I read somewhere that Adolf Hitler was really into Metropolis, and that he held it up as an example that all filmmakers should strive for. Food for thought.
I really don't think so. Fritz Lang was Jewish, his films were banned when Hitler came to power in 1933, and Fritz Lang himself emigrated from Germany allready in 1934. There was a rumor that Goebbels gave Fritz Lang the option of making film for the regime. Whether this were true or not is uncertain, but the offer was extremely unrealistic in any case; He would have ended up in a KZ camp sooner or later.
Oh, WordPerfect. The only Windows software I miss on Linux. Was a (paying) user since the 5.1 DOS version until around MS-Windows 2000. "Reveal codes" was a thing of beauty when handling lots of different documents form different pc's and platforms. Kerning etc. gave superior printresults compared to MS-Word. Had to ditch WP and stop recommending it to others since Corel never did update its dictionary since the DOS version in my native language.
I believe MS now owns a controlling share in the company now owning WP, IMHO mostly to prevent that WordPerfect gets ported to QT and becomes a multi-platform wordprocessor on both Windows, Linux and OSX.
AFAIK, the reason why faxes gained status as legally binding is because that it is very hard to falsify that a tele-communication transaction actually took place between to parties since the telecom industry keeps detailed logs. So in case of a business dispute that turns into a lawsuit, the court can request log files from a neutral 3. party. No such neutral 3. party logfiles existed for email.
Legally binding faxes doesn't give protection against 3. party frauds, but gives some measure of protection that a communication took place between two business partners. The fax signature is of course easily falsified, but AFAIK the reason they became accepted was because old well established laws governing falsifying signatures existed. It is easy to raise charges against someone who falsified a signature, whether on fax or paper, but what about altering the "From:" field in an email? There will also exist an original of the fax with the real signature on at the sender of the fax.
That faxes are legally binding has everything to do with system of justice and law suits/disputes between business partners, but not very much about security. If you want content security use a pgp-signed email, if you want security for being able to sue somebody for breach of contract use a fax.
Personally I think that the pdf files were dodgy from the beginning, but that the errors just show up when using newer generation pdf-viewing software. That could explain why it only seems to be very old files that are corrupted, a more random system error or a systematic software problem would corrupt newer files too.
Your suggestions are of course valid, it must considered a high priority to find out whether the system is corrupting the files, or if they were bad from the beginning.
If booting of a Linux CD isn't an option because it is perceived as "too technical" no other tool can help (even booting from a clean media wouldn't help against physical keyloggers or sniffers). A small Asus EEE PC with a encrypted SSD, grub/bios password and hidden away may allow the person to communicate in secret with some measurement of security against non-technical opponents with limited resources, if the person is able to use some kind of SSL proxy so that the data can't be sniffed easily. Tempest attacks or even simple hidden cameras may spoil even that.
However the Soviets were very interested in things like ESP... Not really I think. The CIA also researched parapsychic phenomenas like remote-viewing, but that hardly makes the US government/CIA to organisations that believed in paranormal and acted from them, unlike the Ahnenerbe organisation. Back to the topic; If there really is a plot device with a "crystal skull" with magic powers that Stalin and the KGB are after, then I think the film will be really, really lame. Just isn't "believable" as the Ark of Covenant device was. Well, just have to wait for the film to see.
Well the Russians fit the bill quite well. Around that time they were doing some horrific things to their own people. Shipping people off to siberia, or forced labor camps mining uranium, etc. They also had similar fascinations with mysticism that Hitler had so they even keep that element alive. Huh? Hitler never cared about occultism and even spoke out against it, it was Himmler that was driving force behind all that. The nazi archaeologist in the Indiana Jones movie was as also spoof/reference to Himmlers "Ahnenerbe" organisation. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenerbe/ It was fun and "believable" since there had been so many "Ahnenerbe"-like mystic conspiracy tales floating around since the war. Eg.Trevor Ravenscroft's Spear of Destiny etc.
That the Soviet Union (i.e the party cadre) was known to have streaks of mysticism is a new one for me. I really don't think one can find a soviet corresponding organisation like Ahnenerbe.
My choice of words weren't good since release can mean two things. What I meant was that Red Hat never has produced and released any closed or non-free software produced by Red Hat self on their distros. I believe that e.g. former SuSe had proprietary software made by them as part of their distro, AFAIK Xandros still does something similar. Several other Linux distroes tried to make money that way by producing proprietary software features other distros couldn't copy because of the licence or lack of source code, but never Red Hat. I was aware that the early Red Hat distros also included non-free software like Netscape etc, but it was third party software.
Why is it so common nowadays for linux distributions to include *BETA* software (as complex as a browser can be) in their releases? Sure, there can be some heavily tested and simple programs left as beta, but firefox? The web browser is a heavily used and substantial tool these days.. Nowadays? Linux distros have always (since RH 5.0 at least;-) ) included beta-quality software simply because their audience demanded it. Some distros are of course more bleeding edge/conservative than others.
The newest Fedora release are for people who wants the latest software available. If one wants a more stable Fedora release, get the previous release like Fedora 8; it has KDE 3.5.x, FF 2, etc.
That a distro like Fedora includes Firefox 3 Beta is also mean extra beta testers so perhaps a bug or two gets fixed before the final FF release (June I believe). And if FF 3 Beta are too broken for some tasks, then there a Konqueror (which I prefer), or elinks.
All kidding aside, I'm very surprised they went with KDE4. I've been playing around with it on Gentoo for several months now, and I could understand making it an option, but to not provide KDE3 out of the box at all (http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/en_US/sn-Desktop.html#sn-KDE) is shocking. I thought even the KDE folks were recommending waiting until 4.1. Oh well, Fedora always likes the latest and greatest. You got it the wrong way around, why should a distro like Fedora release make a release with KDE 3.5.x when KDE 4.0.3 is available. If one needs a stable KDE and OS, stay with Fedora 8. It will be supported for quite some time yet.
Some may think that Fedora moves too fast, but a lot of people really, really wants to work with the latest and most shiniest toys, even if they are somewhat less stable.
It's been a long time since I've heard any excitement about Fedora. The Linux buzz has moved on while RedHat lives in it's own little world, no longer cutting edge and as stuffy as Microsoft... Well, Mr. Frosty Piss, I really do think you have followed Fedora that closely; stuff like LVM, selinux tend to appear in Fedora before any other distro. This release has KDE 4.03, PackageKit, kernel modesetting, EXT4 (preview), OpenJDK 6 etc. If you don't find that stuff exciting hand over your geek card.
Me, a personally doesn't give a damn about "buzz", I want a nice solid but modern distro that is free as in free speech, and Fedora is just that.
Btw. next time you bad mouth Red Hat, which seems to be popular though lame attitude among certain people, just remember which Linux vendor who has contributed the most to make Linux what it is today, and how much Red Hat still contributes to core linux technology. And Red Hat has never, ever waivered in its support of Free, OSS software, and eg. released some proprietary closed source software as part of their distros,
So disappointing yet so simple to have fixed before release. Yeah, too bad no one with a affected Samsung HDD bothered to try one of the release candidates and file a bug report.
These are features I use every day while working on servers. KDE4 adds a lot of eyecandy (and a Vista-style 'start menu' - ick), but why remove useful functionality? Lots of KDE 3.5 features hasn't made it into 4.0 KDE yet. KDE 4.0 is bleeding edge just like Fedora 9 is.
Having the code is great, but this makes me want to know much more about who last edited that code. The great thing about the rpm package management system on Fedora and Red Hat is, that the source rpms always include the pristine, original sourcecode as provided by upstream. The rpm package of course also include separate patches and a.spec file that shows how the patches should be applied on the fly when the binary package is built. So if one didn't like the 'muppet.patch' included, one could always remove it before building the package. Much, much better than delivering a patched tarball.
AFAIK the Norton bin only gave protection for files deleted within the Windows environment, not if one used "delete *.*" from the "console", or if one shelled out to DOS. Anyway the FAT filesystem had no notion of "undelete" or any kind of delete protection, though some hacks could be used because the FAT filesystem was incredible badly designed and therefore technically didn't delete the file, but just the entry to it. But the cost of this design was among other things a really, really nasty tendency to have badly fragmented filesystems.
I don't think it makes sense to implement delete protection on the filesystem level, it should be done as KDE does it, and for those few that wants to delete files from the commandline, request a modified "rm" GNU tool, or use 'mv *.zap/tmp instead of 'rm *.zap' instead.
KDE allready has a trashcan or a "Protected Recycle Bin". If you choose so, all files user deleted within the KDE framework goes to the Trashcan instead, there is of course a slight speed penalty for doing this when deleting lots of files. But since it doesn't work at the system level there are no penalties in e.g. speed when the OS performs deletes of temporary files. So basically the ordinary KDE users using a GUI can have all the delete protection the user wants no matter what filessystem is being used.
I personally find a full-sized fully-functional laptop much better. You can get them around $500 right now, and most of them will browse the Internet and write up simple office documents quite well. The mini-laptops are nice as a third computer (desktop, laptop, mini-laptop), but like the SMART car, are only useful to those who can afford to have the third one as a luxury. I depends on ones needs; if you need an UMPC then the Asus eee pc's (700 and 900 series) are extremely good value for the money. I sometimes travel to different countries to work in archives. I really, really hate lugging a heavy full size laptop (besides all the other needed stuff like books) around town after work. I just want the smallest, lightest laptop available for e.g. travelling, but I don't want to pay a premium price either.
People often argue like you have done; why get a small eee pc when you can get a "real" laptop for just a little more? The point is that people that want the eee pc wants a cheap UMPC, not a luggable laptop. Two different markets entirely. TFA says intel estimates that 50 millions UMPC's will be sold within the next 3 years. Ausus estimate that they will sell perhaps 4 million eee pc's this year alone. Intel's new Atom series of cpu's for UMPC's are in extreme demand even before it is launched and are "sold out" at for most of this year allready. There definitely is a new market for UMPC's that is very different from the cheap full size laptop market.
Yeah I know synthetic tests are problematic, but the two tests gives contrary results. Is it because a MS Vista boot and reboot doesn't involve much random R/W and therefore doesn't shows the appearrent strength of SSD's? Or is it because an extremely low random access value on SSD's are offset by the fact that sequential R/W's are rare on SSD's because of wear-level algorithms? Or is it something else? Twice the read speed and 30 times the random access time ought to give some advantage.
An UMPC like Asus' eeepc is a perfect small and secure device for dealing with email on your vacation and they are cheap too. There are wi-fi hotspots many places and you could also use a bluetooth dongle so you could surf by using the mobile phone as a modem.
The experiment you took part in is an old one. I think A.R. Luria explained what is happening at these experiments sometimes in the early 1970's; The short version is, that what is measured with the electrodes/MRI etc, is nothing else but the body's "gearing up" for some action, and has nothing to do with free will.
You knew a square would appear (even at regular intervals), therefore your body and brain geared up for action (pressing the button). The same thing with a runner preparing for the start shot, or the batter waiting for the ball to be thrown; they gear up in anticipation, and that can be measured in both their muscles and their brain. Or to use a car analogy; a car gets faster out of the starting position if it starts with the motor running 2000 RPM instead of 0 RPM.
Benjamin Lippet (from the TFA) is the originator of these kinds of experiments and his original experiment was murdered in peer review. The TFA experiment is just a variation on Lippet, and therefore just as bad.
Among the many fallacies one has to buy into if accepting this experiment is that consciousness is just a projector screen for the subconscious (epiphenomenology) : What "you" see, hear or do is just a "film" of what happenend X seconds ago. Your consciousness is a computer screen (and not even a touchscreen;-) where the end results of the subconscious is displayed, and therefore NO feedback from you consciousness to your subconsciousness is possible. One has to wonder how these "no free will" pundits can explain why natural selection ever developed consciousness since it is used for nothing at all.
You really have to make some awesome software without any competition if you can force your costumers to use a 5 year old Linux desktop. Most likely they would just dump your software and move to another company that bothers to service their costumers. Server software, that's another case entirely.
Secondly, I find your 100.000 pc's with 50.000 pc's as _spares_ scenario rather detached from reality. Just trying to get the spare pc's to work after being unused for 3-4 years would put me of this scheme. I don't think it would make financial sense either to buy 50.000 pc's to save some software testing: 50.000 x 1000 US$ buys you a lot of testing, besides you bind capital into perhaps unneeded hardware for many years.
Anyway, with 100.000 pc's to manage I would like a nice support contract from the OS vendor, so I would choose a commercial distro like Red Hat og Novell/Suse, not use neither Debian nor Fedora.
Come on you can't be serious when you imply that yum and rpm doesn't work. I have been running linux since RH 4.2 and tried most RH and Fedora releases since then, and rpm has worked excellent for me all these years thank you. I notice you didn't bother to come up with a single argument or case to support your claim, and I guess you can't either. And don't show your Linux ignorance and try to pass of "rpm-dependency-hell" as an argument; circular dependencies are caused by incorrect packaging and can happen for apt/deb systems too.
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I read somewhere that Adolf Hitler was really into Metropolis, and that he held it up as an example that all filmmakers should strive for. Food for thought.
I really don't think so. Fritz Lang was Jewish, his films were banned when Hitler came to power in 1933, and Fritz Lang himself emigrated from Germany allready in 1934. There was a rumor that Goebbels gave Fritz Lang the option of making film for the regime. Whether this were true or not is uncertain, but the offer was extremely unrealistic in any case; He would have ended up in a KZ camp sooner or later.
--
Regards
Oh, WordPerfect. The only Windows software I miss on Linux. Was a (paying) user since the 5.1 DOS version until around MS-Windows 2000. "Reveal codes" was a thing of beauty when handling lots of different documents form different pc's and platforms. Kerning etc. gave superior printresults compared to MS-Word. Had to ditch WP and stop recommending it to others since Corel never did update its dictionary since the DOS version in my native language.
I believe MS now owns a controlling share in the company now owning WP, IMHO mostly to prevent that WordPerfect gets ported to QT and becomes a multi-platform wordprocessor on both Windows, Linux and OSX.
--
Regards
AFAIK, the reason why faxes gained status as legally binding is because that it is very hard to falsify that a tele-communication transaction actually took place between to parties since the telecom industry keeps detailed logs. So in case of a business dispute that turns into a lawsuit, the court can request log files from a neutral 3. party. No such neutral 3. party logfiles existed for email.
Legally binding faxes doesn't give protection against 3. party frauds, but gives some measure of protection that a communication took place between two business partners. The fax signature is of course easily falsified, but AFAIK the reason they became accepted was because old well established laws governing falsifying signatures existed. It is easy to raise charges against someone who falsified a signature, whether on fax or paper, but what about altering the "From:" field in an email? There will also exist an original of the fax with the real signature on at the sender of the fax.
That faxes are legally binding has everything to do with system of justice and law suits/disputes between business partners, but not very much about security. If you want content security use a pgp-signed email, if you want security for being able to sue somebody for breach of contract use a fax.
--
Regards
Personally I think that the pdf files were dodgy from the beginning, but that the errors just show up when using newer generation pdf-viewing software. That could explain why it only seems to be very old files that are corrupted, a more random system error or a systematic software problem would corrupt newer files too.
Your suggestions are of course valid, it must considered a high priority to find out whether the system is corrupting the files, or if they were bad from the beginning.
--
Regards
Here is a java command line tool designed to check the validity of 1000's of pdf files:
http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/Tools/pdf/Validate.html
There is also a tool for repairing some pdf errors:
http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/Tools/index.html
Never used it myself, just stumbled over it when I was searching for some pdf software.
--
Regards
If booting of a Linux CD isn't an option because it is perceived as "too technical" no other tool can help (even booting from a clean media wouldn't help against physical keyloggers or sniffers).
A small Asus EEE PC with a encrypted SSD, grub/bios password and hidden away may allow the person to communicate in secret with some measurement of security against non-technical opponents with limited resources, if the person is able to use some kind of SSL proxy so that the data can't be sniffed easily. Tempest attacks or even simple hidden cameras may spoil even that.
So, get a divorce instead.
--
Regards
Back to the topic; If there really is a plot device with a "crystal skull" with magic powers that Stalin and the KGB are after, then I think the film will be really, really lame. Just isn't "believable" as the Ark of Covenant device was. Well, just have to wait for the film to see.
--
Regards
It was fun and "believable" since there had been so many "Ahnenerbe"-like mystic conspiracy tales floating around since the war. Eg.Trevor Ravenscroft's Spear of Destiny etc.
That the Soviet Union (i.e the party cadre) was known to have streaks of mysticism is a new one for me. I really don't think one can find a soviet corresponding organisation like Ahnenerbe.
--
Regards
Well, my first "Troll" moderation.
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Regards
My choice of words weren't good since release can mean two things. What I meant was that Red Hat never has produced and released any closed or non-free software produced by Red Hat self on their distros. I believe that e.g. former SuSe had proprietary software made by them as part of their distro, AFAIK Xandros still does something similar. Several other Linux distroes tried to make money that way by producing proprietary software features other distros couldn't copy because of the licence or lack of source code, but never Red Hat.
I was aware that the early Red Hat distros also included non-free software like Netscape etc, but it was third party software.
--
Regards
Sure, there can be some heavily tested and simple programs left as beta, but firefox? The web browser is a heavily used and substantial tool these days.. Nowadays? Linux distros have always (since RH 5.0 at least;-) ) included beta-quality software simply because their audience demanded it. Some distros are of course more bleeding edge/conservative than others.
The newest Fedora release are for people who wants the latest software available. If one wants a more stable Fedora release, get the previous release like Fedora 8; it has KDE 3.5.x, FF 2, etc.
That a distro like Fedora includes Firefox 3 Beta is also mean extra beta testers so perhaps a bug or two gets fixed before the final FF release (June I believe).
And if FF 3 Beta are too broken for some tasks, then there a Konqueror (which I prefer), or elinks.
--
Regards
Some may think that Fedora moves too fast, but a lot of people really, really wants to work with the latest and most shiniest toys, even if they are somewhat less stable.
--
Regards
Me, a personally doesn't give a damn about "buzz", I want a nice solid but modern distro that is free as in free speech, and Fedora is just that.
Btw. next time you bad mouth Red Hat, which seems to be popular though lame attitude among certain people, just remember which Linux vendor who has contributed the most to make Linux what it is today, and how much Red Hat still contributes to core linux technology. And Red Hat has never, ever waivered in its support of Free, OSS software, and eg. released some proprietary closed source software as part of their distros,
--
Regards
So disappointing yet so simple to have fixed before release. Yeah, too bad no one with a affected Samsung HDD bothered to try one of the release candidates and file a bug report.
--
Regards
I bought myself a second hand Samsung ML-2510 printer that Samsung touted as "supported" under some Linux kernel version and later. You are not the only person that seems to have trouble with the binary drivers, look here:
http://www.openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Samsung-ML-2510_parallel_with_Samsung_PPD
http://www.openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Samsung-ML-2510
There seems to be some workaround though, so it should work.
Anyway, http://www.openprinting.org/ is a good place to start regarding printing support.
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Regards
but why remove useful functionality? Lots of KDE 3.5 features hasn't made it into 4.0 KDE yet. KDE 4.0 is bleeding edge just like Fedora 9 is.
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Regards
So if one didn't like the 'muppet.patch' included, one could always remove it before building the package. Much, much better than delivering a patched tarball.
--
Regards
AFAIK the Norton bin only gave protection for files deleted within the Windows environment, not if one used "delete *.*" from the "console", or if one shelled out to DOS. Anyway the FAT filesystem had no notion of "undelete" or any kind of delete protection, though some hacks could be used because the FAT filesystem was incredible badly designed and therefore technically didn't delete the file, but just the entry to it. But the cost of this design was among other things a really, really nasty tendency to have badly fragmented filesystems.
/tmp instead of 'rm *.zap' instead.
I don't think it makes sense to implement delete protection on the filesystem level, it should be done as KDE does it, and for those few that wants to delete files from the commandline, request a modified "rm" GNU tool, or use 'mv *.zap
--
Regards
KDE allready has a trashcan or a "Protected Recycle Bin". If you choose so, all files user deleted within the KDE framework goes to the Trashcan instead, there is of course a slight speed penalty for doing this when deleting lots of files. But since it doesn't work at the system level there are no penalties in e.g. speed when the OS performs deletes of temporary files. So basically the ordinary KDE users using a GUI can have all the delete protection the user wants no matter what filessystem is being used.
--
Regards
I just want the smallest, lightest laptop available for e.g. travelling, but I don't want to pay a premium price either.
People often argue like you have done; why get a small eee pc when you can get a "real" laptop for just a little more? The point is that people that want the eee pc wants a cheap UMPC, not a luggable laptop. Two different markets entirely. TFA says intel estimates that 50 millions UMPC's will be sold within the next 3 years. Ausus estimate that they will sell perhaps 4 million eee pc's this year alone. Intel's new Atom series of cpu's for UMPC's are in extreme demand even before it is launched and are "sold out" at for most of this year allready. There definitely is a new market for UMPC's that is very different from the cheap full size laptop market.
Is it because a MS Vista boot and reboot doesn't involve much random R/W and therefore doesn't shows the appearrent strength of SSD's? Or is it because an extremely low random access value on SSD's are offset by the fact that sequential R/W's are rare on SSD's because of wear-level algorithms? Or is it something else? Twice the read speed and 30 times the random access time ought to give some advantage.
--
Regards
An UMPC like Asus' eeepc is a perfect small and secure device for dealing with email on your vacation and they are cheap too. There are wi-fi hotspots many places and you could also use a bluetooth dongle so you could surf by using the mobile phone as a modem.
--
Regards
The experiment you took part in is an old one. I think A.R. Luria explained what is happening at these experiments sometimes in the early 1970's; The short version is, that what is measured with the electrodes/MRI etc, is nothing else but the body's "gearing up" for some action, and has nothing to do with free will.
You knew a square would appear (even at regular intervals), therefore your body and brain geared up for action (pressing the button). The same thing with a runner preparing for the start shot, or the batter waiting for the ball to be thrown; they gear up in anticipation, and that can be measured in both their muscles and their brain.
Or to use a car analogy; a car gets faster out of the starting position if it starts with the motor running 2000 RPM instead of 0 RPM.
Benjamin Lippet (from the TFA) is the originator of these kinds of experiments and his original experiment was murdered in peer review.
The TFA experiment is just a variation on Lippet, and therefore just as bad.
Among the many fallacies one has to buy into if accepting this experiment is that consciousness is just a projector screen for the subconscious (epiphenomenology) : What "you" see, hear or do is just a "film" of what happenend X seconds ago. Your consciousness is a computer screen (and not even a touchscreen;-) where the end results of the subconscious is displayed, and therefore NO feedback from you consciousness to your subconsciousness is possible.
One has to wonder how these "no free will" pundits can explain why natural selection ever developed consciousness since it is used for nothing at all.
--
Regards
You really have to make some awesome software without any competition if you can force your costumers to use a 5 year old Linux desktop. Most likely they would just dump your software and move to another company that bothers to service their costumers. Server software, that's another case entirely.
Secondly, I find your 100.000 pc's with 50.000 pc's as _spares_ scenario rather detached from reality. Just trying to get the spare pc's to work after being unused for 3-4 years would put me of this scheme. I don't think it would make financial sense either to buy 50.000 pc's to save some software testing: 50.000 x 1000 US$ buys you a lot of testing, besides you bind capital into perhaps unneeded hardware for many years.
Anyway, with 100.000 pc's to manage I would like a nice support contract from the OS vendor, so I would choose a commercial distro like Red Hat og Novell/Suse, not use neither Debian nor Fedora.
--
Regards
Come on you can't be serious when you imply that yum and rpm doesn't work.
I have been running linux since RH 4.2 and tried most RH and Fedora releases since then, and rpm has worked excellent for me all these years thank you.
I notice you didn't bother to come up with a single argument or case to support your claim, and I guess you can't either. And don't show your Linux ignorance and try to pass of "rpm-dependency-hell" as an argument; circular dependencies are caused by incorrect packaging and can happen for apt/deb systems too.
--
Regards