Can you name some things that make Linux special? Like the ability for the end user to become educated and modify the system, or the right to fork? And then, can you explain how widespread adoption of Linux will change these things?
This is all so ridiculous. It's not like Sony even asks the user if they want this crap installed. Where would they even put the copyright notice? Of all the underhanded nonsense...
What, is this a faith-based thing?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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So how do you know the average American is short on "vital nutrients"? That sounds way, way poorly defined to be actual science. Is this that wacky pseudoscience where there are magical chemicals that we can't detect but that enhance our auras, gee gosh really?
Vitamin deficiencies are not as rare as one might think; while scurvy is no longer common, most people in the civilized world consume processed foods, which generally lack vital nutrients. As such, their body mass is maintained or expanded, but the gains made in nutritional science have not, as a whole, trickled down very far into the general population.
So... which vital nutrients is the average American short on? And I don't mean a bit short on, I mean deficient in. Does this deficiency affect the average multi-vitamin popping American?
If you had a Magical Cancel Earth's Gravity device, you'd be able to lift it with your legs, if you were diligent about it. Let's say you weigh 70 kg, and you can lift your own weight with your legs. So get rig up a machine kinda like a exercise device. You push with your legs, providing 700 N/10000 kg = 0.07 m/s^2 of acceleration. So to get it to 20 m/s, you'd have to push for under five minutes. ('Course, the craft would move away before then, but I'm pointing out that the force needed is minimal once you count out gravity. You just need a bit of patience.)
Besides, if you relied on the sun for lift, you'd have some trouble launching at night...
Project Gutenberg frequently makes use of the page scans for source material. What PG does is to run the images through OCR, proofread and post-process it. It's more useful than a stack of page images, but considerably more work.
If you look at the current books on Distributed Proofreaders, you'll see that some of them credit the Million Books Project for the page scans.
I've thought the same thing. Perhaps DC could be wired in the wall-socket next to the AC plugs, to be backward-compatible. (Presumably people are a bit hesitant to change an electrical socket standard that's been around for many decades.)
The problem, though, would be what voltage to standardize on, and how to step down. Say you distribute 12V. When you have a 9V device, what sort of electronics do you use? Expensive? Power-hungry and hot-running?
Well, I guess he can't win huh? It's difficult being in his position. He wants the work to get done and he wants to make people happy. I guess him saying, "People always complain that I'm being too soft. Not so this time," is the result of all the grief he puts up with.
Not really; his goal is to release the best kernel possible. (I think he says "world domination", but that's what he means.) I've never seen Linus referred to as being a big squishy-bear when talking about his kernel management style.
Y'know, for all the ads I see in eWeek, I still couldn't tell you what the hell SAP does. Since you seem to know something about it, could you explain it to me? The buzzwords make my head hurt.
Everything started when 2 youths died in an utility station. Still no riot. We DO NOT KNOW for now what actually happened. Accident ? Not sure. Pursuit by police ? Not sure. We don't know.
What really got me was when I read about why the kids ran from the cops. It wasn't because they feared that the cops would beat them, or rob them, or plant evidence on them, or shoot them. No, they didn't want to spend a few hours down at the station-house.
Compare that to the antics of the LAPD's Rampart Division, and the French cops look like saints. Hell, cops shoot unarmed black kids here, and we hardly ever riot. No, folks there must be tweaked up somethin' fierce for some other reason.
On the contrary, I believe there would be incentive. A hardware vendor wants to sell hardware, but not support hardware as support costs money. It wouldn't be long before hardware vendors realized that they could save some significant green by allowing th community to take care of itself, or perhaps provide some basic skeletal framework for a driver and allowing the community to roll their own.
Actually, I think ATI does that now. They don't write drivers for most of their newer cards; they let the board manufacturers who use the ATI graphics cores do it. ATI also has some open source drivers, I think, but that's unrelated.
Why do we still have to have a user program (X) with device drivers in it? (Would anybody think it's a good idea if the Linux kernel didn't have any sound drivers, and required gstreamer to implement its own?)
That's not exactly a legit comparison. gstreamer is an application; X may run in userspace, but it's part of the system in the same way udev is; it's not in the kernel because it doesn't have to be.
It seems we have two competing driver models in Linux: some are in the kernel, and provide a consistent interface (sound cards, SCSI/IDE/... cards, network cards), and some aren't in the kernel at all, but expose them at a low level and rely on userspace programs to provide actual drivers (X11 for video cards, CUPS for printers).
Not exactly. For instance, CUPS may have printer drivers, but it relies on the USB, parport or network communications exported by the printer. There's no compelling reason for it to be in the kernel, since those drivers don't talk directly to the hardware in the same sense that the port drivers do.
Or consider gphoto. The port drivers are part of the kernel, but the camera drivers are in userspace--because there's no compelling reason to put them in the kernel, since there's nothing in there they need.
So that's my understanding of why X or CUPS or gphoto have their drivers in userspace, while sound drivers and port drivers are in the kernel.
I was under the impression that the process by which variation within a species turns into variation between species--the process by which new species emerge--was still debatable. Not that anyone is seriously saying "a wizard did it", but I'm unaware of speciation being observed in the lab.
What sort of drive does the Indy use? A 1GB drive runs $30; from what I can google up, it uses a plain Fast SCSI drive... hmm, want one mailed to you? There's a computer used-parts store near here that carries that sort of thing.
Heck, it'd be the least I could do to encourage kernel development, y'know? Not that I have an Indy or anything, but it's the principle of the thing.
1982 -- Soviet gas pipeline. Operatives working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency allegedly (.pdf) plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The Soviets had obtained the system as part of a wide-ranging effort to covertly purchase or steal sensitive U.S. technology. The CIA reportedly found out about the program and decided to make it backfire with equipment that would pass Soviet inspection and then fail once in operation. The resulting event is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet's history.
I didn't know what it was called, though. Thanks for the link!
Open source was around before heavy investment, and should that investment vanish, open source will still be around. Slower, and more part-time, but still around.
Newegg seem to have them for under forty bucks after shipping. Do I have to fiddle around with binary-only kernel modules for those cards, though? I don't care about super-duper 3D performance--I won't be playing Doom or Half-Life or whatever with this card--but I would like my windows not to skip when I drag them, and the option to make use of spiffy vector-based everything when it comes along would be a definite plus.
The r128 driver is listed in the X config file that was generated on install. Also, I'm pretty sure it's using hardware acceleration for the 3D effects, at least, since some of the OpenGL-based xscreensaver hacks suffer from severe artifacting--software acceleration would be slow, but correct.
I'll make sure to try that out when I get home. So I just apt-get install xdm, and change... some config file to point to xdm instead of gdm? I'm sure it's something in/etc/X11 that I don't know off the top of my head. (I'm not looking to install the whole KDE megillah.)
I clearly should have discovered x11perf before writing this post, so I could at least have some numbers to complain about. I can't even tell if the problem is GNOME or X in general. I suppose I can run some x11perf benchmarks and compare them to... something.
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Can you name some things that make Linux special? Like the ability for the end user to become educated and modify the system, or the right to fork? And then, can you explain how widespread adoption of Linux will change these things?
This is all so ridiculous. It's not like Sony even asks the user if they want this crap installed. Where would they even put the copyright notice? Of all the underhanded nonsense...
So how do you know the average American is short on "vital nutrients"? That sounds way, way poorly defined to be actual science. Is this that wacky pseudoscience where there are magical chemicals that we can't detect but that enhance our auras, gee gosh really?
Vitamin deficiencies are not as rare as one might think; while scurvy is no longer common, most people in the civilized world consume processed foods, which generally lack vital nutrients. As such, their body mass is maintained or expanded, but the gains made in nutritional science have not, as a whole, trickled down very far into the general population.
So... which vital nutrients is the average American short on? And I don't mean a bit short on, I mean deficient in. Does this deficiency affect the average multi-vitamin popping American?
If you had a Magical Cancel Earth's Gravity device, you'd be able to lift it with your legs, if you were diligent about it. Let's say you weigh 70 kg, and you can lift your own weight with your legs. So get rig up a machine kinda like a exercise device. You push with your legs, providing 700 N/10000 kg = 0.07 m/s^2 of acceleration. So to get it to 20 m/s, you'd have to push for under five minutes. ('Course, the craft would move away before then, but I'm pointing out that the force needed is minimal once you count out gravity. You just need a bit of patience.)
Besides, if you relied on the sun for lift, you'd have some trouble launching at night...
Project Gutenberg frequently makes use of the page scans for source material. What PG does is to run the images through OCR, proofread and post-process it. It's more useful than a stack of page images, but considerably more work.
If you look at the current books on Distributed Proofreaders, you'll see that some of them credit the Million Books Project for the page scans.
WTF?
Could you define "bad"? Do you mean, "I didn't like it"? 'Cause winning a Harvey and several Eisners is generally a sign of goodness.
I've thought the same thing. Perhaps DC could be wired in the wall-socket next to the AC plugs, to be backward-compatible. (Presumably people are a bit hesitant to change an electrical socket standard that's been around for many decades.)
The problem, though, would be what voltage to standardize on, and how to step down. Say you distribute 12V. When you have a 9V device, what sort of electronics do you use? Expensive? Power-hungry and hot-running?
Well, I guess he can't win huh? It's difficult being in his position. He wants the work to get done and he wants to make people happy. I guess him saying, "People always complain that I'm being too soft. Not so this time," is the result of all the grief he puts up with.
Not really; his goal is to release the best kernel possible. (I think he says "world domination", but that's what he means.) I've never seen Linus referred to as being a big squishy-bear when talking about his kernel management style.
Torvalds later added, "I am legion. All shall kiss my smoldering hoof."
Y'know, for all the ads I see in eWeek, I still couldn't tell you what the hell SAP does. Since you seem to know something about it, could you explain it to me? The buzzwords make my head hurt.
Everything started when 2 youths died in an utility station. Still no riot. We DO NOT KNOW for now what actually happened. Accident ? Not sure. Pursuit by police ? Not sure. We don't know.
What really got me was when I read about why the kids ran from the cops. It wasn't because they feared that the cops would beat them, or rob them, or plant evidence on them, or shoot them. No, they didn't want to spend a few hours down at the station-house.
Compare that to the antics of the LAPD's Rampart Division, and the French cops look like saints. Hell, cops shoot unarmed black kids here, and we hardly ever riot. No, folks there must be tweaked up somethin' fierce for some other reason.
On the contrary, I believe there would be incentive. A hardware vendor wants to sell hardware, but not support hardware as support costs money. It wouldn't be long before hardware vendors realized that they could save some significant green by allowing th community to take care of itself, or perhaps provide some basic skeletal framework for a driver and allowing the community to roll their own.
Actually, I think ATI does that now. They don't write drivers for most of their newer cards; they let the board manufacturers who use the ATI graphics cores do it. ATI also has some open source drivers, I think, but that's unrelated.
Why do we still have to have a user program (X) with device drivers in it? (Would anybody think it's a good idea if the Linux kernel didn't have any sound drivers, and required gstreamer to implement its own?)
That's not exactly a legit comparison. gstreamer is an application; X may run in userspace, but it's part of the system in the same way udev is; it's not in the kernel because it doesn't have to be.
It seems we have two competing driver models in Linux: some are in the kernel, and provide a consistent interface (sound cards, SCSI/IDE/... cards, network cards), and some aren't in the kernel at all, but expose them at a low level and rely on userspace programs to provide actual drivers (X11 for video cards, CUPS for printers).
Not exactly. For instance, CUPS may have printer drivers, but it relies on the USB, parport or network communications exported by the printer. There's no compelling reason for it to be in the kernel, since those drivers don't talk directly to the hardware in the same sense that the port drivers do.
Or consider gphoto. The port drivers are part of the kernel, but the camera drivers are in userspace--because there's no compelling reason to put them in the kernel, since there's nothing in there they need.
So that's my understanding of why X or CUPS or gphoto have their drivers in userspace, while sound drivers and port drivers are in the kernel.
I was under the impression that the process by which variation within a species turns into variation between species--the process by which new species emerge--was still debatable. Not that anyone is seriously saying "a wizard did it", but I'm unaware of speciation being observed in the lab.
What sort of drive does the Indy use? A 1GB drive runs $30; from what I can google up, it uses a plain Fast SCSI drive... hmm, want one mailed to you? There's a computer used-parts store near here that carries that sort of thing.
Heck, it'd be the least I could do to encourage kernel development, y'know? Not that I have an Indy or anything, but it's the principle of the thing.
1982 -- Soviet gas pipeline. Operatives working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency allegedly (.pdf) plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The Soviets had obtained the system as part of a wide-ranging effort to covertly purchase or steal sensitive U.S. technology. The CIA reportedly found out about the program and decided to make it backfire with equipment that would pass Soviet inspection and then fail once in operation. The resulting event is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet's history.
I didn't know what it was called, though. Thanks for the link!
According to the caption, "the term "bug" had been in use for many years previously by engineers to indicate an indefinite problem".
Open source was around before heavy investment, and should that investment vanish, open source will still be around. Slower, and more part-time, but still around.
Newegg seem to have them for under forty bucks after shipping. Do I have to fiddle around with binary-only kernel modules for those cards, though? I don't care about super-duper 3D performance--I won't be playing Doom or Half-Life or whatever with this card--but I would like my windows not to skip when I drag them, and the option to make use of spiffy vector-based everything when it comes along would be a definite plus.
So what's the incantation to get the "lovely debian screen" configuration back up in case I want to toggle my X login manager again?
The r128 driver is listed in the X config file that was generated on install. Also, I'm pretty sure it's using hardware acceleration for the 3D effects, at least, since some of the OpenGL-based xscreensaver hacks suffer from severe artifacting--software acceleration would be slow, but correct.
I'll make sure to try that out when I get home. So I just apt-get install xdm, and change... some config file to point to xdm instead of gdm? I'm sure it's something in /etc/X11 that I don't know off the top of my head. (I'm not looking to install the whole KDE megillah.)
I clearly should have discovered x11perf before writing this post, so I could at least have some numbers to complain about. I can't even tell if the problem is GNOME or X in general. I suppose I can run some x11perf benchmarks and compare them to... something.