Can *anyone* look at the uuencoded, mime encoded, and other similarly mangled into 6bit, 70 character-per-line standards, and honestly tell me that Usenet was designed with binary file transmission in mind?
There are no Usenet binary transmission standards, just a few different hacks to make it work. If this guy's new hack makes it work better, good for him.
In the.iso naming conventions, I mean. Old Red Hat distributions generally made it clear on the FTP site which CDs were needed for install and which were source. This time I couldn't tell for sure what was what, so I wasted a couple gigabytes of some poor mirror sites' bandwidth.
I want SRPM CDs included when I buy boxed sets from you guys, but when I'm doing an install from the internet I'm happier just pulling the few packages I specifically want source code for rather than the entire OS source.
By the way, I'm posting from 7.2.92 right now; no problems with it yet. Even installing without removing any Ximian packages first doesn't seem to have caused any problems. Good work.
I agree that "tarball+spec file" in general beats "SRPM", but you can rebuild SRPMs in one step with "rpm --rebuild whatever.src.rpm"; this has the advantage of cleaning up the spec file and source/patch files after they've been successfully compiled.
I hereby declare that I and everyone I know form a conglomerate "organization", and as such we will only be purchasing copyrighted material collectively in the future. Because we will only be redistributing this material within our own organization, and not to anyone outside it, we should be exempt from copyright restrictions, right?
Mozilla seems to be pretty efficient CPU-wise, finally, but it's still a huge memory hog (I've seen 0.9.x versions have problems on systems with 128MB of RAM!), and once it starts needing swap space, that CPU efficiency goes out the window.
What do you mean by "settled"? Those of us who "believe the Slashdot propaganda" don't consider 'Microsoft did illegal things, agreed not to do them again if they wouldn't get prosecuted, then did them again' to be much of a settlement.
Exactly how big would an archive that takes "tonnes and tonnes of these tapes" be if it were put onto paper? How much would it cost to store? Do you think people would still pay to store it for 20 years if they did not need it?
How "extremely slow by todays standards" are human beings reading paper? My guess would be hundreds of times slower than the most obsolete tape reader.
KDE 3 will be out this spring! Although KDE 1 and 2 are out, they should probably be ignored just like Windows before version 3, Internet Explorer before version 4, and so on. Hasn't Microsoft taught us that the first versions of any software are completely useless? That people who try them are just dooming themselves to expensive retraining and conversions when the interfaces and file formats all get switched around? Clearly this "KDE" thing must just be starting to work out the bugs, if they're not even at version 3 yet.
Apparantly I'm "Roy Stogner" in the (emailed) comment text, but "Stonere, Roy" in the index.
I do appreciate this level of openness by the DOJ, but it would be more convenient for all involved if they just put a "We're goddamn morons" disclaimer at the top of the page, rather than requiring us to perform significant investigation to ascertain that ourselves.
Searching for "Roy Stogner", roystgnr, or permutations thereof comes up empty. I'm not too disappointed: I suppose if they weren't going to pay attention to my comment anyway, not reading it at all isn't too big a step down.
Apparantly one or two of our denser moderators believe that talking about the disappearance of a discussion on Slashdot about censorship by Slashdot editors can't have anything to do with a story about censorship and the internet.
I'm sure this is a "user generated stories disappear after a while" problem and not "this particular story is being suppressed", but it still sounds ontopic enough for me.
Offer the same content for a nominal fee (say $1.00, or 1 Euro) without any commercial content.
When I digitally record television on my own, it takes me maybe five minutes to cut out the commercials. At least one person downloading your free commercial laden programs will decide that a dollar is worth more than five minutes of his time, and the commercial-free copy he makes will then be available for everybody else as well.
Similar approaches could be used by the recording industry, if they were intelligent enough to get their heads out of their asses and stop persuing copy prevention schemes which have been demonstrated both empirically and mathematically to NOT work, and instead embed the purchaser's name and/or ip in the audio stream itself.
This is called a "watermark", and the recording industry is putting a lot of research into failed attempts to figure out how to make such an embedding unremovable, despite the fact that such a thing seems to be mathematically impossible.
Fox just doesn't have enough room in it's busy schedule full of quality programming to squeeze in Futurama! Why, look at the Austin affiliate's jam packed lineup tonight:
The Teenage Sex and Drugs Hour (Formerly titled "That 70's Show" and "Undeclared")
24 (Sure, there are rumors that this could go away and empty up an hour of space soon, but who knows: they could rename it "48" and surprise you!)
Fox 7 News at Nine (This takes up a whole hour, of course, because you just can't shave any time out of a local news channel and still preserve Fox's world-renowned reputation for journalistic depth and integrity. Tonight's banner headline from www.fox7.com: "Back pain can be excruciating!")
Um, er, well... that's it for current programming. But they surround it with four hours of reruns (allowing them to spend less on expensive new programming, and pass the savings on to you, the viewer!), "Fox 7 News at Five" (for the hour full of important breaking stories that just can't wait until 9), and the late night rerun of "Fox 7 News at Nine".
And it goes on like that, night after night! Why would they want to air a clone of a successful Fox show like The Simpsons, when they can air "That 80's Show"? And have you seen the fan base behind "Grounded for Life"? You can't do a single search on Morpheus without tripping over DivX episodes of that runaway hit. And let's not forget the lucrative DVD revenues from "Titus"!
Basically, there's no place for Futurama in the Fox lineup anymore. Saturday night is locked down with "Human Scum TV", craftily filling in the space between COPS and America's Most Wanted with COPS reruns! So what are they going to do? If only Fox was running three other humorous adult animation shows to fill out the rest of two hours, perhaps they'd be able to create some sort of thematically unified lineup, but where would they find three shows like that on short notice?
If you see a Linux kernel crash, it is either hardware failure or a kernel failure. Since hardware failures (especially RAM and power supply) can be imposssible to repeat, the only way to prove that it is a kernel failure is to find the kernel bug. If you find the kernel bug, then the bug gets fixed, and suddenly your crash data is for an obsolete kernel.
You could try to take a statistical run at it, of course, but I suspect the number of machines required to give meaningful results would be on the order of Google's farm.
Copy control signals (for various reasons Slashdot has discussed to death) just won't work. If I can see it and hear it, I can copy it.
What will happen instead is what we're already seeing. TV station logos planted on top of shows, opaque and animated so they can't be edited out. Video squished, bent, and overlayed to accomodate advertisements while the show is actually playing. Scenes cut out of reruns so you'll have to buy the DVD set to get the whole show.
The only way to ruin TV copying is to ruin TV. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to bother anyone doing it.
To this reporter, Carmack isn't using OpenGL, an existing 3D graphics standard which Microsoft refused to adopt in favor of their (for years inferior) attempt to lock programmers in to DirectX, he's using "his own graphics technology" which is "almost like a religious thing for him".
You missed his point. He wasn't refering to inventions that can be described digitally, instead he was talking about "invertions" that consist of digital information.
You missed his point. All inventions consist of digital information. For example, want to guess what percentage of patented mechanical ideas can be completely specified with a CAD file? In general, anything I can communicate to you can be completely communicated digitally (that's why this "Internet" thing is so useful), and anything patentable has to be communicated to the patent office.
How much work is a LinuxPPC port?
on
A Loki Timeline
·
· Score: 2
If you have a game that uses the same source for Windows and Macintosh, and you port it to Linux APIs, then the Mac port means it's already endian-agnostic, and so the LinuxPPC port is basically a matter of "copy source to LinuxPPC machine, run make". How much effort is being wasted there?
Tens of thousands of researchers (yes, including federally funded ones) have been working on cancer treatment, in an effort that has gone on longer than anyone here has been alive. This could be because:
a. Evil capitalist greed is preventing the publication of the many potential cures that are right around the corner.
b. Curing cancer is a really hard problem.
I understand why you're angry enough to guess "a", but I don't think you're right.
The "metric buttload" is logical and has been used by just about everyone for centuries, but the "Imperial buttload" is kept alive by backwards Americans who can't bear to teach their children things they don't really understand themselves.
Can you tell me where a piece of paper dropped off a skyscraper will land?
The weather in low earth orbit is just as unpredictable as the weather at the ground, and just as variable. The density of the atmosphere around satellites (and thus the drag force on them) can vary by an order of magnitude. If the satellite loses orientation (which it is essentially certain to as drag forces overcome tidal or powered stabilization) then its coefficient of drag changes as well, and unpredictably when it rotates. It may not even have just drag acting on it; even in orbit an angled surface can produce just as much lift as drag, and when the satellite hits the atmosphere its shape could produce more lift than drag.
And of course, for every second by which the atmosphere delays reentry, the satellite has moved 5 miles in its orbit. 5 mi/s * 3600 s/hr * 9 hr gives a nice 160,000 mile strip of possible landing sites, crossing around and around the whole globe. If you'd like to gamble about the probability of something being hit by one of the chunks, though, I suggest placing your money on "no".
The state of DVD playback on Linux is not what it is on Windows.
You mean, "legal"? It's hard to carry on development of legitimate software when a crucial chunk of hit has to be distributed anonymously through Geocities.
Slashdot Mirror
Can *anyone* look at the uuencoded, mime encoded, and other similarly mangled into 6bit, 70 character-per-line standards, and honestly tell me that Usenet was designed with binary file transmission in mind?
There are no Usenet binary transmission standards, just a few different hacks to make it work. If this guy's new hack makes it work better, good for him.
In the .iso naming conventions, I mean. Old Red Hat distributions generally made it clear on the FTP site which CDs were needed for install and which were source. This time I couldn't tell for sure what was what, so I wasted a couple gigabytes of some poor mirror sites' bandwidth.
I want SRPM CDs included when I buy boxed sets from you guys, but when I'm doing an install from the internet I'm happier just pulling the few packages I specifically want source code for rather than the entire OS source.
By the way, I'm posting from 7.2.92 right now; no problems with it yet. Even installing without removing any Ximian packages first doesn't seem to have caused any problems. Good work.
I agree that "tarball+spec file" in general beats "SRPM", but you can rebuild SRPMs in one step with "rpm --rebuild whatever.src.rpm"; this has the advantage of cleaning up the spec file and source/patch files after they've been successfully compiled.
I hereby declare that I and everyone I know form a conglomerate "organization", and as such we will only be purchasing copyrighted material collectively in the future. Because we will only be redistributing this material within our own organization, and not to anyone outside it, we should be exempt from copyright restrictions, right?
Mozilla seems to be pretty efficient CPU-wise, finally, but it's still a huge memory hog (I've seen 0.9.x versions have problems on systems with 128MB of RAM!), and once it starts needing swap space, that CPU efficiency goes out the window.
What do you mean by "settled"? Those of us who "believe the Slashdot propaganda" don't consider 'Microsoft did illegal things, agreed not to do them again if they wouldn't get prosecuted, then did them again' to be much of a settlement.
Exactly how big would an archive that takes "tonnes and tonnes of these tapes" be if it were put onto paper? How much would it cost to store? Do you think people would still pay to store it for 20 years if they did not need it?
How "extremely slow by todays standards" are human beings reading paper? My guess would be hundreds of times slower than the most obsolete tape reader.
KDE 3 will be out this spring! Although KDE 1 and 2 are out, they should probably be ignored just like Windows before version 3, Internet Explorer before version 4, and so on. Hasn't Microsoft taught us that the first versions of any software are completely useless? That people who try them are just dooming themselves to expensive retraining and conversions when the interfaces and file formats all get switched around? Clearly this "KDE" thing must just be starting to work out the bugs, if they're not even at version 3 yet.
Apparantly I'm "Roy Stogner" in the (emailed) comment text, but "Stonere, Roy" in the index.
I do appreciate this level of openness by the DOJ, but it would be more convenient for all involved if they just put a "We're goddamn morons" disclaimer at the top of the page, rather than requiring us to perform significant investigation to ascertain that ourselves.
Searching for "Roy Stogner", roystgnr, or permutations thereof comes up empty. I'm not too disappointed: I suppose if they weren't going to pay attention to my comment anyway, not reading it at all isn't too big a step down.
Apparantly one or two of our denser moderators believe that talking about the disappearance of a discussion on Slashdot about censorship by Slashdot editors can't have anything to do with a story about censorship and the internet.
I'm sure this is a "user generated stories disappear after a while" problem and not "this particular story is being suppressed", but it still sounds ontopic enough for me.
I need two bits for my own codec. I find that
00
fully rounds out the Britney experience.
Offer the same content for a nominal fee (say $1.00, or 1 Euro) without any commercial content.
When I digitally record television on my own, it takes me maybe five minutes to cut out the commercials. At least one person downloading your free commercial laden programs will decide that a dollar is worth more than five minutes of his time, and the commercial-free copy he makes will then be available for everybody else as well.
Similar approaches could be used by the recording industry, if they were intelligent enough to get their heads out of their asses and stop persuing copy prevention schemes which have been demonstrated both empirically and mathematically to NOT work, and instead embed the purchaser's name and/or ip in the audio stream itself.
This is called a "watermark", and the recording industry is putting a lot of research into failed attempts to figure out how to make such an embedding unremovable, despite the fact that such a thing seems to be mathematically impossible.
Didn't know what to say to that.
Well, duh. Two words:
"Prove it!"
And it goes on like that, night after night! Why would they want to air a clone of a successful Fox show like The Simpsons, when they can air "That 80's Show"? And have you seen the fan base behind "Grounded for Life"? You can't do a single search on Morpheus without tripping over DivX episodes of that runaway hit. And let's not forget the lucrative DVD revenues from "Titus"!
Basically, there's no place for Futurama in the Fox lineup anymore. Saturday night is locked down with "Human Scum TV", craftily filling in the space between COPS and America's Most Wanted with COPS reruns! So what are they going to do? If only Fox was running three other humorous adult animation shows to fill out the rest of two hours, perhaps they'd be able to create some sort of thematically unified lineup, but where would they find three shows like that on short notice?
Kind of like "The Net" for math....
And then you threw them away and replaced them with much more pithy, accurate words. Thank you!
If you see a Linux kernel crash, it is either hardware failure or a kernel failure. Since hardware failures (especially RAM and power supply) can be imposssible to repeat, the only way to prove that it is a kernel failure is to find the kernel bug. If you find the kernel bug, then the bug gets fixed, and suddenly your crash data is for an obsolete kernel.
You could try to take a statistical run at it, of course, but I suspect the number of machines required to give meaningful results would be on the order of Google's farm.
Copy control signals (for various reasons Slashdot has discussed to death) just won't work. If I can see it and hear it, I can copy it.
What will happen instead is what we're already seeing. TV station logos planted on top of shows, opaque and animated so they can't be edited out. Video squished, bent, and overlayed to accomodate advertisements while the show is actually playing. Scenes cut out of reruns so you'll have to buy the DVD set to get the whole show.
The only way to ruin TV copying is to ruin TV. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to bother anyone doing it.
To this reporter, Carmack isn't using OpenGL, an existing 3D graphics standard which Microsoft refused to adopt in favor of their (for years inferior) attempt to lock programmers in to DirectX, he's using "his own graphics technology" which is "almost like a religious thing for him".
You missed his point. He wasn't refering to inventions that can be described digitally, instead he was talking about "invertions" that consist of digital information.
You missed his point. All inventions consist of digital information. For example, want to guess what percentage of patented mechanical ideas can be completely specified with a CAD file? In general, anything I can communicate to you can be completely communicated digitally (that's why this "Internet" thing is so useful), and anything patentable has to be communicated to the patent office.
If you have a game that uses the same source for Windows and Macintosh, and you port it to Linux APIs, then the Mac port means it's already endian-agnostic, and so the LinuxPPC port is basically a matter of "copy source to LinuxPPC machine, run make". How much effort is being wasted there?
However, look at the situation:
Tens of thousands of researchers (yes, including federally funded ones) have been working on cancer treatment, in an effort that has gone on longer than anyone here has been alive. This could be because:
a. Evil capitalist greed is preventing the publication of the many potential cures that are right around the corner.
b. Curing cancer is a really hard problem.
I understand why you're angry enough to guess "a", but I don't think you're right.
The "metric buttload" is logical and has been used by just about everyone for centuries, but the "Imperial buttload" is kept alive by backwards Americans who can't bear to teach their children things they don't really understand themselves.
Can you tell me where a piece of paper dropped off a skyscraper will land?
The weather in low earth orbit is just as unpredictable as the weather at the ground, and just as variable. The density of the atmosphere around satellites (and thus the drag force on them) can vary by an order of magnitude. If the satellite loses orientation (which it is essentially certain to as drag forces overcome tidal or powered stabilization) then its coefficient of drag changes as well, and unpredictably when it rotates. It may not even have just drag acting on it; even in orbit an angled surface can produce just as much lift as drag, and when the satellite hits the atmosphere its shape could produce more lift than drag.
And of course, for every second by which the atmosphere delays reentry, the satellite has moved 5 miles in its orbit. 5 mi/s * 3600 s/hr * 9 hr gives a nice 160,000 mile strip of possible landing sites, crossing around and around the whole globe. If you'd like to gamble about the probability of something being hit by one of the chunks, though, I suggest placing your money on "no".
The state of DVD playback on Linux is not what it is on Windows.
You mean, "legal"? It's hard to carry on development of legitimate software when a crucial chunk of hit has to be distributed anonymously through Geocities.