I have a rather "complicated" set up, but it mostly works:
I set up 'redmon'*, add a postscript printer from the windows printer drivers database, and redirect the output to ghostscript which has a ps2pdf utility.
Debian Testing/Unstable has a mode of "keeping packages reasonably current so that you never have to do a mass-update or complete reinstall." Of course, eventually stable "releases" are made, but if you stay in the Unstable branch, there are no "releases" and packages keep get updated.
As for your "package conflicts" problem, I've used Debian extensively for years, and I've never really encountered any "package conflicts". The dependency hell problem in RPM systems was mainly due to poor release quality and intermingling of RPMs built for different distros. I doubt it's an inherent problem of binary package systems.
RTFM is exactly what you're paid to do as an admin and if you're not doing it before every upgrade and better yet testing the upgrades on a separate server before they break thousands of users you have only your self to blame.
I agree I'd be a bit more cautious than the grandparent when performing major upgrades to a production system. But then not all sysadmins are full time sysadmins with no other tasks. In a small software company, the developers are sometimes the sysadmins too.
> Give me one good reason why I should not cite an encyclopedia for commonly availible, non-contraversial > information? > I double freakin dog dare you.
I suppose you don't need to cite such "commonly available, non-controversial information" things in the first place, unless such information is a significant part of your thesis, and in that case you'd need to cite primary sources anyway.
The only situation in which you need to cite "commonly available, non-controversial information" is when the teacher wants you to learn how to cite references, in which case (s)he'd probably want you to learn how to use the library as well.
I'd rather get my dream fulfilled than get a job I dislike.
Well I suppose if the less talented people among our species find their own means to survive, most people here on slashdot shouldn't have a really big problem even if they started to focus on earning "real money" a bit late.
The REAL question is, if there were people watching him perform this "feat", they should have rescued him when he was submerged. And if there weren't people watching him... who knows exactly why he was drowned?
Re:Not so funny candidate--Christine Boskoff
on
Darwin Awards 2006
·
· Score: 1
> So why aren't we all laughing at that?
Because it's not humorous/entertaining? I mean, many people die from these expeditions, but I would bet that not many would intentionally fly a kite in a thunderstorm...
> The difference is that folks such as the FSF believe that the social fabric matters. They believe that patent > landmines hinder software development, for example. They believe that sharing ideas, rather than holding them > close to the vest, helps us all.
Actually, almost everybody in OSS believes this. The difference is only that the FSF guys are much more fanatical on pushing their "freedom" agenda, whereas others just want to code with minimal fuss.
A genuine question I'd like to ask: why even bother to bear the name of Christianity, when you(r mother) does not believe in the most basic tenet of Christianity?
The problem was not Christianity, but the tightly held monopoly of the Church of Rome that kept its people in the dark about the truths of scripture while allowing corrupt people to wield incredible power. The crusaders were told that they would be "forgiven of all sins" if they went on the crusade, and in their ignorance, they did not know that Jesus gave forgiveness freely for sins confessed (you don't even need a priest). Thus the religion was subverted and misused to the profit of greedy men. As I said, it had very little to do with the religion of Christianity and everything to do with the corruption of man.
I think what you might have missed is the possibility that religion provides the environment for such corruption to exist (I'm not saying it definitely is the case though). Just as a warm, wet environment is not a problem in itself, it provides a suitable environment for pathogens to strive. For example, why was Christianity (along with most Abrahamic religions) subverted and misused? I, for example, have not heard any subversions on such a grand scale for religions such as Daoism, ancestral worship, etc (I'm a Chinese).
Personally, I think the notion that there exists a concrete, absolute truth (i.e. "God"), and that one should simply believe in it without questioning its authority is the source of the problem. It provides the ingredients (note: not "cause", there is a difference) that allow a person to throw away all notions of rationality and empathy in the name of the "truth". Which is why you don't see as many "fundamentalists" for non-religious people, or even for religions which are not so assertive of its absolute truth (eg. see religions which originated in China for example -- Taoist, Confucianism, etc).
Seeing that you're now rated at -1 Troll I should not have replied, but somehow your bait seems tasty. I'll bite.
Atheists believe the only consequence to actions in life is if you get caught or at the very worst, guilt.
This argument gets repeated over and over and over again. OK. First of all I'm what you'd call an "atheist". Yes basically I believe "the only consequence to actions in life is if you get caught or at the very worst, guilt".
Yet, the fact that some people think this is not enough scares me. Personally, guilt is quite adequate to deter me from doing anything bad to other people when I am tempted to do so. And to know that for some people, "guilt" is not enough and that they need deterrence in the form of some external metaphysical entity scares me. I wonder what horrors they will commit if one day they suddenly decide not to believe in God, or suddenly realize that there are numerous loopholes which supposedly "clear their record" after they have "sinned".
I agree with the last, but the other portions are just as engrained in todays 'christian' beliefs as if it says in the Bible "Take up guns and smite thy neighbor". Bullshit. These people are not Christians, nor should you believe they are.
I don't have a bible at hand, but I'm sure you could find phrases to that effect somewhere in the Old Testament. Not that I'm saying most Christians believe in hatred, but it might shed some light on where the hatred comes from.
(I have a personal theory that hidden emotions in human culture (including religions) get somehow transferred from generation to generation like recessive genes, and occasionally manifest and wreck havoc)
But Gnumeric really is an Excel clone, just as OOo Calc is an Excel clone. I'd argue Gnumeric is a better Excel clone than OOo Calc, but it's still just an Excel clone. Can you name me an open source spreadsheet-like program that is not an Excel clone? What this would look like, I don't know. I've often wondered if there is a "Unix way" to do spreadsheets--that is, a way to put data in a plain text file and then do analysis on it.
The downside is that you'll have to explain what " public class " is. What " public static void " means.
The best intro language remains to be pascal. I don't know why people get so fed up with it. Sure it's not as powerful or as popular as C/C++/Java, it's a bit verbose, but the language is clean and readable.
Re:Fedora's pace is just right for me
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
I have servers running stable, and even old-stable (woody).
Tell me what features your cutting edge system would give me on those production machines, and we'll talk.
And by the way, the singled out one or two packages which are not in stable can be probably found at backports.org
A two year old distro is actually not that old by present day measures. WinXP was made in 2001, and nobody seems to be saying that it's too old (even SP2 is more than two years old).
Perhaps I'm getting old, but I fail to see the reason to get the latest and greatest unless it has a feature that I desperately want. A few years ago it used to be that packages 6 months ago were lacking so many features that it wasn't even usable, but these days things have arguably stabilized and you probably will be hard pressed to find any differences between a package six months ago and a bleeding edge package today.
A patent for, say, a polynomial time solution to the travelling salesman problem should not be invalidated because we know how to solve the problem for the special cases of the problem (eg. a graph with two vertices)
I'm not saying that software patents make sense, but your argument why this particular claim should fail does not hold.
The article should be titled "What's *Right* With The FOSS Community".
Lack of vision? He cites GNOME as an example. Well if GNOME isn't good enough, we have XFCE, KDE, and what not. If GNOME evolves to become an utter failure, some other project will definitely take its place. This is a *strength* of OSS.
He cites XFree as another example. (Despite the fact that XFree was using a more "Cathedral" model than a "Bazaar" model). He even acknowledges that a successful fork (X.Org) was made. This example actually proves two things: 1. the Cathedral model doesn't work (at least in this case), 2. Failing projects will get revived through forking. That shows again the *strength* of OSS.
Contrast this to Microsoft. Despite what the anti-MS zealots are saying, Microsoft is still doing an OK job in its main products (Windows, Office, etc.). But what if one day their products gets a hundred times worse than now (think something akin to WinME), what can we (or the MS fanboys) do? We can't just take their source code and fork it, and there aren't even viable drop-in alternatives available -- a failure at Microsoft could bring down the whole ecosystem once and for all. (yes you can move to linux, but that actually proves the point -- the MS ecosystem will perish)
Your suggestion is fundamentally flawed on moral, cultural, and practical grounds.
There have been a number of good replies from fellow slashdotters, so I'm not going to repeat all that.
A few things that I'd want to add:
Firstly, you must understand that there are some expressions which could be easily expressed in one language and extremely difficult in another, due to the grammar, available vocabulary, perceptions of aesthetic for the language and so on. If you don't believe me, try translating a page of complex mathematical symbols (a specialized niche language) into English, and tell me English is better for all applications.
Using your TCP/IP analogy, you must be aware that above TCP/IP there are a multitude of different protocols for different applications. HTTP for the "WWW", FTP for lame file transfers, SMTP/IMAP/POP3 for email (three!), telnet/SSH for remote shell access (two!), and so on. Your suggestion that everybody ought to speak English is like the efforts to move everything onto port 80 -- yeah things become more "standardized", but having everything served in HTTP isn't necessarily a good thing.
Secondly, on what grounds do you prohibit people from speaking whatever language they want? For one, it's against free speech. And why English? Some fellow slashdotters have suggested Esperanto. Why not that instead?
Thirdly, as I am sure you have noticed, your proposal is absolutely impractical. Good luck on getting the 1.3 billion people in China to agree with you. Actually they are having trouble in getting those 1.3 billion people to agree on a single dialect (Mandarin), and people do speak their local dialect from time to time. EVEN if you have overcome that hurdle, language changes and evolves, and unless there is a strong link of communication between different local regions, the language will eventually evolve into different paths.
Ever heard of search engines? hyperlinks? Bookmarks? Copy and paste? Keyboard layout switching? Input methods?
Tell me you actually type things like this: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207712&op=Repl y&threshold=0&commentsort=3&mode=thread&pid=169325 84 into your browser URL textbox, and only then maybe your point is valid.
Perhaps you'll find it inconvenient, but if you can't find a way to enter (for example) Chinese characters into your system, chances are that you probably don't read it anyway, and the intended audience of that website is not you.
Suppose instead of somebody using your code, they write their own implementation, which probably contain as many bugs as your first version. In the meantime, your code is already at v0.6.2 and has dozens of important bug fixes.
Developers who use other's code and are concerned about security should regularly check whether there are upstream fixes to the reused code.
Legal documents these days are long enough to begin with. You must have seen how long EULA's can be. Now, do you REALLY want to go through, not only one, but MULTIPLE documents of even greater length?
No thanks.
Didn't the grandparent poster say: "Right now, I'm sitting in the UIUC Law Library, looking at two hundred volumes that comprise legislative history going back to the early 1900s... and that's just abridged stuff." Well, I'm pretty sure it doesn't cover everything to the point of absolute clarity. So do you want to have a few more hundred volumes of these stuff? Who's going to read through all of them?
Besides, the real world is a lot more illogical than your computer is. There will *always* be grey areas which are impossible to resolve. A computer logically comprises discrete bits. The real world is for all practical purposes a continuum.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a rather "complicated" set up, but it mostly works:
I set up 'redmon'*, add a postscript printer from the windows printer drivers database, and redirect the output to ghostscript which has a ps2pdf utility.
* http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/
Heard of Debian?
Debian Testing/Unstable has a mode of "keeping packages reasonably current so that you never have to do a mass-update or complete reinstall." Of course, eventually stable "releases" are made, but if you stay in the Unstable branch, there are no "releases" and packages keep get updated.
As for your "package conflicts" problem, I've used Debian extensively for years, and I've never really encountered any "package conflicts". The dependency hell problem in RPM systems was mainly due to poor release quality and intermingling of RPMs built for different distros. I doubt it's an inherent problem of binary package systems.
RTFM is exactly what you're paid to do as an admin and if you're not doing it before every upgrade and better yet testing the upgrades on a separate server before they break thousands of users you have only your self to blame.
I agree I'd be a bit more cautious than the grandparent when performing major upgrades to a production system. But then not all sysadmins are full time sysadmins with no other tasks. In a small software company, the developers are sometimes the sysadmins too.
> Give me one good reason why I should not cite an encyclopedia for commonly availible, non-contraversial
> information?
> I double freakin dog dare you.
I suppose you don't need to cite such "commonly available, non-controversial information" things in the first place, unless such information is a significant part of your thesis, and in that case you'd need to cite primary sources anyway.
The only situation in which you need to cite "commonly available, non-controversial information" is when the teacher wants you to learn how to cite references, in which case (s)he'd probably want you to learn how to use the library as well.
I'd rather get my dream fulfilled than get a job I dislike.
Well I suppose if the less talented people among our species find their own means to survive, most people here on slashdot shouldn't have a really big problem even if they started to focus on earning "real money" a bit late.
The difference? You're a human, not a beast. You should know better.
The REAL question is, if there were people watching him perform this "feat", they should have rescued him when he was submerged. And if there weren't people watching him... who knows exactly why he was drowned?
> So why aren't we all laughing at that?
Because it's not humorous/entertaining? I mean, many people die from these expeditions, but I would bet that not many would intentionally fly a kite in a thunderstorm...
> The difference is that folks such as the FSF believe that the social fabric matters. They believe that patent
> landmines hinder software development, for example. They believe that sharing ideas, rather than holding them
> close to the vest, helps us all.
Actually, almost everybody in OSS believes this. The difference is only that the FSF guys are much more fanatical on pushing their "freedom" agenda, whereas others just want to code with minimal fuss.
A genuine question I'd like to ask: why even bother to bear the name of Christianity, when you(r mother) does not believe in the most basic tenet of Christianity?
After reading your question and thinking for a while, I come up with this ingenious argument:
;-p
I reject the notions of logic and rationality.
There.
The problem was not Christianity, but the tightly held monopoly of the Church of Rome that kept its people in the dark about the truths of scripture while allowing corrupt people to wield incredible power. The crusaders were told that they would be "forgiven of all sins" if they went on the crusade, and in their ignorance, they did not know that Jesus gave forgiveness freely for sins confessed (you don't even need a priest). Thus the religion was subverted and misused to the profit of greedy men. As I said, it had very little to do with the religion of Christianity and everything to do with the corruption of man.
I think what you might have missed is the possibility that religion provides the environment for such corruption to exist (I'm not saying it definitely is the case though). Just as a warm, wet environment is not a problem in itself, it provides a suitable environment for pathogens to strive. For example, why was Christianity (along with most Abrahamic religions) subverted and misused? I, for example, have not heard any subversions on such a grand scale for religions such as Daoism, ancestral worship, etc (I'm a Chinese).
Personally, I think the notion that there exists a concrete, absolute truth (i.e. "God"), and that one should simply believe in it without questioning its authority is the source of the problem. It provides the ingredients (note: not "cause", there is a difference) that allow a person to throw away all notions of rationality and empathy in the name of the "truth". Which is why you don't see as many "fundamentalists" for non-religious people, or even for religions which are not so assertive of its absolute truth (eg. see religions which originated in China for example -- Taoist, Confucianism, etc).
Seeing that you're now rated at -1 Troll I should not have replied, but somehow your bait seems tasty. I'll bite.
Atheists believe the only consequence to actions in life is if you get caught or at the very worst, guilt.
This argument gets repeated over and over and over again. OK. First of all I'm what you'd call an "atheist". Yes basically I believe "the only consequence to actions in life is if you get caught or at the very worst, guilt".
Yet, the fact that some people think this is not enough scares me. Personally, guilt is quite adequate to deter me from doing anything bad to other people when I am tempted to do so. And to know that for some people, "guilt" is not enough and that they need deterrence in the form of some external metaphysical entity scares me. I wonder what horrors they will commit if one day they suddenly decide not to believe in God, or suddenly realize that there are numerous loopholes which supposedly "clear their record" after they have "sinned".
I agree with the last, but the other portions are just as engrained in todays 'christian' beliefs as if it says in the Bible "Take up guns and smite thy neighbor". Bullshit. These people are not Christians, nor should you believe they are.
I don't have a bible at hand, but I'm sure you could find phrases to that effect somewhere in the Old Testament.
Not that I'm saying most Christians believe in hatred, but it might shed some light on where the hatred comes from.
(I have a personal theory that hidden emotions in human culture (including religions) get somehow transferred from generation to generation like recessive genes, and occasionally manifest and wreck havoc)
But Gnumeric really is an Excel clone, just as OOo Calc is an Excel clone. I'd argue Gnumeric is a better Excel clone than OOo Calc, but it's still just an Excel clone. Can you name me an open source spreadsheet-like program that is not an Excel clone? What this would look like, I don't know. I've often wondered if there is a "Unix way" to do spreadsheets--that is, a way to put data in a plain text file and then do analysis on it.
;-)
MySQL?
*ducks*
The downside is that you'll have to explain what " public class " is. What " public static void " means.
The best intro language remains to be pascal. I don't know why people get so fed up with it. Sure it's not as powerful or as popular as C/C++/Java, it's a bit verbose, but the language is clean and readable.
I have servers running stable, and even old-stable (woody).
Tell me what features your cutting edge system would give me on those production machines, and we'll talk.
And by the way, the singled out one or two packages which are not in stable can be probably found at backports.org
A two year old distro is actually not that old by present day measures. WinXP was made in 2001, and nobody seems to be saying that it's too old (even SP2 is more than two years old).
Perhaps I'm getting old, but I fail to see the reason to get the latest and greatest unless it has a feature that I desperately want. A few years ago it used to be that packages 6 months ago were lacking so many features that it wasn't even usable, but these days things have arguably stabilized and you probably will be hard pressed to find any differences between a package six months ago and a bleeding edge package today.
> the police won't prosecute for crimes ...
> The victim has to bring the case himself.
Are you sure on that? I wonder who brought those cases for murder.
A patent for, say, a polynomial time solution to the travelling salesman problem should not be invalidated because we know how to solve the problem for the special cases of the problem (eg. a graph with two vertices)
I'm not saying that software patents make sense, but your argument why this particular claim should fail does not hold.
The article should be titled "What's *Right* With The FOSS Community".
Lack of vision? He cites GNOME as an example. Well if GNOME isn't good enough, we have XFCE, KDE, and what not. If GNOME evolves to become an utter failure, some other project will definitely take its place. This is a *strength* of OSS.
He cites XFree as another example. (Despite the fact that XFree was using a more "Cathedral" model than a "Bazaar" model). He even acknowledges that a successful fork (X.Org) was made. This example actually proves two things: 1. the Cathedral model doesn't work (at least in this case), 2. Failing projects will get revived through forking. That shows again the *strength* of OSS.
Contrast this to Microsoft. Despite what the anti-MS zealots are saying, Microsoft is still doing an OK job in its main products (Windows, Office, etc.). But what if one day their products gets a hundred times worse than now (think something akin to WinME), what can we (or the MS fanboys) do? We can't just take their source code and fork it, and there aren't even viable drop-in alternatives available -- a failure at Microsoft could bring down the whole ecosystem once and for all. (yes you can move to linux, but that actually proves the point -- the MS ecosystem will perish)
Except that you still have to agree to a EULA which basically forces you to give away all your rights and your firstborn.
Well, maybe not the firstborn. But I'm sure there are lots of gray areas in EULA's, and copyright law in general.
The mod who gave you +1 is smoking crack.
Your suggestion is fundamentally flawed on moral, cultural, and practical grounds.
There have been a number of good replies from fellow slashdotters, so I'm not going to repeat all that.
A few things that I'd want to add:
Firstly, you must understand that there are some expressions which could be easily expressed in one language and extremely difficult in another, due to the grammar, available vocabulary, perceptions of aesthetic for the language and so on. If you don't believe me, try translating a page of complex mathematical symbols (a specialized niche language) into English, and tell me English is better for all applications.
Using your TCP/IP analogy, you must be aware that above TCP/IP there are a multitude of different protocols for different applications. HTTP for the "WWW", FTP for lame file transfers, SMTP/IMAP/POP3 for email (three!), telnet/SSH for remote shell access (two!), and so on. Your suggestion that everybody ought to speak English is like the efforts to move everything onto port 80 -- yeah things become more "standardized", but having everything served in HTTP isn't necessarily a good thing.
Secondly, on what grounds do you prohibit people from speaking whatever language they want? For one, it's against free speech. And why English? Some fellow slashdotters have suggested Esperanto. Why not that instead?
Thirdly, as I am sure you have noticed, your proposal is absolutely impractical. Good luck on getting the 1.3 billion people in China to agree with you. Actually they are having trouble in getting those 1.3 billion people to agree on a single dialect (Mandarin), and people do speak their local dialect from time to time. EVEN if you have overcome that hurdle, language changes and evolves, and unless there is a strong link of communication between different local regions, the language will eventually evolve into different paths.
Ever heard of search engines? hyperlinks? Bookmarks? Copy and paste? Keyboard layout switching? Input methods?
l y&threshold=0&commentsort=3&mode=thread&pid=169325 84 into your browser URL textbox, and only then maybe your point is valid.
Tell me you actually type things like this: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=207712&op=Rep
Perhaps you'll find it inconvenient, but if you can't find a way to enter (for example) Chinese characters into your system, chances are that you probably don't read it anyway, and the intended audience of that website is not you.
You've got it backwards.
Suppose instead of somebody using your code, they write their own implementation, which probably contain as many bugs as your first version. In the meantime, your code is already at v0.6.2 and has dozens of important bug fixes.
Developers who use other's code and are concerned about security should regularly check whether there are upstream fixes to the reused code.
Legal documents these days are long enough to begin with. You must have seen how long EULA's can be. Now, do you REALLY want to go through, not only one, but MULTIPLE documents of even greater length?
No thanks.
Didn't the grandparent poster say: "Right now, I'm sitting in the UIUC Law Library, looking at two hundred volumes that comprise legislative history going back to the early 1900s... and that's just abridged stuff." Well, I'm pretty sure it doesn't cover everything to the point of absolute clarity. So do you want to have a few more hundred volumes of these stuff? Who's going to read through all of them?
Besides, the real world is a lot more illogical than your computer is. There will *always* be grey areas which are impossible to resolve. A computer logically comprises discrete bits. The real world is for all practical purposes a continuum.