To say free OS's might be hurt if free apps are ported to Windows is like Microsoft saying Windows will be hurt if Office is ported to Linux. It may be true, but limiting choice is *not* what the FOSS movement is supposed to be about. That's a Microsoft tactic.
I *have* to run Windows sometimes in order to access certain software or devices. Do we really want to *force* people to run Linux because they really like some KDE app?
Re:How do you what to junk when you do need space?
on
Digital Packrats
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· Score: 1
I've got several computers. The total disk space currently on all of them is just under 1 TB. I've found a lot of my space is used for extraneous backups. When I upgrade one computer, I back up the drives in giant tar files to another computer. Later, I upgrade *that* computer and those tar files get tarred up and stored in bigger tar files on another box. I'd bet if I dug down into my recursive backups, I'd find a backup of my old 486 Windows 3.1/DOS box, my old 0.99pl13 Linux box (MCC distribution or something like that I think), and a backup of my old 67MB AT&T Unix PC (3B1)! But, it's cheaper in dollars and time to just keep getting bigger drives and keep stuffing them full. I just picked up a 250GB drive for $80.
What I really wish is that it was as easy to get extra storage in meatspace as it is in cyberspace. I've got boxes of crap stacked to the ceiling and need more room!
(I think you got that "former" and "latter" thing reversed. I assume you mean "screw the rest of the world" is childish.)
I don't know why Kofi is the SG. We (the US) used to like Osama bin Laden at one time too, so it's a fact we sometimes don't seem to know who to back. Does the US meddle in others' affairs too much? Yes, and it's come back to haunt us. Much of that was because of the global chess game we unfortunately had to play with the Soviet Union where the rest of the nations of the world were (unfortunately) just pawns in the game.
I said "screw the UN" and that's what I mean. I say screw a system where some irrelevant country like France can veto removing a sadistic and dangerous dictator from power because they are getting paid off by the very same dictator. Screw a system that then slams the US for acting "unilaterally" because it didn't want to remove that dictator. ("Unilateral" must mean having 30'ish countries with you or less, now.)
I think it's benificial for the US and the rest of the world to work together to make the world a free and prosperous place. The US and a few other places in the world realize that civilization itself is under threat from a bunch of fanatics that want to drag the world back 1000+ years.
The US is a sovereign nation with the right to protect itself from threats just as any other nation does. Screw anyone who thinks it does not have that right.
This is a very unique war we're in right now. With others you could point to an area of the map and say "here is the enemy". You can't do that this time. However, for that enemy to be dangerous it must have money and other resources. Those are supplied mostly by various countries and dictators like Saddam. Even if Saddam didn't *currently* have large stockpiles of WMD's (although some *have* been found -- and he could have ramped up production again as soon as UN sanctions were lifted, which would have happened soon because of those payoffs), I think Saddam was *himself* a weapon of mass destruction.
Not true. Look at the wikipedia link someone posted above. The US has been paying its "debt", but not all of the 22% to 25% the UN wants.
'Course, I wish we'd get the hell out of the UN. It could move its headquarters to France.
Ignoring all the corruption and other current problems in the UN, I have a real problem with an organization that is ostensibly for human rights, freedom, etc., yet gives equal voice to dictatorships and authoritarian governments with horrible human rights records.
In a wonderful statement of hypocrisy, the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" spells out many things that are human rights (and several things it says are but are not), but then sneaks this little nugget into Article 29: "(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." In other words, you don't have any rights to oppose the UN. Sweet.
The UN is going to be angrier than they already are at us. Kofi will be angrier than he already is for killing off his oil-for-food scam money. The UN will be angrier at the US even though the US pays for the lion's share of its operation.
congratulations america! you've completely alienated yourselves from all of your former allies and friends and earned the distrust and enmity of the rest of the planet.
On behalf of the rest of America, I say "so what?" With friends like France, who needs enemies? Just go bask in the glow of your corrupt U.N. while telling yourself you're a humanitarian buying all that oil from Saddam so he could build a few more palaces. The next time some tyrant takes over the whole of Europe, we'll send John Kerry over to negotiate. We certainly don't want to be too aggressive and scare all you surrender monkeys.
What if, for example, I went to the hardware store to buy some lumber, nails, and a hammer so that I could build something that would add value to my life? What if I also had to consult a patent attorney before doing so, fearing that the method I use to construct this item might be covered by someone's patent?
Actually you could go to the hardware store, buy all that stuff, and build something that violated someone's patent. The difference is no one is trying to patent, say, door openings just to keep other people from building houses at all.
Well, I'll admit I've never watched his show. I'd never heard of it, or him, in fact, until I got his book. I enjoyed his book. But with any book like that you have to take everything with a grain of salt. Since it's from his viewpoint it's going to be colored by his opinion or bias.
Not to nit-pick, but he's a House member, not a Senator. I wish he *were* a Senator, then his voice would be a little louder...
Go to the House web page sometime and look how he votes. For example, the spyware vote is here. Note that 32 members didn't vote. Who knows what their opinions of this were? Where they just too chicken to vote against it? Or were they too busy giving some cute intern a beef injection?
He's one of the few (only) politicians who understands there are constitutional limits on what the federal government has jurisdiction over. Hell, even murder isn't a federal crime. (But killing someone might violate the victim's civil rights, which is a federal crime. How fubar is that???) I suppose you could claim the interstate commerce clause gives them this authority, but that part of the constitution has been abused so much in the last century...
I just finished reading Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day by Joe Scarborough. He was one of the 73 rookies voted into the House during the "Republican Revolution" in 1994. It's a great inside view into why the revolution ultimately failed, why the "small government" Republicans are now putting us nearly half a trillion dollars further in debt every year, and why someone like Ron Paul who tries to buck the system and vote his convictions almost never succeeds and loses favor in his own party.
I need something that (for any given TODO item) lets you designate sub-items, and also set dependencies. Then I can just have it report to me what's eligible to be done next. For example, before I can put in new carpet, I need to paint and rip out the old carpet. "Painting" is made up of "gather painting supplies", "mask off window trim", etc. I've never found anything like this. I was going to write my own, but it's too far down on the TODO list:-)
I had a RAID 5 with 4 60GB Maxtor drives. I've had very poor luck with Maxtor drives (about 50% failure rate). Once when one went bad, I "corrected" the problem with Maxtor's low-level format utility. While it was rebuilding the array, *another* one got an unrecoverable error and got kicked out of the array. Two drives gone and I was screwed. However, I was able to get the "bad" drive going well enough to dd its contents off to another drive. Then I did the low-level format on it. Then I did a "mkraid" using the exact same blocksize, etc. With a little more trickery I was actually able to get the array back up and running with no lost data! I switched to 4 120 GB Western Digital drives and have had no problems with them.
BTW, I put the old Maxtor drives in a second fileserver. I use that raid for backups of stuff. I discovered that the drives were getting pretty hot, so I installed a window air-conditioning unit in the computer room (it got hot in there with 4 or 5 computers running all the time). That seemed to stop my drive failure problem. I still don't trust the Maxtors all that much, though. The WDs have run fine even when the room got really hot.
Oh, the software RAID-5 with ReiserFS seems to work well for me. I keep several VMWare virtual machine disk images on the RAID and can run them all at once with surprisingly good performance. The machine is an AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. I'm about to upgrade it to 1GB of RAM while I can still buy PC-133 SDRAM...
Marc Modersitzki, former public relations manager of the IBM subsidiary formerly known as SCO, said, "We're all pleased with the outcome of the case." Mr. Modersitzki is now assistant vice president of the janitorial service, toilet scrubbing division, in the IBM headquarters building. Darl McBride, former CEO of SCO, could not be reached for comment as it's not currently visiting day at the prison where he now resides as a result of of the charges filed on behalf of former SCO stockholders who seem not to be as pleased.
Because selling something that doesn't exist means more of them are "available" on the market. This causes downward pressure on the stock.
I read something once that brokerages would sometimes "create" shares of stock when customers bought them rather than actually go out on the market to buy them. This would dilute the shares that actually did exist, driving the price down. The solution suggested in the thing I read was to always request your stock certificates when you bought stock, rather than let the broker hold them. Of course, that would make it difficult to sell the stock quickly.
In this case it doesn't matter to me. I hope SCO's stock falls so low the company is only worth two chickens and a half-eaten loaf of bread. That would server those idiots who bought up the stock and drove the price up right, IMHO.
So what is it when someone listens to a song on the radio? Does having a copy of the song so you can listen to it when you want make it theft? What if you record it off the radio?
I'm not saying I think file sharing is not theft, I'm just playing "what if".
I was thinking about "piracy" the other day. If I break into your house and take your TV, it is obviously theft because I have obtained the TV without paying for it and you have suffer the loss of your TV. If, however I make a copy of your copyrighted song, I have still gotten something without paying, but you are not out anything except the money you theoretically would have received for my copy.
When I was a kid, I used to make "unauthorized copies" of lots of programs for my Commodore 64 (I don't do that anymore... I mostly use Free Software or buy the few things I can't get as Open Source). Anyway, the software industry was not really deprived of the money they would have gotten from me purchasing all those games because I never could have afforded them anyway.
To put it another way, if you work minimum wage at Burger King and you download $200,000 worth of music, have you really deprived the music industry of $200,000? No. That's why I find the numbers they spread around about the cost of "piracy" to be misleading.
Yeah, I was wondering if he was responding to the same ESR letter I read. Whether he agrees with ESR's argument or not, I didn't see anything (in ESR's letter) I'd classify as a "rant". And what was all that about SCO? There was nothing in ESR's open letter about that that I saw.
I know they've made major improvements in fission reactors. Unfortunately some of the improvements were due to be brought forth about the time the Three Mile Island fiasco happened, which pretty much killed nulear energy in the US.
As for the other stuff you claim about a small amount of waste, you either know more about it than I do or you're pulling it out of your ass. I'll give you the benefit of doubt and assume the former:-) I do remember something about where they remove all the radioactivity from the containment vessel water which greatly reduces the volume of waste. The spent fuel can be processed into a "brick" of really nasty stuff that has to be put somewhere...
I've never really worried about nuclear waste anyway. They keep talking about having to store it for X thousands of years. I figure it won't be that many decades before we have very reliable methods for getting to space. Then we just drop the stuff into a long decaying orbit around the sun.
I think in this day and age where everyone is worried (justly or not) about terrorism and dirty bombs, vastly increasing the amount of fissionable material circulating "out in the wild" to power these reactors isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Speaking of fissionable material, I remember hearing once that there is only about a 10 or 20 year supply of fissionable uranium available if we were to start using it as a primary energy source. I don't remember ever hearing that again, so I may have dreamed it. For that matter, I remember all those environmental doomsday things they used to make us read in school in the 70's said we were supposed to be out of oil sometime in the 90's (and New York City was supposed to be 10 feet under water because of the melted ice caps), so I sort of doubt those kinds of long term predictions anyway.
I saw a show the other day where they've got some sort of algae that will convert something (don't remember exactly what) to hydrogen. In essense, they are converting solar energy to hydrogen. Regardless of the medium used to store the energy, I see the only long term clean *source* of energy being solar or fusion. In the case you mention regarding cooking or inedible oil, ultimately the source is solar, so I think we're on the same page. There just needs to be a lot more research to find the right combination for the best efficiency.
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To say free OS's might be hurt if free apps are ported to Windows is like Microsoft saying Windows will be hurt if Office is ported to Linux. It may be true, but limiting choice is *not* what the FOSS movement is supposed to be about. That's a Microsoft tactic.
I *have* to run Windows sometimes in order to access certain software or devices. Do we really want to *force* people to run Linux because they really like some KDE app?
I've got several computers. The total disk space currently on all of them is just under 1 TB. I've found a lot of my space is used for extraneous backups. When I upgrade one computer, I back up the drives in giant tar files to another computer. Later, I upgrade *that* computer and those tar files get tarred up and stored in bigger tar files on another box. I'd bet if I dug down into my recursive backups, I'd find a backup of my old 486 Windows 3.1/DOS box, my old 0.99pl13 Linux box (MCC distribution or something like that I think), and a backup of my old 67MB AT&T Unix PC (3B1)! But, it's cheaper in dollars and time to just keep getting bigger drives and keep stuffing them full. I just picked up a 250GB drive for $80.
What I really wish is that it was as easy to get extra storage in meatspace as it is in cyberspace. I've got boxes of crap stacked to the ceiling and need more room!
Unfortunately my dictionary doesn't have "bearinked" in it.
I've posted trolls before, but that wasn't one. It's my real *opinion*. There *is* a difference.
(I think you got that "former" and "latter" thing reversed. I assume you mean "screw the rest of the world" is childish.)
I don't know why Kofi is the SG. We (the US) used to like Osama bin Laden at one time too, so it's a fact we sometimes don't seem to know who to back. Does the US meddle in others' affairs too much? Yes, and it's come back to haunt us. Much of that was because of the global chess game we unfortunately had to play with the Soviet Union where the rest of the nations of the world were (unfortunately) just pawns in the game.
I said "screw the UN" and that's what I mean. I say screw a system where some irrelevant country like France can veto removing a sadistic and dangerous dictator from power because they are getting paid off by the very same dictator. Screw a system that then slams the US for acting "unilaterally" because it didn't want to remove that dictator. ("Unilateral" must mean having 30'ish countries with you or less, now.)
I think it's benificial for the US and the rest of the world to work together to make the world a free and prosperous place. The US and a few other places in the world realize that civilization itself is under threat from a bunch of fanatics that want to drag the world back 1000+ years.
The US is a sovereign nation with the right to protect itself from threats just as any other nation does. Screw anyone who thinks it does not have that right.
This is a very unique war we're in right now. With others you could point to an area of the map and say "here is the enemy". You can't do that this time. However, for that enemy to be dangerous it must have money and other resources. Those are supplied mostly by various countries and dictators like Saddam. Even if Saddam didn't *currently* have large stockpiles of WMD's (although some *have* been found -- and he could have ramped up production again as soon as UN sanctions were lifted, which would have happened soon because of those payoffs), I think Saddam was *himself* a weapon of mass destruction.
I hope the US doesn't pay its "debt". The UN is fundamentally corrupt and anti-US. Why should we contribute to that?
Not true. Look at the wikipedia link someone posted above. The US has been paying its "debt", but not all of the 22% to 25% the UN wants.
'Course, I wish we'd get the hell out of the UN. It could move its headquarters to France.
Ignoring all the corruption and other current problems in the UN, I have a real problem with an organization that is ostensibly for human rights, freedom, etc., yet gives equal voice to dictatorships and authoritarian governments with horrible human rights records.
In a wonderful statement of hypocrisy, the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" spells out many things that are human rights (and several things it says are but are not), but then sneaks this little nugget into Article 29: "(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." In other words, you don't have any rights to oppose the UN. Sweet.
The UN is going to be angrier than they already are at us. Kofi will be angrier than he already is for killing off his oil-for-food scam money. The UN will be angrier at the US even though the US pays for the lion's share of its operation.
Screw the UN.
congratulations america! you've completely alienated yourselves from all of your former allies and friends and earned the distrust and enmity of the rest of the planet.
On behalf of the rest of America, I say "so what?" With friends like France, who needs enemies? Just go bask in the glow of your corrupt U.N. while telling yourself you're a humanitarian buying all that oil from Saddam so he could build a few more palaces. The next time some tyrant takes over the whole of Europe, we'll send John Kerry over to negotiate. We certainly don't want to be too aggressive and scare all you surrender monkeys.
Yeah, I don't think "expensive" hardware causes software piracy. I think expensive software causes software piracy. Stupid Ballmer...
What if, for example, I went to the hardware store to buy some lumber, nails, and a hammer so that I could build something that would add value to my life? What if I also had to consult a patent attorney before doing so, fearing that the method I use to construct this item might be covered by someone's patent?
Actually you could go to the hardware store, buy all that stuff, and build something that violated someone's patent. The difference is no one is trying to patent, say, door openings just to keep other people from building houses at all.
I'd patent the smell of bullshit, but I guess the smell wafting from the USPO would be prior art.
Well, I'll admit I've never watched his show. I'd never heard of it, or him, in fact, until I got his book. I enjoyed his book. But with any book like that you have to take everything with a grain of salt. Since it's from his viewpoint it's going to be colored by his opinion or bias.
Not to nit-pick, but he's a House member, not a Senator. I wish he *were* a Senator, then his voice would be a little louder...
Go to the House web page sometime and look how he votes. For example, the spyware vote is here. Note that 32 members didn't vote. Who knows what their opinions of this were? Where they just too chicken to vote against it? Or were they too busy giving some cute intern a beef injection?
He's one of the few (only) politicians who understands there are constitutional limits on what the federal government has jurisdiction over. Hell, even murder isn't a federal crime. (But killing someone might violate the victim's civil rights, which is a federal crime. How fubar is that???) I suppose you could claim the interstate commerce clause gives them this authority, but that part of the constitution has been abused so much in the last century...
I just finished reading Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day by Joe Scarborough. He was one of the 73 rookies voted into the House during the "Republican Revolution" in 1994. It's a great inside view into why the revolution ultimately failed, why the "small government" Republicans are now putting us nearly half a trillion dollars further in debt every year, and why someone like Ron Paul who tries to buck the system and vote his convictions almost never succeeds and loses favor in his own party.
Thanks! I gave those a brief look-see. A couple of them look like they might fit the bill. I'll download them and give them a try!
Well, obviously that's just an example. But then again, this is /. so maybe it's not so obvious :-)
I need something that (for any given TODO item) lets you designate sub-items, and also set dependencies. Then I can just have it report to me what's eligible to be done next. For example, before I can put in new carpet, I need to paint and rip out the old carpet. "Painting" is made up of "gather painting supplies", "mask off window trim", etc. I've never found anything like this. I was going to write my own, but it's too far down on the TODO list :-)
I had a RAID 5 with 4 60GB Maxtor drives. I've had very poor luck with Maxtor drives (about 50% failure rate). Once when one went bad, I "corrected" the problem with Maxtor's low-level format utility. While it was rebuilding the array, *another* one got an unrecoverable error and got kicked out of the array. Two drives gone and I was screwed. However, I was able to get the "bad" drive going well enough to dd its contents off to another drive. Then I did the low-level format on it. Then I did a "mkraid" using the exact same blocksize, etc. With a little more trickery I was actually able to get the array back up and running with no lost data! I switched to 4 120 GB Western Digital drives and have had no problems with them.
BTW, I put the old Maxtor drives in a second fileserver. I use that raid for backups of stuff. I discovered that the drives were getting pretty hot, so I installed a window air-conditioning unit in the computer room (it got hot in there with 4 or 5 computers running all the time). That seemed to stop my drive failure problem. I still don't trust the Maxtors all that much, though. The WDs have run fine even when the room got really hot.
Oh, the software RAID-5 with ReiserFS seems to work well for me. I keep several VMWare virtual machine disk images on the RAID and can run them all at once with surprisingly good performance. The machine is an AMD Athlon 1.4 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. I'm about to upgrade it to 1GB of RAM while I can still buy PC-133 SDRAM...
From some article in the (not so) distant future:
When you in a long narrow tunnel and you start to see light at the end of it, It's usually of the approaching train.
Or you're having a near-death experience.
What's the difference?
Because selling something that doesn't exist means more of them are "available" on the market. This causes downward pressure on the stock.
I read something once that brokerages would sometimes "create" shares of stock when customers bought them rather than actually go out on the market to buy them. This would dilute the shares that actually did exist, driving the price down. The solution suggested in the thing I read was to always request your stock certificates when you bought stock, rather than let the broker hold them. Of course, that would make it difficult to sell the stock quickly.
In this case it doesn't matter to me. I hope SCO's stock falls so low the company is only worth two chickens and a half-eaten loaf of bread. That would server those idiots who bought up the stock and drove the price up right, IMHO.
So what is it when someone listens to a song on the radio? Does having a copy of the song so you can listen to it when you want make it theft? What if you record it off the radio?
I'm not saying I think file sharing is not theft, I'm just playing "what if".
I was thinking about "piracy" the other day. If I break into your house and take your TV, it is obviously theft because I have obtained the TV without paying for it and you have suffer the loss of your TV. If, however I make a copy of your copyrighted song, I have still gotten something without paying, but you are not out anything except the money you theoretically would have received for my copy.
When I was a kid, I used to make "unauthorized copies" of lots of programs for my Commodore 64 (I don't do that anymore... I mostly use Free Software or buy the few things I can't get as Open Source). Anyway, the software industry was not really deprived of the money they would have gotten from me purchasing all those games because I never could have afforded them anyway.
To put it another way, if you work minimum wage at Burger King and you download $200,000 worth of music, have you really deprived the music industry of $200,000? No. That's why I find the numbers they spread around about the cost of "piracy" to be misleading.
Yeah, I was wondering if he was responding to the same ESR letter I read. Whether he agrees with ESR's argument or not, I didn't see anything (in ESR's letter) I'd classify as a "rant". And what was all that about SCO? There was nothing in ESR's open letter about that that I saw.
I know they've made major improvements in fission reactors. Unfortunately some of the improvements were due to be brought forth about the time the Three Mile Island fiasco happened, which pretty much killed nulear energy in the US.
:-) I do remember something about where they remove all the radioactivity from the containment vessel water which greatly reduces the volume of waste. The spent fuel can be processed into a "brick" of really nasty stuff that has to be put somewhere...
As for the other stuff you claim about a small amount of waste, you either know more about it than I do or you're pulling it out of your ass. I'll give you the benefit of doubt and assume the former
I've never really worried about nuclear waste anyway. They keep talking about having to store it for X thousands of years. I figure it won't be that many decades before we have very reliable methods for getting to space. Then we just drop the stuff into a long decaying orbit around the sun.
I think in this day and age where everyone is worried (justly or not) about terrorism and dirty bombs, vastly increasing the amount of fissionable material circulating "out in the wild" to power these reactors isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Speaking of fissionable material, I remember hearing once that there is only about a 10 or 20 year supply of fissionable uranium available if we were to start using it as a primary energy source. I don't remember ever hearing that again, so I may have dreamed it. For that matter, I remember all those environmental doomsday things they used to make us read in school in the 70's said we were supposed to be out of oil sometime in the 90's (and New York City was supposed to be 10 feet under water because of the melted ice caps), so I sort of doubt those kinds of long term predictions anyway.
I saw a show the other day where they've got some sort of algae that will convert something (don't remember exactly what) to hydrogen. In essense, they are converting solar energy to hydrogen. Regardless of the medium used to store the energy, I see the only long term clean *source* of energy being solar or fusion. In the case you mention regarding cooking or inedible oil, ultimately the source is solar, so I think we're on the same page. There just needs to be a lot more research to find the right combination for the best efficiency.