; it's quite a bit more efficient, and does not require exotic file systems which most normal people (i.e. your customers) will not use.
Except there's lots and lots of those files in a modern Linux system. Config files, icon files, and small libraries for instance. Additionally many files are searched in different paths, making a fast directory search important.
I used to do that, and then I got a UPS instead and switched back to pure ext2. The performance hit from journalling is simply too high to tolerate. A decent UPS (pretty much anything made by APC) will prevent the crashes in the first place, solving the problem completely and without any unnecessary overhead. With UPS prices being as low as they are, there is no excuse for not having one, so I think that journalling will become obsolete in some near future.
Just as a RAID is not a backup, an UPS isn't a disk journal. One of those days you'll get a long outage, or the power cable will turn out to fit badly into the power supply, have a kernel panic, the UPS won't switch to battery fast enough, etc. And then after several minutes of fsck something important might end up broken.
If the journal causes you a noticeable slowdown you probably aren't a typical user. In typical usage the disk should be mostly idle after boot.
I don't see a point in going forward insanely fast without brakes. I'll take the safety. I have an UPS on every computer, and still have a journalled FS, because there were times when the UPS was of no help. Like yesterday, when I upgraded my laptop's RAM, booted it, and found that with more than 2GB RAM, the BIOS maps the video RAM above 4GB. The video card showed its displeasure with that state of affairs by corrupting the display and locking up. Had no choice but to powercycle the box.
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That's an advantage, but not the main reason.
The main reason for /boot is that some ancient BIOSes can't read past 1024 (IIRC) cylinders. So placing files used by the bootloader at the end of a 500GB disk wouldn't work, even if Linux could handle the disk fine once it booted.
The other reason is that people keep coming up with fancy filesystems, and it's difficult for the bootloader to support every FS with each possible option. For instance, when ReiserFS was new, GRUB couldn't deal correctly with tail packing. Having /boot on say, ext3, or reiserfs without packing solved that issue. This way, you don't have to worry about your bootloader not being able to read from btrfs, or getting confused by extents in ext4.
Note that this last part applies to GRUB specifically, since LILO doesn't really understand the filesystem. But LILO runs into another issue: Since it doesn't know the FS and follows the offsets that were determined when it was installed, it can't possibly deal with something like a filesystem that defragments itself.
Assumption: For there to be a soul, it has to be located somewhere.
So we can try to figure out where it is by ruling out the places where it isn't.
It can't be in the body surrounding the brain. We can currently replace any part of it without making a human "soulless" according to a religious authority. I've never heard a priest declare somebody with a leg prothesis to lack a soul, for instance. So it's not in the leg, arm, heart, veins, liver, kidneys, etc. There have been humans with artificial replacements for all of those, but I've never heard for anybody to claim they lacked a soul because of it. Surely if the soul disappeared with the disappearance of a body part it'd make some noticeable difference.
So a place left: the brain. However there are cases of humans who managed to retain quite normal functioning with a hemisphere missing, and AFAIK either half can be missing. The resulting human won't be completely normal to be sure, but I still haven't heard of anybody referring as somebody with half a brain as lacking a soul.
Two conclusions may be made from this.
The first one is that since that the lack of no part of the human body seems to cause a "soulless" condition, there's no such thing.
The second one is that the soul is integrated into the brain over all its area, so having a brain means having "half a soul". In that case, how much soul is needed? Does having any brain damage imply you have "less soul" and are therefore less human? Also brain size and weight changes with age. Does that mean that a child has less soul than an adult? And the decrease in mass with age would imply having less of it as you get older. That would also imply that a machine using a part of a human brain would automatically acquire the amount of the soul present in it.
So it seems to me that either there's no such thing, or a machine can be made with it easily.
The other option is to suppose the soul isn't attached anywhere, and not implicit in a human body, but external and granted by a deity. In which case the answer would be "yes", since an all-powerful deity could always attach one to a robot if it felt like it.
You're mistaken, all displays use RGB.
A monitor is originally black, so to get colors light has to be emitted. Colors add up, with R+G+B resulting in white.
A sheet of paper is originally white, to get colors you have to absorb some of them. Cyan for instance reflects blue and green, and absorbs red. C+M+Y in theory should equal black, but in reality doesn't, so printers have an extra black color.
Where does this "arrogance" nonsense come from? It would have been true in say, the middle ages, but today we're more than capable of something like this. Currently we can go against pretty much any natural process.
Golf course in the middle of a desert? Been done. Building a city under the water table? Yep, New Orleans, and the only problem was incompetence. Changing the weather in an area? Yes, can be done to a large extent. Driving species into extinction? Trivial, can do it without even trying.
We can do even greater things. Ending civilization as we know it? Sure, there's plenty nuclear weaponry for that. If we set to flattening the Everest for some reason, we could do it, and slicing off a mountain is something that's been done before (open mining)
It's ridiculous in this day and age to think that humanity is incapable of making changes of monumental size.
Why do you think your death will be quick and easy? It's much more likely that your death, if caused by an upset of balance in nature will be a slow and extremely unpleasant process. You could die of drowning, or of thirst and hunger, or of skin cancer. You could die of malaria if the climate changes enough for it to spread to wherever you live. In case of big enough problems you could experience the breakdown of society with all it entails.
If for instance an ecological disaster manages to greatly damage food production, whole cities will experience starvation on an unprecedented level. People won't just drop dead, it'll be years of torment, both for you and your friends and relatives.
I don't doubt that the planet will recover from anything we throw at it, even if we annihilate the human race. But that's not the problem. The problem is that there are ways for things to get extremely unpleasant, and that once some things get started it may take years or decades to fix.
They used to do that. You can find sockets on ancient cards, like a S3 ViRGE.
The problem in my understanding is that current cards push memory as far as it will go, and a socket would impose a limit on it. Besides, it's hard to put a heatsink on the RAM then.
You see this from a quite different point of view as the residents of the country.
Go talk to some russians who lived there during communism and its fall. You'll find that a large amount of them don't like Gorbachov at all, and like Putin, which is near the reverse of how the rest of the world thinks it should be.
Why? Because to most citizens practical matters vasty outweigh everything else. I suspect that if you walk to enough people, you'll find that a large amount of them wish Russia to be large, rich and powerful, civil liberties and openness be damned. People like Putin because he brings the country closer to that ideal, and are willing to ignore some things for it.
In places like Iraq and Afghanistan I suspect that however bad things were, a large amount of people didn't think they were doing too badly. Sure there's a dictator, and there are no liberties to speak of, but even under such conditions many people can get by fairly well. When you barge in, start blowing up things, burn their field and kill their children, you might be surprised to learn that they're not going to thank you for it.
Same can go for the US, btw. Many Europeans currently think you're completely nuts, the "land of the free" idea is long dead, and were it a smaller and less powerful country it'd probably be looked at in the same way as Iraq with Saddam in power. Now think a little, were somebody now to invade the US to remove Bush from power, citing the decreasing civil liberties, attacks to other countries, torture in Guantanamo and so on, would you welcome them?
The election of Obama seems to have been received with relief and surprise at that "they finally elected somebody sane".
You should try Scorched 3D, then.
Very good remake. Good graphics, runs on pretty much any hardware, Linux and Windows version, multiplayer. And seeing half the island disappear after firing something very overkill is really awesome.
With an internal server, the mail you got it stays there so you can still read it, and compose replies. With an internal SMTP you can queue emails for delivery even if they don't get out (nice for laptops that may not stay around until the connection comes back). With an internal IM server you keep being able to talk to people inside the company, and can depending on the server, can queue messages until the connection comes back.
Now if you happen to use say, gmail, then you're out of luck. You can't read your mail, can't compose replies, can't IM people in the next room. All you can do is sit there and wait for somebody to fix the problem.
Bullshit. I made a fairly significant amount of money from SL, and I don't do porn, nor even come anywhere near it.
It's easy, I script for money. What I sell is my programming skill, which is the same thing I do in RL.
How's that any different from the real world? Your "casino" scheme is precisely the way land works in the real world -- whether you make any profit or not, you have to pay taxes. Same goes for webhosting, or renting an establishment, or...
SL has very little to do with a pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes are bound to collapse at some point, while SL doesn't really have to, just like a webhost or any other business that operates on the same model
And that's different from the real world how? Hell, Microsoft got started by being there at the right time and getting a lucrative contract.
And that's different from the real world how? There are lots and lots of poor saps who pay huge amounts of money on an establishment and setting up a business because they think they can run a successful bar, turns out they can't, and go bankrupt.
Sounds a lot like a large part of the real world to me
Go away, shill.
If there's DRM, I don't buy it. The message finally got through to MP3 stores, so it will eventually reach gaming companies, no matter how much you or they insist it won't. If enough people get sick of it, it'll finally show up as a big red number on the balance sheet. I bought several copies of NWN 1 (for myself and friends) because it works on Linux and doesn't have DRM, but won't pay a cent for say, Spore.
Linux may not have many games, but it's sure nice. I've yet to see one with annoying restrictions. No stupid CD/DVD requirements. No hardware lockin. I can easily copy the game from one box to another without issues.
And no, being too big to easily copy is not a copy prevention method. That doesn't work for very long.
It doesn't matter whether it's the filename, or a field that takes tabs separated by whitespace.
I repeat, the percentage of people who will consistently describe a document with such an amount of information is very, very low. And those who do are not the people who have trouble finding their stuff because they file it under a bad name in a random location, which happens to be the specific case we're talking about here.
And that solves problems with people who can't find their documents how exactly?
I'm not arguing tags in general don't work. I'm arguing that tags need consistent, well thought handling, which will not improve matters any for those people who couldn't be bothered to save their documents under a name and location they could find a week later.
You can't fix a lack of organization with technology. If users don't bother to tag, stuff their papers into the nearest folder to then shove it into the nearest drawer, save their files with names like "asdf.doc", etc, then giving them a comprehensive tagging system isn't going to improve matters any. Sometimes, the user is in fact being stupid and needs training.
And you don't need tags for tagging emails with people's names, that information already comes in the email's headers. When people talk about tags, in my experience, they don't generally talk about things that already can be found (mail from Alice from the past week), but a comprehensive classification system for all sorts of documents. This mostly works for mail since it has lots of metadata, much worse for office documents (which may have tags but very rarely do), and sucks for any sort of image data (try finding pictures of tabby cats lying on a chair unless somebody went through the photo archive and tagged every picture with every characteristic possible)
Why reinvent GPG? Cryptographic signatures already include a checksum, and once setup, verification is easily automated.
The difference is that with GPG, the signature can't be faked by breaking into the main server, you need the actual private key, which can be safely kept far away from the internet-facing servers.
You need to find a better place in SL, then.
There are places full of ads, but then there are plenty of those that don't have any. Also recently they're starting to make rules against placement of obnoxious ads.
Don't like #1, at all. Users already fear that they're going to break something. This would make it a certainty. Under this sort of paradigm, the user will accidentally delete the content or reformat it with some horrible font, and will find that even drastically uplugging the box doesn't prevent their changes from being saved.
So you introduce an undo history, now the file grows huge, plus anybody who gets the document now gets to see all the embarrassing mistakes made during the document's creation. Who wants their boss to see they spent an hour fiddling with fonts?
You also lose the distinction between good content and temporary content. Saving can be used to indicate that what is saved is good, your way will contain whatever was last there, including half done reorganizations and the cat walking on the keyboard.
Don't like #2. How do you identify a photo by content? By looking at a grid of 5000 photos and trying to find the right one? What if you're editing and made slight changes like size, cropping, red eye reduction, format changes that are hard to see on a thumbnail?
Don't like #3 either. In any office you'll end up with several screens worth of documents soon enough.
#4 partly implemented in KDE. Usefulness is limited for anything besides images or documents with very distinctive appearance on the first page
#6 already exists in multiple forms
Yeah, I can imagine an average person's reaction when confronted with the requirement to fit their description of a document in some taxonomy database. Won't be a pretty one.
Look, such things are fine, good and useful when you're being paid to do them. The average user will however uttery hate anything of the sort. Things like "drafting policies" and "taxonomy" are completely foreign to most people outside your environment.
Err, no. MD5/SHA checks provide no security. They only let you verify that a file wasn't corrupted in transit. Such things are generally freak accidents and very uncommon, and are mainly useful for checking things like that yep, that CD image was indeed 300MB in size and nothing got cut off anywhere.
If you find a shady site, and download a .rpm or .deb from there, nothing stops them from providing the matching checksum.
Proper security is attained by GPG signatures.
That "just" is a pretty big one.
Who gives documents names like "Class assignment for the first term of Digital Electronics in 2007"? Nobody I know bothers to type half of that. They'll have something like "Documents/DE/Assignment1.doc" usually.
But this isn't even a normal user. If you want a bad case, take my mother, who names documents things like "letter.doc", then keeps several related documents as different pages inside the same document. Invoice #1 and #2 might be in invoice.doc as two pages, invoice #3 is going to be in the middle of a related document sent to a co-worker which includes the invoice on page 5.
Not that well, you can see many problems right there.
For instance, photos about DragonCon in 2008 are going to be tagged as: "DragonCon 2008"; "dragoncon2008"; "dragoncon" and "2008", "dc2008", "dc", "dragon", plus include typos ("dargon"), and so on.
And this is an easy example, with a distinctive name. Searching for keywords that are not so unique is a lot more challenging.
Also, the first convention was probably just tagged as "dragoncon", making it hard to filter out of the rest. And which such a large amounts of variations you never can be 100% sure you searched all that's searchable, because maybe that one cool photo of Dr. Octopus was tagged as "dc2008" and you didn't think to try that one.
With personal files you also have the problem that you need it to work 100%. It is fine if my search for convention photos, or some landmark misses 10% of them due to them being badly tagged. It's NOT fine when that happens with my office documents, however.
You think it's going to be any better for people who can't find things they saved?
They can't find it because they didn't care at the time of saving to attach enough information to the file to be able to find it later. Instead, they saved it under a name like "letter5", or even worse, "asdf", and possibly left it in a random directory as well.
Tags won't be just as bad, they'll be worse. They require a considerable effort to tag consistently. You also have to think of all the possible tags that could be related to the file. Is it "friends", "acquaintances", "buddies", etc? Is it singular or plural? Will "birthdays" be enough, or you also have to file it under "parties", "celebrations" and "events" in case you remember the file you need was related to some sort of celebration but you can't remember which?
What happens with categories that are diffuse, change meaning, or their contents? For instance, take emails from Alice, that initially get tagged with "acquaintances", then progresses to "friends", then "significant other", then "ex". If you search for something that was mentioned in a friend's email, are Alice's emails tagged as they were initially (in which case after the upgrade from acquaintances to friends her previous mail needs an extra keyword to find), or have they all been updated to "ex", in which case the search might fail since she was a friend back then?
Coming up with a good keywords system is something that only geeks and secretaries are going to do. Your average person will at best pick a couple keywords, then complain they can't find stuff because they didn't use the right keywords, or that every single document comes up because all the mail is tagged as "email" and nothing else.
You need a Second Life, I think.
No levels, but then no skill points either. You can actually acquire a skill like scripting or building and get respect and even money for it. Want to try your diplomacy skills? Well, that's what all the other users are for. You can play games but can never be really killed. Find enough similar people and you could probably organize an in-world roleplay session, with GM and all.
Art can be useful. For instance, here's a translated quote from an old russian cartoon:
"Well, what is the picture on the wall good for, for instance?"
"It's a very useful picture -- it covers the hole on the wallpaper!"
Look at the bottom of the page. That's from 2003. Of kernel 2.6.0. A lot of code changed since then.
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by this. Latency is mostly influenced by the hard disk. And on a desktop the disk shouldn't be a bottleneck anyway.
Except there's lots and lots of those files in a modern Linux system. Config files, icon files, and small libraries for instance. Additionally many files are searched in different paths, making a fast directory search important.
Just as a RAID is not a backup, an UPS isn't a disk journal. One of those days you'll get a long outage, or the power cable will turn out to fit badly into the power supply, have a kernel panic, the UPS won't switch to battery fast enough, etc. And then after several minutes of fsck something important might end up broken.
If the journal causes you a noticeable slowdown you probably aren't a typical user. In typical usage the disk should be mostly idle after boot.
I don't see a point in going forward insanely fast without brakes. I'll take the safety. I have an UPS on every computer, and still have a journalled FS, because there were times when the UPS was of no help. Like yesterday, when I upgraded my laptop's RAM, booted it, and found that with more than 2GB RAM, the BIOS maps the video RAM above 4GB. The video card showed its displeasure with that state of affairs by corrupting the display and locking up. Had no choice but to powercycle the box.