How about drop this numbers thing altogether, and go with names like Debian Potato etc for the actual release? You can still have an associated release number for bug tracking purposes (bug fixed in ver. X, so Y > X should be OK), but on the box call it "Mandrake Spelunker" rather than "Mandrake 8.0".
Same thing here - the reason I'm going to install 8.0 is because I want the 2.4.x kernel and KDE 2.1... SuSE seem pretty aggressive with keeping up too - I might give them a shot one of these days.
If I wanted a older stable version of Linux I'd go for Debian.
Thanks, Ted. That 100% CPU usage sounds pretty familiar!
I'll check my/var/log directories when I get home?
BTW, off the top of your head, do you know how to configure logrotate - is there a simple way to avoid this problem (other than disabling logrotate, which is what I did)?
I'm running 7.1 at home, and it seems a bit flakey - not sure why. Maybe because I'm using reiserfs?
It was OK for a while, but the slocate and logrotate cron jobs now just chunder on forever (I've now disabled them), and sometimes the system just goes into a CPU killing disk-swap downward spiral (I've got 64MB RAM, but two swap regions totalling a lot more - maybe 128MB or 256MB).
Any ideas? Anyone else have problems with 7.1 that went away with 7.2?
I think I'm gonna give 8.0 a try anyway - got a partition reserved waiting for it!
Why not consider what it'd be like if we lost ALL our cultural infrastructure, and had to go back to stabbign cows with pointed sticks, and butchering them with chipped flints (now there's a lost skill).
Think about what it'd be like if we lost EVERYTHING.
No sawmills, no saws either for that matter or axes.
No mines, no smelting facilities.
No cars. No railroads.
No cloths. No cloth. No mills. No electic sheep shearers. No electricity either.
All the libraries and electronic records of our cultural know-how gone.
It's not going to happen, as neither is your scenario, but it's staggering how much of our lifestyle differs from that of cave men due to infrastructure rather than any advance in us ourselves.
The debt doesn't have to be paid back down to an absolute level during times of prosperity. What's important is to keep it at a manageable percentage of GDP and/or tax receipts.
Yeah, the/. review entirely glossed over the central thesis of the book which is that successful capitalism doesn't just allow for the accumulation of wealth, but that it also requires infrastructure/laws to allow that accumulated wealth to be mobile.
I've always thought it pretty obvious that the US's prosperity comes from two things:
1) Wealth generation by a continual influs of highly motivated immigrants
2) Wealth spreading by a society that prefers to borrow and spend rather than save
It's funny how so many people think the national debt is a bad thing, when withing reason (e.g. the runup during Reagan's years rather than that of Bush Sr.), it's part of the system that has been so successful.
The US has high crime beause of its value system. People are more likely to feel justified in their violent acts because it serves their selfish needs (whatever they are) - and that is the #1 value in America: You are the only important thing to yourself..
Money will always exist as an intermediatory for direct barter. The internet may add new forms of money such as Mojo Nation's "mojo" or PayPal's trust based $ equivalents (it's not a bank, so the system is based on trust in PayPal), but it will never do away with the fact that I may want bread today and not have the MP3 files that the bread-owner would like in exchange... so I give him the exchange medium money, which he can trade for MP3s tomorrow with someone else.
Capitalism is displacing communism in the former USSR, eastern europe and even china (more slowly), so I think it's a little early to say that it's darwinian progress has halted.
I'm a Brit (living in the States now), and I'd never heard of the sterling coins, or the derivation of "pound sterling"!
It's interesting that the 240 sterlings created from a pound of silver in 775 - presumably a somewhat arbitrary number dictated by the size of the coin, survived for over 1000 years! More the shame that decimilization ended that piece of history... reading that actually makes me care less now whether the UK adopts the Euro, since the decimilized "pound" is only part of history in terms of name alone.
BTW, when did the pound cease to be silver backed? I seem to remember that the old pound notes carried the "I promise to pay the bearer, upon demand, the sum of one pound" verbiage right up until the end.
Yup. Could be a whole new category of Darwin awards too...
Crazed scientist removes self from gene pool by irradiating his testicles with high-powered X-rays.
Well, science doesn't disprove anything (other than it's own theories). If god, or the hand of god, appears in a physics lab then theories will have to adapt to that reality, but so far the world appears to be 100% explicable by the combination of quantum theory and general relativity, hopefully soon to be combined into string theory. That's it - nothing else required to explain ANY other phenomena! All other scientific theories are higher level ones which are nothing more than convenience.
So, if there is a "god", while science may not be able to (or be trying to) disprove him/it, it certainly appears to have no need for him/it either. Given a world who's every content and behaviour can be predicted by science, where is there room for a god? It's a pretty wierd god that doesn't leave a single trace of its existence.
Finally, I did *not* say there was matter/energy existing before the universe - I said there was a quantum field - a bubbling field of probabalistic math and wierdness than not even the theory's creators claim to understand.
If you believe in god, then presumably you believe god always existed (else who created god), so you accept that there are some things (well, ONE thing) that has no beginning, but simply is and always was. My view is that the quantum field is and always was. Maybe this is my god.
The difference though, is that my god not only has rules, but we know the rules, and can predict what'll happen as a result of them. Pretty nifty, eh? Bet you can't do that with your god!;-)
It sounds to me that you are not thinking this through. Matter is being created and destroyed all around us because...drumroll...there is matter here for it to do so.
No... quantum theory allows for matter to be created out of nothing. It's the law of conservation of energy which states that matter/energy can't be created/destroyed - only mutated - but that's a "law" of classical physics (i.e. more a law of statistics than anything else). At the quantum level there's no such restriction, but the the PROBABILITY of matter getting created out of nothing is vanishingly small as the amount of matter under consideration increases and the amount of time it "stays existed" increases. Expansion theory takes it from there.
You appear to be confusing "matter/energy" with the underlying quantum reality which is something that presumably always existed (even before the universe did). Time as such started with the big bang, so any notion of anything "before" then having to have a start or beginning would be wrong.
Don't blame me if your own lack of knowledge leads you to jump to incorrect conclusions.
Why do you insult my intelligence, I don't yours?
I wasn't insulting your intelligence - I was just pointing out that your common sense arguments of it not being possible to create matter out of nothing are wrong. It may be hard to comprehend, but quantum physics is probably the most successful theory ever - we may not understand it (maybe never will), but it predicts experimental outcomes with 100% accuracy.
There is no evidence PROVING evolution, just adaptation. Adaptation goes on all around us. Evolution is a myth, conjecture, a theory, dare I say a belief again.
Adaptation and evolution are the same thing. Two animals are considered to be different species if they can't mate and produce fertile offspring (and therefore their DNA will diverge as it no longer can combine). If a genetic mutation caused a lion to have stripes then it's still be a lion, but if it altered it's sperm so it could no longer breed with other lions then it'd be a new species. Call it adaptaion if you will, but it's still evolution - new species getting created.
If you have separated pockets of animals of the same species, then over time they are almost *certain* to diverge to the point where they can no longer interbreed! That's why different continents have different animals, yet if you know when plate tectonics caused the formerly joined contitents to divide and look for earlier fossils, then they will be the same.
Show me a timelapse of a fruitfly evolving into a mouse and I will show you evolution. Oh, that can't happen?
You're confused; that's like saying we're evolved from apes, when in fact the correct way to say it is that we have common ancestor with apes.
Fruit flies and mice are current day species, so the likely hood of one evolving into the other (i.e. evolution "reinventing" the mouse as an adaptation of the fruitfly) is unlikely. What is likely, and pretty much inevitable is that the fruitfly and mouse will both continue to evlolve, and in a few million years both may have spawned a number of new species.
You may believe in small "adaptive" changes, but find it hard to believe that genetic mutation can result in large/dramatic change, but you only have to look at things like two headed sheep or six fingered people to realize that large change can happen even in a single generation given the right mutation.
Where did matter come from? It didnt' just appear one day on it's own, it had to be created. What was the driving force behind absolute nothing? Evolution? Heh, I don't think so.
Matter is all the time being created out of nothing and then disappearing - it's going on all around us all the time. Nothing mysterious about that - it's basic quantum physics.
The best theory for the creation of our universe is the expansion theory under which the universe started out as one of these "out of nothing" quantum blips, but then kept on expanding rather than disappeared, due to well understood basic physics.
Don't blame me if your own lack of knowledge leads you to jump to incorrect conclusions.
You want evidence supporting evolution? What are you looking to prove - it's not so much a theory as a simple observation that "the fittest survive". Q: If two things compete, which one wins? A: The "fitter" one (where "fitter" is defined as being the one which wins the most competitions!). Do you find that contentious?
What has changed since Darwins time is that we have discovered DNA and genetics. Darwin just made the survival of the fittest and hence evolution through competition observation - he didn't have a clue how this could actually work, but we now know. The existance of DNA and genetics is a discovery, not a theory.
Finally, if you really want to see DNA based evolution in action, then go to any research lab and see generations of flies or mice behave exactly as predicted.
There is nothing to prove about the "theory" of evolution - it's just the way things provably are - it's not a theory.
Science is about observing, creating theories, then testing those theories (if it isn't falsifiable it isn't a theory and isn't science). The amount of verification provided by the human genome is staggering (what creationist would have predicted junk or bacterial DNA?).
God (whatever he/that is) may or may not exist, but all the evidence points to the fact that he had nothing to do with the creation of life or evolution of species - these are well understood scientific phenomena, and no further explanation is necessary.
What about experiments like creating a stork with teeth (it's been done) as proof that our understanding of genetic coding and mutation are correct. You could say that god controlled the outcome of the experiment to fool the scientist, and there'd be nothing I could say to convince you otherwise because your beliefs are non-falsifiable. Mine are.
It's well documented that we can predict things like eye color and hereditary diseases from genes, and they way these genes combine when we mate (with dominant GENETIC traits prevailing), further proves that darwinian evolution primarily does occur at the level of genes, even notwithstanding their interdependent actions. Presumably there are also chemical reasons why gene markers exist - because the chemisty dicates that those are the points where "cut and paste" mutations are going to occur.
The evidence points to the fact that genes are indeed the level at which mutations occur, and natural selection operates, and so the onus is on us to understand how this can be given the interaction of genes, rather than to say that it can't be so!
Slashdot Mirror
Yep - exactly same symtoms here, and sure enough my /var/log/mail and news directories are *rather* full!
Thanks for the link to the fix.
How about drop this numbers thing altogether, and go with names like Debian Potato etc for the actual release? You can still have an associated release number for bug tracking purposes (bug fixed in ver. X, so Y > X should be OK), but on the box call it "Mandrake Spelunker" rather than "Mandrake 8.0".
Same thing here - the reason I'm going to install 8.0 is because I want the 2.4.x kernel and KDE 2.1... SuSE seem pretty aggressive with keeping up too - I might give them a shot one of these days.
If I wanted a older stable version of Linux I'd go for Debian.
Thanks, Ted. That 100% CPU usage sounds pretty familiar!
/var/log directories when I get home?
I'll check my
BTW, off the top of your head, do you know how to configure logrotate - is there a simple way to avoid this problem (other than disabling logrotate, which is what I did)?
Thanks.
That's what I fugured - I'm gonna give 8.0 a try..
I'm running 7.1 at home, and it seems a bit flakey - not sure why. Maybe because I'm using reiserfs?
It was OK for a while, but the slocate and logrotate cron jobs now just chunder on forever (I've now disabled them), and sometimes the system just goes into a CPU killing disk-swap downward spiral (I've got 64MB RAM, but two swap regions totalling a lot more - maybe 128MB or 256MB).
Any ideas? Anyone else have problems with 7.1 that went away with 7.2?
I think I'm gonna give 8.0 a try anyway - got a partition reserved waiting for it!
Does anyone know if this bug affects WD SCSI drives, or just ATA ones?
"Hey baby, are those quantum computers in your shirt, or am I just glad to see you?"
Why not consider what it'd be like if we lost ALL our cultural infrastructure, and had to go back to stabbign cows with pointed sticks, and butchering them with chipped flints (now there's a lost skill).
Think about what it'd be like if we lost EVERYTHING.
No sawmills, no saws either for that matter or axes.
No mines, no smelting facilities.
No cars. No railroads.
No cloths. No cloth. No mills. No electic sheep shearers. No electricity either.
All the libraries and electronic records of our cultural know-how gone.
It's not going to happen, as neither is your scenario, but it's staggering how much of our lifestyle differs from that of cave men due to infrastructure rather than any advance in us ourselves.
Let's see--we have xine, xmms, oms, and now gstreamer..
Not to mention LAMP, mplayer, Xthreatre, XMovie, and a couple others I've forgotten!
To be fair though, GStreamer is a library rather than an application, so it may be worth taking a look at...
The debt doesn't have to be paid back down to an absolute level during times of prosperity. What's important is to keep it at a manageable percentage of GDP and/or tax receipts.
Yeah, the /. review entirely glossed over the central thesis of the book which is that successful capitalism doesn't just allow for the accumulation of wealth, but that it also requires infrastructure/laws to allow that accumulated wealth to be mobile.
I've always thought it pretty obvious that the US's prosperity comes from two things:
1) Wealth generation by a continual influs of highly motivated immigrants
2) Wealth spreading by a society that prefers to borrow and spend rather than save
It's funny how so many people think the national debt is a bad thing, when withing reason (e.g. the runup during Reagan's years rather than that of Bush Sr.), it's part of the system that has been so successful.
The US has high crime beause of its value system. People are more likely to feel justified in their violent acts because it serves their selfish needs (whatever they are) - and that is the #1 value in America: You are the only important thing to yourself ..
Interesting insight - I think you may be right.
Money will always exist as an intermediatory for direct barter. The internet may add new forms of money such as Mojo Nation's "mojo" or PayPal's trust based $ equivalents (it's not a bank, so the system is based on trust in PayPal), but it will never do away with the fact that I may want bread today and not have the MP3 files that the bread-owner would like in exchange... so I give him the exchange medium money, which he can trade for MP3s tomorrow with someone else.
Capitalism is displacing communism in the former USSR, eastern europe and even china (more slowly), so I think it's a little early to say that it's darwinian progress has halted.
Thanks for that pound sterling link!
I'm a Brit (living in the States now), and I'd never heard of the sterling coins, or the derivation of "pound sterling"!
It's interesting that the 240 sterlings created from a pound of silver in 775 - presumably a somewhat arbitrary number dictated by the size of the coin, survived for over 1000 years! More the shame that decimilization ended that piece of history... reading that actually makes me care less now whether the UK adopts the Euro, since the decimilized "pound" is only part of history in terms of name alone.
BTW, when did the pound cease to be silver backed? I seem to remember that the old pound notes carried the "I promise to pay the bearer, upon demand, the sum of one pound" verbiage right up until the end.
Cool! I wonder if you can double your intelligence by splitting all the atoms in your brain?! :-)
Yup. Could be a whole new category of Darwin awards too... Crazed scientist removes self from gene pool by irradiating his testicles with high-powered X-rays.
http://www.bobbins.org/
Well, science doesn't disprove anything (other than it's own theories). If god, or the hand of god, appears in a physics lab then theories will have to adapt to that reality, but so far the world appears to be 100% explicable by the combination of quantum theory and general relativity, hopefully soon to be combined into string theory. That's it - nothing else required to explain ANY other phenomena! All other scientific theories are higher level ones which are nothing more than convenience.
;-)
So, if there is a "god", while science may not be able to (or be trying to) disprove him/it, it certainly appears to have no need for him/it either. Given a world who's every content and behaviour can be predicted by science, where is there room for a god? It's a pretty wierd god that doesn't leave a single trace of its existence.
Finally, I did *not* say there was matter/energy existing before the universe - I said there was a quantum field - a bubbling field of probabalistic math and wierdness than not even the theory's creators claim to understand.
If you believe in god, then presumably you believe god always existed (else who created god), so you accept that there are some things (well, ONE thing) that has no beginning, but simply is and always was. My view is that the quantum field is and always was. Maybe this is my god.
The difference though, is that my god not only has rules, but we know the rules, and can predict what'll happen as a result of them. Pretty nifty, eh? Bet you can't do that with your god!
It sounds to me that you are not thinking this through. Matter is being created and destroyed all around us because...drumroll...there is matter here for it to do so.
No... quantum theory allows for matter to be created out of nothing. It's the law of conservation of energy which states that matter/energy can't be created/destroyed - only mutated - but that's a "law" of classical physics (i.e. more a law of statistics than anything else). At the quantum level there's no such restriction, but the the PROBABILITY of matter getting created out of nothing is vanishingly small as the amount of matter under consideration increases and the amount of time it "stays existed" increases. Expansion theory takes it from there.
You appear to be confusing "matter/energy" with the underlying quantum reality which is something that presumably always existed (even before the universe did). Time as such started with the big bang, so any notion of anything "before" then having to have a start or beginning would be wrong.
Don't blame me if your own lack of knowledge leads you to jump to incorrect conclusions.
Why do you insult my intelligence, I don't yours?
I wasn't insulting your intelligence - I was just pointing out that your common sense arguments of it not being possible to create matter out of nothing are wrong. It may be hard to comprehend, but quantum physics is probably the most successful theory ever - we may not understand it (maybe never will), but it predicts experimental outcomes with 100% accuracy.
There is no evidence PROVING evolution, just adaptation. Adaptation goes on all around us. Evolution is a myth, conjecture, a theory, dare I say a belief again.
Adaptation and evolution are the same thing. Two animals are considered to be different species if they can't mate and produce fertile offspring (and therefore their DNA will diverge as it no longer can combine). If a genetic mutation caused a lion to have stripes then it's still be a lion, but if it altered it's sperm so it could no longer breed with other lions then it'd be a new species. Call it adaptaion if you will, but it's still evolution - new species getting created.
If you have separated pockets of animals of the same species, then over time they are almost *certain* to diverge to the point where they can no longer interbreed! That's why different continents have different animals, yet if you know when plate tectonics caused the formerly joined contitents to divide and look for earlier fossils, then they will be the same.
Show me a timelapse of a fruitfly evolving into a mouse and I will show you evolution. Oh, that can't happen?
You're confused; that's like saying we're evolved from apes, when in fact the correct way to say it is that we have common ancestor with apes.
Fruit flies and mice are current day species, so the likely hood of one evolving into the other (i.e. evolution "reinventing" the mouse as an adaptation of the fruitfly) is unlikely. What is likely, and pretty much inevitable is that the fruitfly and mouse will both continue to evlolve, and in a few million years both may have spawned a number of new species.
You may believe in small "adaptive" changes, but find it hard to believe that genetic mutation can result in large/dramatic change, but you only have to look at things like two headed sheep or six fingered people to realize that large change can happen even in a single generation given the right mutation.
Where did matter come from? It didnt' just appear one day on it's own, it had to be created. What was the driving force behind absolute nothing? Evolution? Heh, I don't think so.
Matter is all the time being created out of nothing and then disappearing - it's going on all around us all the time. Nothing mysterious about that - it's basic quantum physics.
The best theory for the creation of our universe is the expansion theory under which the universe started out as one of these "out of nothing" quantum blips, but then kept on expanding rather than disappeared, due to well understood basic physics.
Don't blame me if your own lack of knowledge leads you to jump to incorrect conclusions.
You want evidence supporting evolution? What are you looking to prove - it's not so much a theory as a simple observation that "the fittest survive". Q: If two things compete, which one wins? A: The "fitter" one (where "fitter" is defined as being the one which wins the most competitions!). Do you find that contentious?
What has changed since Darwins time is that we have discovered DNA and genetics. Darwin just made the survival of the fittest and hence evolution through competition observation - he didn't have a clue how this could actually work, but we now know. The existance of DNA and genetics is a discovery, not a theory.
Finally, if you really want to see DNA based evolution in action, then go to any research lab and see generations of flies or mice behave exactly as predicted.
There is nothing to prove about the "theory" of evolution - it's just the way things provably are - it's not a theory.
Science is about observing, creating theories, then testing those theories (if it isn't falsifiable it isn't a theory and isn't science). The amount of verification provided by the human genome is staggering (what creationist would have predicted junk or bacterial DNA?).
God (whatever he/that is) may or may not exist, but all the evidence points to the fact that he had nothing to do with the creation of life or evolution of species - these are well understood scientific phenomena, and no further explanation is necessary.
What about experiments like creating a stork with teeth (it's been done) as proof that our understanding of genetic coding and mutation are correct. You could say that god controlled the outcome of the experiment to fool the scientist, and there'd be nothing I could say to convince you otherwise because your beliefs are non-falsifiable. Mine are.
It's well documented that we can predict things like eye color and hereditary diseases from genes, and they way these genes combine when we mate (with dominant GENETIC traits prevailing), further proves that darwinian evolution primarily does occur at the level of genes, even notwithstanding their interdependent actions. Presumably there are also chemical reasons why gene markers exist - because the chemisty dicates that those are the points where "cut and paste" mutations are going to occur.
The evidence points to the fact that genes are indeed the level at which mutations occur, and natural selection operates, and so the onus is on us to understand how this can be given the interaction of genes, rather than to say that it can't be so!
Although it's only just gone into the kernel in 2.4, reiserfs has been stable and working for a while, and is already included in a number of distros.
I use Mandrake 7.1 (current is 7.2) which has reiserfs - I use it for all my non-root filesystems to avoid the fsck checks.