I don't agree that support for disconnected operation and merging is a "philosophical" issue, since it has a real positive impact on my one or two person projects. I know it sounds like a cult, but branch-and-merge is really really useful.
I do think that (as a few other people have mentioned) that svn is better at being a distributed, versioned file system, just because it supports subtree checkouts.
I don't think it is a direct patent suit from Microsoft that is likely, but rather suits from patent trolls, possibly with "moral" support from Microsoft.
People might find the views of a Canadian IP Lawyer interesting. He seems to think that the copyright claim is non-sense, and the official mark one likely won't fly based on recent Supreme court rulings.
I dunno much about either, but the copyright on an image from 1937 does seem like a stretch. Maybe someone should have some t-shirts printed and really rub it in.
Credit where credit is due: this comes via Michael Geist.
Seriously, this isn't a troll or flamebait. Name three achivements of the UN since it's founding. Ok, you in the back that remembered the Korean War being fought under UN auspices. Yea, because the Soviets were off in a sulk for a brief period the UN managed to allow the US (with our usual allies of the UK and the Aussies along with token support from the usual suspects) to fight to a tie, but under no circumstances actually win. And we are STILL mired down there to this day. There is no citation, but Wikipedia says that Canada and Turkey both had more than twice the soldiers that Australia did in this particular conflict. As a Canadian, I grant you the US did the heavy lifting, even adjusted for population, but I'm not sure why you single out Australia.
Well, more or less correct, except isn't "sudo -s" enabled by default? I don't have have a current Ubuntu install, but that is what I remember from D-animal or E-animal.
I really enjoyed the BBC (mini)-series, maybe even more than the book. The production values are a bit variable, but I thought it good fun. IIRC, the TV series was first in this case.
If it had 3G, I would have already sent them money. I might anyway, but it is painfull to have to choose between all that cool stuff and fast data transfer.
Well, sometimes the Ubuntu installer does not work. That is how I ended up reverting to plain debian on my wife's core2 duo machine after a few days of struggling with the Ubuntu installer. No doubt someone else has had the opposite experience.
Truth to tell, I don't really notice that much difference between running Debian testing and Ubuntu. At least no-one at my house is longing for the days when we ran Ubuntu.
So I am curious, what fabulous things am I missing? Or maybe the fact I am a fairly experienced Debian user negates most of it.
I didn't mean to diss the people who wear the pagers. That would be dangerous:-)
I believe you that your job is hard work, and stressful. I used to do IT support for medical doctors, who have even bigger egos than professors:-), and when their billing system goes off line, they get tense in a a way that professors never have to. On the other hand, I am glad to say I never had to deal 70,000 MDs.
I guess my high level point, which maybe was obscured by the peculiar position of CS departments, is that outsourcing user-visible services is going to give ammunition to those that believe that there is fat in the IT budget. Because of tenure, the non-academic staff of a university are always the first to go in a crunch.
Hmm, well I agree that one shouldn't transfer Universities based on this as some other poster suggested.
On the other hand "let the Uni IT department do their job" is a two edged sword. I don't think University IT services are anywhere near infallible, and they certainly can use (constructive) critisism. One thing that has astonished me is the degree to which the fraction of the University budget consumed by the IT (or computing services, or whatever) seems to stay constant or increase while the actual services provided seem to go down. No doubt people on the inside have a different perspective, but especially from a more DIY department like CS, it looks to us like they owe us a slice of their budget. Of course the politics are complicated, but as far as I understand it, computing services does not want to take running the networks and labs that we do. Becaus e then it would cost them something, and we have no budget to give them.
So what does this have to do with the topic at hand?
Well, on our campus, email and public access labs are the only visible services provided by computing services (yes, I know they run the network, but it is not clear everybody understands how expensive that is). So I think it would be bad politics for them to eliminate (outsource) email.
Even working with highly technical explanations of engineering manuals that follow a very formulaic layout, you can't deny that Framemaker is simply easier to use, make edits and use all those crazy features like graphics, color, and hyperlinks that are hacks in LaTeX.
I won't argue about graphic layout; this is simply outside my expertise. But for making hypertext documents, LaTeX+package hyperref+TeX4ht+pdflatex works extremely well and produces nice HTML and PDF documents from the same source. For the working academic, the ability to take the same material and format it as a web page, poster, presentation, and a paper is pretty valuable. I know that other packages can do the same; I've never been very impressed with the quality of the PDF or HTML from Word.
Probably we are agreeing here, except that I wanted to note that there are a whole class of hyperlinked documents for which LaTeX is a good solution (even ignoring the fact that it is the only thing I really know how to use)
Or they take the (not unreasonable) view that if they're responsible for the network, and it's their ass on the line if security is breached and damage is done, then having unknown (to them) systems with access is a vulnerability that should be addressed.
This is true, but there are certain tradeoffs involved in operating in a University environment (I don't know the Community College environment so well). The basic tradeoff is less money compared to what I would pull in in industry, and a (subjectively) more pleasant working environment. This includes being treated with a little more respect by IT. In particular, I don't adapt my work environment very much for their convenience. On the other hand, I end up doing a certain amount of IT work myself. I agree that this is self-centered and a privilege; did I mention the lower pay ?:-)
but in academia, there may be strong argument that it should be since a lot of specialist software is available for Windows while there's very little that's Mac- or Linux-only.
In the sciences, that is almost precisely wrong as far as I can tell (and I realize you said "may"). Scientific software seems to come first to Linux, then an easy port to MacOS X, then to Cygwin, and finally (maybe) to Windows natively. My experience is essentially with computation intensive things like optimization, symbolic algebra, and so on.
What current DSLR doesn't allow you complete manual control over the shutter and aperature if you want it? The Rebel XT certainly does (I have one). I got bored after I checked (http://www.dpreview.com) the Nikon D50 and the Olympus E500, which both have a fill manual mode. Perhaps you are using DSLR to mean something different from most people, and what you meant to say is that you cannot afford a DSLR, which is fair enough.
Just the processors which is why he showed the SPECmarks or whatever this phantom benchmark that, to my knowledge, isn't a free download from anywhere.
It is true that SPECmark is not free, but to call it phantom is
is unfair. www.spec.org is probably the most respected
"engineering computation" benchmark around. Now whether that reflects
what people want to do with Macs is a fair question.
There probably isn't one set of application benchmarks that would
make everyone happy. At least the SPECInt (as opposed the SPECFp)
are reasonably predictive of tasks like compilation.
By the way, they used to have a deal where it was pretty cheap for
CS departments to get a copy.
(and it's probably redundant by now, but this would be the creator of Ethernet, for those who didn't know who Bob Metcalfe is)
And Ethernet, in the originally collide-n-pray incarnation (as opposed to switched), is so awesome for streaming video. This is why Bob is a natural expert on this topic.
I tried it on my home box, (I run KDE on FreeBSD at work)
but I found the administration tools where just not as smooth as the Gnome counterparts. Since this box is not primarily for me, I decided to go for the Gnome version for now.
This is admittedly not very scientific, since part of
my confusion with Kubuntu might have just been unfamiliarity with Ubuntu as whole; I just installed one Ubuntu box last week and that is the sum of my experience.
But then my other home box runs XFCE, so I guess I could
just be desktop-indifferent.
Now, Bob, you seem to think you're worth about twenty-five bucks. Because by the time I pay for my ticket and my wife's, we're getting into that range.
The Bush administration has even suggested making something like it mandatory for everyone who wants to access the Internet, which would scare me a lot if I thought the technology would actually work.
(Obligatory "USA not equal world" comment).
Or that all of the users of the internet are under the jurisdiction of the Bush administration.
I'm not saying they didn't say it, mind you.
I doubt Microsoft, IBM, General Motors, CitiBank, etc. would put up with that nor would any of the other many thousands of businesses and in short order, their money would do the talking to congressmen.
A rousing defence of the ideals of American
democracy!
Copy and paste rolling eyes emoticon
from previous post.
On a more serious note, it is possible that other nations do not need to "Clear and Present Danger" signals of the kind you mock in order to think that there is no particular reason that control of some evidently international system
should rest with the US Department of Commerce.
The question is not whether this is definitely going to lead to bad things, but whether this
expceptional situation is justified by something other than historical circumstances.
"You can't stop us" is fine as far as it goes,
but don't expect kudos from the crowd. "The war on terror", has alas, become a bit devalued as an
international currency.
Then you will be pleased to hear about my
new faith-based initiative to hand over management of the internet to church groups.
Just to show that this is not one of those wacky christian-right things, we will have a separate top
level domain ".heathen" to carry domains with Muslim, Jewish, and Catholic content.
OK I've seen six variations of the "Linus Torvalds system" proposed as jokes. But could this work seriously? Some combination of public key cryptography, along with strong antileeching facilities?
The idea is you donate 100G of drive space, and
in return you get some smaller amount of replicated
storage on other peoples' computer's.
I wouldn't sell this as an enterprise solution, but for home users, maybe it could work.
Maybe it could talk SMB and NFS.
OK, why not? I see upload speed and security as
the two obvious worries.
Well, surprisingly enough, KDE is not required. There is a project call korganizer-pi (pi=platform independant) that
runs without KDE. Indeed, it runs on Windows. The UI is a little less slick than the latest Korganizer, but it does e.g., allow me to sync my laptop and my zaurus to a server via ssh.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree that support for disconnected operation and merging is a "philosophical" issue, since it has a real positive impact on my one or two person projects. I know it sounds like a cult, but branch-and-merge is really really useful.
I do think that (as a few other people have mentioned) that svn is better at being a distributed, versioned file system, just because it supports subtree checkouts.
I don't think it is a direct patent suit from Microsoft that is likely, but rather suits from patent trolls, possibly with "moral" support from Microsoft.
People might find the views of a Canadian IP Lawyer interesting. He seems to think that the copyright claim is non-sense, and the official mark one likely won't fly based on recent Supreme court rulings.
I dunno much about either, but the copyright on an image from 1937 does seem like a stretch. Maybe someone should have some t-shirts printed and really rub it in.
Credit where credit is due: this comes via Michael Geist.
Well, more or less correct, except isn't "sudo -s" enabled by default? I don't have have a current Ubuntu install, but that is what I remember from D-animal or E-animal.
I really enjoyed the BBC (mini)-series, maybe even more than the book. The production values are a bit variable, but I thought it good fun. IIRC, the TV series was first in this case.
If it had 3G, I would have already sent them money. I might anyway, but it is painfull to have to choose between all
that cool stuff and fast data transfer.
Well, sometimes the Ubuntu installer does not work. That is how I ended up reverting to plain debian on my wife's core2 duo machine after a few days of struggling with the Ubuntu installer. No doubt someone else has had the opposite experience.
Truth to tell, I don't really notice that much difference between running Debian testing and Ubuntu. At least no-one at my house is longing for the days when we ran Ubuntu.
So I am curious, what fabulous things am I missing? Or maybe the fact I am a fairly experienced Debian user negates most of it.
I didn't mean to diss the people who wear the pagers. That would be dangerous :-)
:-), and when their billing system goes off line, they get tense in a a way that professors never have to. On the other hand, I am glad to say I never had to deal 70,000 MDs.
I believe you that your job is hard work, and stressful. I used to do IT support for medical doctors,
who have even bigger egos than professors
I guess my high level point, which maybe was obscured by the peculiar position of CS departments, is that outsourcing user-visible services is going to give ammunition to those that believe that there is fat in the IT budget. Because of tenure, the non-academic staff of a university are always the first to go in a crunch.
Hmm, well I agree that one shouldn't transfer Universities based on this as some other poster suggested.
On the other hand "let the Uni IT department do their job" is a two edged sword. I don't think University IT services are
anywhere near infallible, and they certainly can use (constructive) critisism. One thing that has astonished me is the degree to
which the fraction of the University budget consumed by the IT (or computing services, or whatever) seems to stay constant or increase while the actual services provided seem to go down. No doubt people on the inside have a different perspective, but
especially from a more DIY department like CS, it looks to us like they owe us a slice of their budget. Of course the politics are
complicated, but as far as I understand it, computing services does not want to take running the networks and labs that we do. Becaus e then it would cost them something, and we have no budget to give them.
So what does this have to do with the topic at hand?
Well, on our campus, email and public access labs are the only visible services provided by computing services (yes, I know they
run the network, but it is not clear everybody understands how expensive that is). So I think it would be bad politics for them
to eliminate (outsource) email.
You would drink whisky only 8 years old, and mixed with cola? You are a sick
bastard.
I won't argue about graphic layout; this is simply outside my expertise. But for making hypertext documents,
LaTeX+package hyperref+TeX4ht+pdflatex works extremely well and produces nice HTML and PDF documents from
the same source. For the working academic, the ability to take the same material and
format it as a web page, poster, presentation, and a paper is pretty valuable. I know that other packages
can do the same; I've never been very impressed with the quality of the PDF or HTML from Word.
Probably we are agreeing here, except that I wanted to note that there are a whole class of hyperlinked
documents for which LaTeX is a good solution (even ignoring the fact that it is the only thing I really know
how to use)
This is true, but there are certain tradeoffs involved in operating in a University environment
(I don't know the Community College environment so well). The basic tradeoff is less money
compared to what I would pull in in industry, and a (subjectively) more pleasant working environment. This includes being treated with a little more respect by IT. In particular,
I don't adapt my work environment very much for their convenience. On the other hand, I end up doing a certain amount of IT work myself. I agree that this is self-centered and a privilege; did I mention the lower pay ?:-)
In the sciences, that is almost precisely wrong as far as I can tell (and I realize you said "may"). Scientific software seems to come first to Linux, then an easy port to MacOS X,
then to Cygwin, and finally (maybe) to Windows natively. My experience is essentially with computation intensive things like optimization, symbolic algebra, and so on.
What current DSLR doesn't allow you complete manual control over the shutter and aperature if you want it? The Rebel XT certainly does (I have one). I got bored after I checked
(http://www.dpreview.com) the Nikon D50 and the Olympus E500, which both have a fill manual mode. Perhaps you are using DSLR to mean something different from most people, and what you
meant to say is that you cannot afford a DSLR, which is fair enough.
There probably isn't one set of application benchmarks that would make everyone happy. At least the SPECInt (as opposed the SPECFp) are reasonably predictive of tasks like compilation.
By the way, they used to have a deal where it was pretty cheap for CS departments to get a copy.
I tried it on my home box, (I run KDE on FreeBSD at work) but I found the administration tools where just not as smooth as the Gnome counterparts. Since this box is not primarily for me, I decided to go for the Gnome version for now. This is admittedly not very scientific, since part of my confusion with Kubuntu might have just been unfamiliarity with Ubuntu as whole; I just installed one Ubuntu box last week and that is the sum of my experience. But then my other home box runs XFCE, so I guess I could just be desktop-indifferent.
Probably I just lead a sheltered life
Read. It. Again.
Thank you.
tex4ht (as google) will work for plain TeX.
It basically processes the dvi file, so I doubt the
output is nice.
Copy and paste rolling eyes emoticon from previous post.
On a more serious note, it is possible that other nations do not need to "Clear and Present Danger" signals of the kind you mock in order to think that there is no particular reason that control of some evidently international system should rest with the US Department of Commerce. The question is not whether this is definitely going to lead to bad things, but whether this expceptional situation is justified by something other than historical circumstances.
"You can't stop us" is fine as far as it goes, but don't expect kudos from the crowd. "The war on terror", has alas, become a bit devalued as an international currency.
Then you will be pleased to hear about my new faith-based initiative to hand over management of the internet to church groups. Just to show that this is not one of those wacky christian-right things, we will have a separate top level domain ".heathen" to carry domains with Muslim, Jewish, and Catholic content.
Ask your pastor how you can help.
Think of the children!
OK I've seen six variations of the "Linus Torvalds system" proposed as jokes. But could this work seriously? Some combination of public key cryptography, along with strong antileeching facilities?
The idea is you donate 100G of drive space, and in return you get some smaller amount of replicated storage on other peoples' computer's.
I wouldn't sell this as an enterprise solution, but for home users, maybe it could work. Maybe it could talk SMB and NFS.
OK, why not? I see upload speed and security as the two obvious worries.
Well, surprisingly enough, KDE is not required. There is a project call korganizer-pi (pi=platform independant) that runs without KDE. Indeed, it runs on Windows. The UI is a little less slick than the latest Korganizer, but it does e.g., allow me to sync my laptop and my zaurus to a server via ssh.