Or alternatively if you don't want to mess about with patches which will inevatively screw up, rsync your old tarball with the new one:) --
mysql> DELETE FROM world.human_race WHERE iq < 100;
Recompile exim/sendmail/whatever with TLS support and about 30% of your mails will get sent out encrypted, headers and all.
Other way around, use POP3S at least - et voila, you've drastically reduced the amount of your email that's sent plaintext for sniffers to get at.
Not exactly perfect, but it's better than nothing. The more people who set up their software to use SSL, the better it gets for everyone. --
mysql> DELETE FROM world.human_race WHERE iq < 100;
Yep, it's fine to allow some kids bully others, make their lives a misery and generally set them up for a life filled with depression, misery and loneliness - after all, they're typically not disrupting school activities - but it's not acceptable for someone to peacefully rebel over anything because it might make some people uncomfortable and force them to think for a change.
So it's really the player, not the OS that's effecient in this case. Which is really what I meant - OS is unlikely to effect something like this beyond some fancy priority stuff, and maybe threading/IPC.
I've yet to try it though.. wonder if it has SMP support...
> What an abomination this is to the name of both God and human life.
Learning to understand and manipulate cells is an abomination?
With that thinking, so is, say, a lifesaving heart bypass, or even using a condom, because using our knowledge to manipulate life is Bad(tm).
> Not only must human life be reduced to such a tiny level
Because life kinda exists at such a tiny level; you'd prefer ignorance? You think it best to ignore reality and go about our lives like good [insert whatever religion you are]?
Way to waste your (God given?) gifts.
> we must also find ways to modify with the very seeds of humanity?
IMO, it's more evil to waste our knowlege and abilities than it is to explore them; would you rather we just let people die needlessly, when the technology exists to help them? Causing death by inaction.. that's paramount to murder (or in the timescales of the life of a species, mass-murder. Oops).
> What's next, a device which can transcend earthly existance and modify the human soul? Are we so vain?
Seeing as the soul is merely a concept in people's minds; a meme, if you will, I don't see this being likely. TBH, if you think we're inherintly "better" than everything else because of some utterly abstract nonsense like a god given soul, you're the vain one. (not to say I don't value human life; I don't need the idea of a human soul to do that when it has intrinsic value)
> I'm horrified by the thought that life can be treated as some sort of vile mechanical process
Why "vile"? What makes you think life is any more than a complex reproducing machine, forged through billions of years of evolution (bet you hate that too)? Why does the idea that the Universe can create complex life like without a plan, or a creator disturb you? We're certainly not well designed.. more a massive kludge.
That doesn't make it any less incredible, or wonderful, unless you're an ignorant fool.
> rather than the sacred and beautiful thing it is.
Knowing how a sunset produces all those wonderful colours doesn't make it any less beautiful. In fact, knowing how such complexity and beauity can arise naturally makes it even more wonderful. As it is with many things.
> I'm all for the curing of diseases
In what way is this any less meddling than cellular level manipulation? Or using a condom? Or trying not to be hit by a bus when you cross the road? Would you rather sit back and die, or become ill, when there's a chance to avert it?
Do you cross the road, or drive with your eyes closed so you don't interfere with life, and God's plan by inadvertantly not mowing someone down, or being mown down yourself? Or do you think our abilities are ok dealing with things like that, but nothing more complex that is, yet, reached within a couple of centuries of rapid development at the very start of the technological era of our species?
> I'm worried that in several years, humanity will be replaced with robotic drones who serve no purpose other than to work and perform
More like freed to do things it's good at, and enjoys. Wasting a human with a nasty repetative job when a machine can do it better is a bit evil, concidering the worth of the human who could be doing better things. As our technology becomes better supportive, this is what will result; people freed to live their lives.
> And we're throwing praise and money into this abomination
Don't get me started about throwing praise and money into a religion that.. no, let's just not.
> Were it not expressly forbidden by the 6th commandmant, I would rather take my life than live in such a horrendously blasphemous society.
You realise, of course, that not everybody wants to follow your religion, or a religion? You, of *course*, respect peoples right to make their own choices and believe in whatever they want to?
Seemingly, you don't; I noticed your use of the word "Godless" in a post about the third world, which I take as something of an insult, seeing as I'm also "Godless"; that doesn't make me respect life any less, nor does it take the wonder out of life.
If you're so narrow minded to think it does, you're obviously not well educated enough to really understand what makes it so wonderful.
(Oh, and guys, I don't think this is a traditional troll, unless you count differing opinions as trolls, which isn't very P.C., now, is it? Maybe he's an idiot with awful opinions, but that doesn't really make him a troll, does it?)
Win2k does something like this, in the form of Hibernate; it saves RAM to disk, shuts down and when you next power on it loads the RAM image.
This, however, needs the drivers to support it - I'm one of the lucky ones, I've, in fact, yet to find anyone else who finds it's stable (where as I've found I can even do it in the middle of Q3a... just). Hibernate cuts my boot time from ~45s to ~25s here, which isn't bad, although hardly mindboggling.
I remember something on the Amiga called FastBoot which took a memory image and let you boot from that; rather more hacky, but cut boot time for my 45s Workbench down to less than 5s.
What idiot at CrapHound thought it would be a good idea to limit the font to 12 pixels.. presumably they use 800*600 or something, because at 1280*1024 it's horribly tiny, and changing font size does nothing when it's limited like that.
Wish you could override CSS in IE... and any font size smaller than the main body text (hey, my default size and font is nice and readable, it's perfect, I don't want some dumbass web "designer" screwing with it), and JavaScript.OpenWindow (except in hyperlinks), and all the other stupid JavaScript design bugs (wtf does a scripting language have to grab events from the mouse buttons, or be able to move windows about, or do things when you leave a page, argh), and, well, *AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH*.
Yes, it really pisses me off that most so called designers seem more interested in eye candy and l337 fonts than whether their sites are even vaguely usable. Sigh.
... what will happen at re-entry? Burn up? Smash into a few trillion bits of metal and plastic?
Hell, I can even see our future selves destroying it before it hits something when it becomes apparant that it's not going to burn up, or it being "cleaned" out of orbit when space junk starts being a major problem.
But I digress.. we're all picking holes in this one, so, smartarses, how would YOU make a time capsule designed to last 50k years? Where you you put it? What would you use to store the data?
Or have the computer confirm your actions; natural languages can be very ambiguous, so you either limit it to remove it, or more sensibly you guess what the user MIGHT want and ask nicely which action the user meant. And as for spaces in filenames.. can't say I care really, I just press tab and my shell fills it in for me:)
That's an important point; just because you CAN mix HTML and code, doesn't mean you HAVE to!
Not all sites are big enough to need that though; they just need a few lines of code to make the HTML a bit smarter, so being able to mix HTML with code can be very useful for quick sites (and for people learning the language).
But I digress, classes are a nice subject to bring up; if php doesn't do something you want, you can either write a class to do it or look for one on a class repository (same with Perl, but it's a bit simpler with php). Classes are great; they really encourage you to make your code reusable and mean as you work on more projects (or find more classes others have written) you actually end up doing less work; you just write a bit of supporting code, some templates et voila. (In fact, my latest project is working to get rid of the supporting code bit too:)
And what's more, there's actually a chance you might be able to read other people's code, as opposed to Perl's 20,000 different ways of doing the same thing (making Perl a great language to write poetry in... er, yeah, that's a really useful feature), resulting in easier code maintenence, and (gasp!) make it easier to learn.
It's different from Java in that it isn't just restricted to one language; it's an instruction set, not a language + instruction set.
It also differs in that there aren't multiple VM's which make java a "write once, test everywhere" system (their words).
It also isn't a complete "do everything" system where these binaries run on their own API which deals with security etc, they're completely system native. Also looking at their interview I get the idea that they write very tight code and these "VP" binaries aren't as slow as you might think.
Certainly, I can easily see even modest machines getting very acceptable performance out of it; anything which needs the speed can be compiled in native flavours too, which the VP version there for CPU's unsupported by the app directly (e.g, when you get your brand new IC64 or whatever, you can just get the VP binary and run it rather than having to wait for native ones to appear, making it much less painful to switch hardware).
Multiprocessing over networks also seems to be a big thing with them. In this interview in Amiga Active (mentions a Byte article from '94 if anyone wants to dig about) one of the Tao guys mentions a ray tracer running on a 486. They plug an 8 CPU transputer board into it and without even recompiling the system takes advantage of it.. then they get a MIPS board with 4 CPU's (total of 13 processors and 3 different architectures) and all they see is a speed increase... sounds fscking cool if you ask me (although they do admit it doesn't happen by magic; "the programmer still has to think!... but [we're] making it much simpler...".
Also, imagine if you can run any architecture you like with this system; you can suddenly say to your CPU supplier "I can use any CPU I like; MIPS, x86, PPC, ARM, so either you do it for x quid a unit or we walk". Sounds cool for budget systems.
On one last note, they mention they've had ~10 offers to have their virtual CPU implimented in silicon ala a Java CPU, so it doesn't look like the industry doesn't know them:)
They seem very much like a reverse Transmeta, only with Elate you're not tied to one piece of hardware. Sounds seriously cool; an OS/API layer which either runs native or on a host OS such as Windows, Linux, QNX, Epoc, WinCE etc...
Whether you like the idea or not, whether you think it will get anywhere or not, you still have to admit, it sounds seriously cool, so let's not knock it just because you haven't seen it running (hey! newsflash! you're not omnipotent!), or because it's linked with Amiga, or because you enjoy being a neo-luddite. OK?
-- Tom (no longer paying for the call, although now dieing from 'flu, feh)
You can evan change CPU's and binaries still run, because they are compiled for a virtual processor ala Java (native binaries are, of course, also possible).
The thing with Elate is, because it's so portable, it can even run on top of other OS's (yes, user space kernels aren't anything new.
Sorry this is short and vague; it's peak rate and I'm paying loads to be on atm;)
Amiga Active issue 6 had a nice article on it (March 2000), but a web search of Tao and Elate should bring up some stuff too.
In my experience it's just as bad, if not worse, than any other "community"... there are some cool people and some lame people, like anywhere.
I use my Amiga because I love Thor, GoldEd, AmIRC, ARexx, and all the little things that make my life easier; a big reason is that I know the system so well, I can do most of the stuff I could do anywhere much more easily.
After going though RedHat 5.1 and 5.2 when it was all just Black Magic, 6.0 when it was just "argh", I was finally introduced to Slackware (by the time the 5th person told be to "get Slack 7!", I though I better do it:), and I finally just "clicked" with it and things started to make sense.
It may not be the most advanced distro in the world as far as package systems etc come into it, but I think this is GOOD for new users; it reduces the "black magic" level and makes it easier to understand the system. The startup system is nice; SysV init isn't exactly friendly, especially to the new user; discovering how the init scripts worked was a major moment in my learning of Linux... despite being "non standard", I found it very KISS.
Upgrading.. well, yes, that's a pain in the arse, and in the end I just installed Corel on my main desktop Linux box and turned it into Debian (yes, it is possible, it is easy (fix/etc/apt/sources.list, make a proper lilo config, apt-get update/dist-upgrade et voila:)).. apt, yum.
Slack remains my second fave distro; I use it on my gateway and it performs flawlessly. Definately a nice distro to start on, and to keep going with if you are happy with the simple package system and fairly poor upgradability.
One amusing quote from an ex RedHat 6 user I know who had switched to Slackware 7 was "I don't believe it, everything works! everything compiles!"
My Slack 7 CD was the best £2 I ever spent:)
-- 66686 - CPU of the beast. 66687: Math Coprocessor of the Beast.
At Teesside Uni in the UK, if it ain't http or ftp (assuming you're on a Windows box... the Unix machines (RH 6, SG etc) don't even have ftp!), forget it; everything is firewalled to hell. The Unix boxes are behind a "deny everything" firewall and a http proxy, and the Wintel boxes are behind a "deny everything except ftp and http" firewall.. I'm not bothered about the lack of Napster, but I want ssh, telnet, IRC and ftp access at least!
> The question is whether anyone should have the ability to use the legal > system to exclude another from posting in a public forum; unlike other > forms of harassment, a Usenet post is not directed to any particular > person.
Balls. A usenet post is not directed at any particular person if b the author deems it to be... if they want to target harassment at a particular person, they can and will.
Timothy Rue in comp.sys.amiga.misc is a perfect example; he's infamous for filling the group with crap... posting insulting comments aimed at certain people (including me... he labeled me as an evil bastard out to get him after infamousmentioned how much nicer the group would be if people didn't reply to his trolls.. insane? probably), and going on about his "VIC", something he seems to see as revolutionary, but which nobody has yet been able to describe, other than calling it a dodgy script that seems to do stuff... but nothing useful.
Terry Cooksey is another example... infamous for calling anyone and everyone an "AMIGA HATING NAZI FAG"... luckily he removed himself from the group, but it's worrying that people can post this sort of thing with no fear of reproach.
Killfiles aren't the answer... they're fine if someone just has some opinions you disagree with, but when someone repeatedly posts complete abuse, large posts of copyright material (i.e. web pages), source code to some unidentifiable program, private mail, and basically trolls, inciting hundereds of replies, mainly also consisting of abouse back to the original poster... well, if you've ever experienced it (expecially if you've been the victim of the abuse)... well, you would understand why it's important to be able to stop the very odd user from posting. Not to mention that not all clients support killfiling well, if at all, and how newbies or people who don't know how to killfile won't be able to, or won't know to killfile them and replies to them before finding the group filled with abuse.
I do agree that removing somebodies freedom of speech is a very serious thing, but with certain lusers, it's the only solution...
> PPS: Why don't browsers have a cache in one file?
Umm, can you imagine how slow that would be?
First, you have to keep some sort of index of where certain URL's are stored in the file, and how big they are. Secondly expiring URL's would be a nightmare because you'd have to copy the rest of the cache elsewhere to remove the now unused space.
Even worse, you'd have to lock the entire cache every time you update it (which, remember, is going to take ages), and the entire thing would lock up while it did it.
Also, 10 tasks all seeking deep within a 50+MB would be quite heavy on disk activity...
Slashdot Mirror
Or alternatively if you don't want to mess about with patches which will inevatively screw up, rsync your old tarball with the new one :)
--
mysql> DELETE FROM world.human_race WHERE iq < 100;
Find an rsync mirror, rsync your ISO to the latest. Can save a loooooooooooooot of bandwidth.
--
mysql> DELETE FROM world.human_race WHERE iq < 100;
Recompile exim/sendmail/whatever with TLS support and about 30% of your mails will get sent out encrypted, headers and all.
Other way around, use POP3S at least - et voila, you've drastically reduced the amount of your email that's sent plaintext for sniffers to get at.
Not exactly perfect, but it's better than nothing. The more people who set up their software to use SSL, the better it gets for everyone.
--
mysql> DELETE FROM world.human_race WHERE iq < 100;
Start your own then. It's not as if Sourceforge itself isn't open source :)
There is, of course, the small matter of actually getting the equipment to run it on..
--
mysql> DELETE FROM world.human_race WHERE iq < 100;
Yep, it's fine to allow some kids bully others, make their lives a misery and generally set them up for a life filled with depression, misery and loneliness - after all, they're typically not disrupting school activities - but it's not acceptable for someone to peacefully rebel over anything because it might make some people uncomfortable and force them to think for a change.
BP6tastic :)
mysql -h slashdot.org -u slashdot -p slashd0t
So it's really the player, not the OS that's effecient in this case. Which is really what I meant - OS is unlikely to effect something like this beyond some fancy priority stuff, and maybe threading/IPC.
I've yet to try it though.. wonder if it has SMP support...
Big wow; the effeciency of things like this has nothing to do with the OS, just the compiler.
Scheduling it so it always gets the CPU exactly when it needs it, that's a different matter, but 2% on decoding an MP3's nothing special.
Well, unless you're on a Z80. Or a Cyrix.
> What an abomination this is to the name of both God and human life.
Learning to understand and manipulate cells is an abomination?
With that thinking, so is, say, a lifesaving heart bypass, or even using a condom, because using our knowledge to manipulate life is Bad(tm).
> Not only must human life be reduced to such a tiny level
Because life kinda exists at such a tiny level; you'd prefer ignorance? You think it best to ignore reality and go about our lives like good [insert whatever religion you are]?
Way to waste your (God given?) gifts.
> we must also find ways to modify with the very seeds of humanity?
IMO, it's more evil to waste our knowlege and abilities than it is to explore them; would you rather we just let people die needlessly, when the technology exists to help them? Causing death by inaction.. that's paramount to murder (or in the timescales of the life of a species, mass-murder. Oops).
> What's next, a device which can transcend earthly existance and modify the human soul? Are we so vain?
Seeing as the soul is merely a concept in people's minds; a meme, if you will, I don't see this being likely. TBH, if you think we're inherintly "better" than everything else because of some utterly abstract nonsense like a god given soul, you're the vain one. (not to say I don't value human life; I don't need the idea of a human soul to do that when it has intrinsic value)
> I'm horrified by the thought that life can be treated as some sort of vile mechanical process
Why "vile"? What makes you think life is any more than a complex reproducing machine, forged through billions of years of evolution (bet you hate that too)? Why does the idea that the Universe can create complex life like without a plan, or a creator disturb you? We're certainly not well designed.. more a massive kludge.
That doesn't make it any less incredible, or wonderful, unless you're an ignorant fool.
> rather than the sacred and beautiful thing it is.
Knowing how a sunset produces all those wonderful colours doesn't make it any less beautiful. In fact, knowing how such complexity and beauity can arise naturally makes it even more wonderful. As it is with many things.
> I'm all for the curing of diseases
In what way is this any less meddling than cellular level manipulation? Or using a condom? Or trying not to be hit by a bus when you cross the road? Would you rather sit back and die, or become ill, when there's a chance to avert it?
Do you cross the road, or drive with your eyes closed so you don't interfere with life, and God's plan by inadvertantly not mowing someone down, or being mown down yourself? Or do you think our abilities are ok dealing with things like that, but nothing more complex that is, yet, reached within a couple of centuries of rapid development at the very start of the technological era of our species?
> I'm worried that in several years, humanity will be replaced with robotic drones who serve no purpose other than to work and perform
More like freed to do things it's good at, and enjoys. Wasting a human with a nasty repetative job when a machine can do it better is a bit evil, concidering the worth of the human who could be doing better things. As our technology becomes better supportive, this is what will result; people freed to live their lives.
> And we're throwing praise and money into this abomination
Don't get me started about throwing praise and money into a religion that.. no, let's just not.
> Were it not expressly forbidden by the 6th commandmant, I would rather take my life than live in such a horrendously blasphemous society.
You realise, of course, that not everybody wants to follow your religion, or a religion? You, of *course*, respect peoples right to make their own choices and believe in whatever they want to?
Seemingly, you don't; I noticed your use of the word "Godless" in a post about the third world, which I take as something of an insult, seeing as I'm also "Godless"; that doesn't make me respect life any less, nor does it take the wonder out of life.
If you're so narrow minded to think it does, you're obviously not well educated enough to really understand what makes it so wonderful.
(Oh, and guys, I don't think this is a traditional troll, unless you count differing opinions as trolls, which isn't very P.C., now, is it? Maybe he's an idiot with awful opinions, but that doesn't really make him a troll, does it?)
Win2k does something like this, in the form of Hibernate; it saves RAM to disk, shuts down and when you next power on it loads the RAM image.
This, however, needs the drivers to support it - I'm one of the lucky ones, I've, in fact, yet to find anyone else who finds it's stable (where as I've found I can even do it in the middle of Q3a... just). Hibernate cuts my boot time from ~45s to ~25s here, which isn't bad, although hardly mindboggling.
I remember something on the Amiga called FastBoot which took a memory image and let you boot from that; rather more hacky, but cut boot time for my 45s Workbench down to less than 5s.
I'd like to see that power your telephone :)
Maybe we'll have to get UPS's for our telephones...
What idiot at CrapHound thought it would be a good idea to limit the font to 12 pixels.. presumably they use 800*600 or something, because at 1280*1024 it's horribly tiny, and changing font size does nothing when it's limited like that.
Wish you could override CSS in IE... and any font size smaller than the main body text (hey, my default size and font is nice and readable, it's perfect, I don't want some dumbass web "designer" screwing with it), and JavaScript.OpenWindow (except in hyperlinks), and all the other stupid JavaScript design bugs (wtf does a scripting language have to grab events from the mouse buttons, or be able to move windows about, or do things when you leave a page, argh), and, well, *AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH*.
Yes, it really pisses me off that most so called designers seem more interested in eye candy and l337 fonts than whether their sites are even vaguely usable. Sigh.
... what will happen at re-entry? Burn up? Smash into a few trillion bits of metal and plastic?
Hell, I can even see our future selves destroying it before it hits something when it becomes apparant that it's not going to burn up, or it being "cleaned" out of orbit when space junk starts being a major problem.
But I digress.. we're all picking holes in this one, so, smartarses, how would YOU make a time capsule designed to last 50k years? Where you you put it? What would you use to store the data?
Or have the computer confirm your actions; natural languages can be very ambiguous, so you either limit it to remove it, or more sensibly you guess what the user MIGHT want and ask nicely which action the user meant. And as for spaces in filenames.. can't say I care really, I just press tab and my shell fills it in for me :)
> Welcome to the American language.. =]
:)
Oi, it's English, you tart
That's an important point; just because you CAN mix HTML and code, doesn't
:)
mean you HAVE to!
Not all sites are big enough to need that though; they just need a few
lines of code to make the HTML a bit smarter, so being able to mix HTML with
code can be very useful for quick sites (and for people learning the
language).
But I digress, classes are a nice subject to bring up; if php doesn't do
something you want, you can either write a class to do it or look for one on
a class repository (same with Perl, but it's a bit simpler with php).
Classes are great; they really encourage you to make your code reusable and
mean as you work on more projects (or find more classes others have written)
you actually end up doing less work; you just write a bit of supporting
code, some templates et voila. (In fact, my latest project is working to get
rid of the supporting code bit too
And what's more, there's actually a chance you might be able to read other
people's code, as opposed to Perl's 20,000 different ways of doing the same
thing (making Perl a great language to write poetry in... er, yeah, that's
a really useful feature), resulting in easier code maintenence, and (gasp!)
make it easier to learn.
It's different from Java in that it isn't just restricted to one language; it's an instruction set, not a language + instruction set.
... but [we're] making it much simpler ...".
:)
It also differs in that there aren't multiple VM's which make java a "write once, test everywhere" system (their words).
It also isn't a complete "do everything" system where these binaries run on their own API which deals with security etc, they're completely system native. Also looking at their interview I get the idea that they write very tight code and these "VP" binaries aren't as slow as you might think.
Certainly, I can easily see even modest machines getting very acceptable performance out of it; anything which needs the speed can be compiled in native flavours too, which the VP version there for CPU's unsupported by the app directly (e.g, when you get your brand new IC64 or whatever, you can just get the VP binary and run it rather than having to wait for native ones to appear, making it much less painful to switch hardware).
Multiprocessing over networks also seems to be a big thing with them. In this interview in Amiga Active (mentions a Byte article from '94 if anyone wants to dig about) one of the Tao guys mentions a ray tracer running on a 486. They plug an 8 CPU transputer board into it and without even recompiling the system takes advantage of it.. then they get a MIPS board with 4 CPU's (total of 13 processors and 3 different architectures) and all they see is a speed increase... sounds fscking cool if you ask me (although they do admit it doesn't happen by magic; "the programmer still has to think!
Also, imagine if you can run any architecture you like with this system; you can suddenly say to your CPU supplier "I can use any CPU I like; MIPS, x86, PPC, ARM, so either you do it for x quid a unit or we walk". Sounds cool for budget systems.
On one last note, they mention they've had ~10 offers to have their virtual CPU implimented in silicon ala a Java CPU, so it doesn't look like the industry doesn't know them
They seem very much like a reverse Transmeta, only with Elate you're not tied to one piece of hardware. Sounds seriously cool; an OS/API layer which either runs native or on a host OS such as Windows, Linux, QNX, Epoc, WinCE etc...
Whether you like the idea or not, whether you think it will get anywhere or not, you still have to admit, it sounds seriously cool, so let's not knock it just because you haven't seen it running (hey! newsflash! you're not omnipotent!), or because it's linked with Amiga, or because you enjoy being a neo-luddite. OK?
-- Tom (no longer paying for the call, although now dieing from 'flu, feh)
That's what Elate is.
;)
You can evan change CPU's and binaries still run, because they are compiled for a virtual processor ala Java (native binaries are, of course, also possible).
The thing with Elate is, because it's so portable, it can even run on top of other OS's (yes, user space kernels aren't anything new.
Sorry this is short and vague; it's peak rate and I'm paying loads to be on atm
Amiga Active issue 6 had a nice article on it (March 2000), but a web search of Tao and Elate should bring up some stuff too.
Community, feh, yeah, right.
In my experience it's just as bad, if not worse, than any other "community"... there are some cool people and some lame people, like anywhere.
I use my Amiga because I love Thor, GoldEd, AmIRC, ARexx, and all the little things that make my life easier; a big reason is that I know the system so well, I can do most of the stuff I could do anywhere much more easily.
After going though RedHat 5.1 and 5.2 when it was all just Black Magic, 6.0 :), and
/etc/apt/sources.list, make a proper :)).. apt, yum.
:)
when it was just "argh", I was finally introduced to Slackware (by the time
the 5th person told be to "get Slack 7!", I though I better do it
I finally just "clicked" with it and things started to make sense.
It may not be the most advanced distro in the world as far as package
systems etc come into it, but I think this is GOOD for new users; it reduces
the "black magic" level and makes it easier to understand the system. The
startup system is nice; SysV init isn't exactly friendly, especially to the
new user; discovering how the init scripts worked was a major moment in my
learning of Linux... despite being "non standard", I found it very KISS.
Upgrading.. well, yes, that's a pain in the arse, and in the end I just
installed Corel on my main desktop Linux box and turned it into Debian
(yes, it is possible, it is easy (fix
lilo config, apt-get update/dist-upgrade et voila
Slack remains my second fave distro; I use it on my gateway and it performs
flawlessly. Definately a nice distro to start on, and to keep going with if
you are happy with the simple package system and fairly poor upgradability.
One amusing quote from an ex RedHat 6 user I know who had switched to
Slackware 7 was "I don't believe it, everything works! everything compiles!"
My Slack 7 CD was the best £2 I ever spent
--
66686 - CPU of the beast. 66687: Math Coprocessor of the Beast.
At Teesside Uni in the UK, if it ain't http or ftp (assuming you're on a Windows box... the Unix machines (RH 6, SG etc) don't even have ftp!), forget it; everything is firewalled to hell. The Unix boxes are behind a "deny everything" firewall and a http proxy, and the Wintel boxes are behind a "deny everything except ftp and http" firewall.. I'm not bothered about the lack of Napster, but I want ssh, telnet, IRC and ftp access at least!
Because they're onto Directory Opus 5 now, which is totally different to DOpus 4.
:)
Screw cloning DOpus 4, give us DOpus 5
> The question is whether anyone should have the ability to use the legal
> system to exclude another from posting in a public forum; unlike other
> forms of harassment, a Usenet post is not directed to any particular
> person.
Balls. A usenet post is not directed at any particular person if b the
author deems it to be... if they want to target harassment at a particular
person, they can and will.
Timothy Rue in comp.sys.amiga.misc is a perfect example; he's infamous for
filling the group with crap... posting insulting comments aimed at certain
people (including me... he labeled me as an evil bastard out to get him
after infamousmentioned how much nicer the group would be if people didn't
reply to his trolls.. insane? probably), and going on about his "VIC",
something he seems to see as revolutionary, but which nobody has yet been
able to describe, other than calling it a dodgy script that seems to do
stuff... but nothing useful.
Terry Cooksey is another example... infamous for calling anyone and everyone
an "AMIGA HATING NAZI FAG"... luckily he removed himself from the group, but
it's worrying that people can post this sort of thing with no fear of
reproach.
Killfiles aren't the answer... they're fine if someone just has some
opinions you disagree with, but when someone repeatedly posts complete
abuse, large posts of copyright material (i.e. web pages), source code to
some unidentifiable program, private mail, and basically trolls, inciting
hundereds of replies, mainly also consisting of abouse back to the original
poster... well, if you've ever experienced it (expecially if you've been the
victim of the abuse)... well, you would understand why it's important to be
able to stop the very odd user from posting. Not to mention that not all
clients support killfiling well, if at all, and how newbies or people who
don't know how to killfile won't be able to, or won't know to killfile them
and replies to them before finding the group filled with abuse.
I do agree that removing somebodies freedom of speech is a very serious
thing, but with certain lusers, it's the only solution...
> PPS: Why don't browsers have a cache in one file?
Umm, can you imagine how slow that would be?
First, you have to keep some sort of index of where certain URL's are stored
in the file, and how big they are. Secondly expiring URL's would be a
nightmare because you'd have to copy the rest of the cache elsewhere to
remove the now unused space.
Even worse, you'd have to lock the entire cache every time you update it
(which, remember, is going to take ages), and the entire thing would lock up
while it did it.
Also, 10 tasks all seeking deep within a 50+MB would be quite heavy on disk
activity...