Note, however, that the documentation on the website is out of date - the 'a' and 'n' package series are no longer split up into floppy-sized chunks (since 8.0). You can still do an ext2 (etc.) installation from floppies by initially installing the split version of Zipslack on to a FAT/FAT32 partition, and moving the complete system over to a Linux-native partition (moving instructions are in the Zipslack docs).
Note also that there's no longer a UMSDOS installation rootdisk, as there was in 8.0 and earlier versions - you have to start with Zipslack as a base system, and build up from there.
The System V init stuff is in the 'sysvinit' package, and is really just to support third party software that expects it to be there - Slackware is still primarily a BSD-style init system.
Re:I found the article a little frustrating...
on
New Amino Acid Discovered
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Looks like you're right about it being a stop codon. Actually, the article does tell you which one (in jargon):
"Then in 1998, they published a paper showing that the gene had a component called an in-frame amber codon that behaved unusually."
I'm surprised that the BBC swallowed this one so uncritically. The Guardian has a rather more sceptical story, which implies that the underwater 'structures' have not been dated in any meaningful way, and may in fact be natural rock formations :
Graham Hancock, the most prominent member of the expedition, is well known for what might kindly be described as 'fringe' theories of ancient civilizations, Faces on Mars, etc:
There was an interesting discussion on this topic last year over on bionet.software, with contributions from several authors of significant bioinformatics software (search for 'open source' in the bionet.software group at groups.google.com).There's also a good interview with Ewan Birney (of BioPerl and EnsEMBL fame) about open source bioinformatics here:
http://conferences.oreilly.com/biocon/
Like some of the other contributors to this thread, the argument I find most convincing is that peer-reviewed scientific publications usually (and for very good reasons) require full disclosure of methods - why should software be exempt from this? Similarly valid criticisms were made about _Science_'s decision to publish the Celera human genome paper with only conditional access to the primary data. Biotech companies are of course free to conceal both their data and methodology, but the scientists involved should not then expect the right to contribute to the peer-reviewed literature.
There are also sound economic reasons for an open source approach to significant scientific software: it's ironic that software developed with public funding has in some cases been commercialized by the host institution of the programmers, leading to a situation where other laboratories that receive grants from the same funding body end up paying substantial license fees! (some funding agreements are now savvy enough to include a clause preventing this). In fields like molecular biology, there's also the risk that initially reasonable license fees can rocket when the software proves to be useful. This is pretty much what happened in the case of GCG, a set of sequence manipulation utilities originally developed by a university department, but later acquired by a large biotech company. The increasingly restrictive and expensive license was one of the factors that led to the creation of EMBOSS:
http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/Software/EMBOSS/
a GPL/LGPL'd alternative that in many respects now surpasses GCG, and runs on a wider range of Unix-like platforms (including Linux, Cygwin and MacOS X).
Alan Garner - Red Shift
Keith Roberts - Pavane
Alasdair Gray - Lanark
Angela Carter - Burning Your Boats (collection)
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
From the CD-R FAQ at http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq02.html#S2-4-2
"One last piece of advice: do not assume that any disc that doesn't extract cleanly is copy-protected. There have been many, many postings on message boards from people who think they have found a protected disc, or how some specific piece of software can defeat the protection (sorry guys, CDFS.VXD is not magic)."
The evidence at the cdfreaks sites seems rather thin ("Recently someone reported to our site that there is software that is able to rip SafeAudio protected CD's very easy."). Shouldn't we reserve judgement until there are more specific details? Can anyone name a single title with this type of copy protection?
I guess this would be an argument for never porting Free software to a proprietary OS, though. Personally I think your second point outweighs your first - having (e.g.) high quality Free tools like gcc and Perl available on multiple platforms has been a Good Thing overall (even after complete Free OSs had become available to replace the proprietary systems many of these tools were developed on in the first place). RMS may well disagree, however:-)
Would Troll Tech actually lose anything by extending this licensing policy to the Windows version of Qt? Allowing the GPL as an option would open up an excellent toolkit for cross-platform development of Free software without significantly affecting licensing revenue from closed-source commercial developers. Troll would get good publicity, lots of Qt/X apps that would otherwise never be ported would show up on Windows (also good for Troll's profile), and all the C++ developers would get a free new toy to play with. Surely everyone wins?
UMSDOS still has it's uses, and isn't 'crippled' except in the sense of being slower for some operations than ext2. Rather than making people prefer Windows, I'd argue that this type of installation can ease the transition to Linux by removing the 'risk' of repartitioning. Lots of users who start out with distributions like Zipslack then progress to a native installation. It's also useful to have a quick and dirty method of reversibly installing Linux on a Windows machine.
However, the real issue here isn't the filesystem but the boot loader. Having no access to real mode DOS would prevent the use of loadlin, which many people still use to boot their ext2 installations. Of course, using a Win9x bootdisk is still an option, but you won't be able to use loadlin without one.
Been there, done that, even gave it the same name! It would be interesting to see how it benchmarks vs UMSDOS ~ both methods obviously have a performance penalty with respect to native ext2.
By the way, the nastier UMSDOS bugs in the 2.2x kernels have been fixed over the last few months:
http://linux.voyager.hr/umsdos/
so it's once again a viable option for situations where repartitioning is undesirable (& the flexibility of disk usage is nice). UMSDOS in 2.4-pre-x is still screwed, however.
...is the quote from the HMV guy claiming that they'd be boycotting releases from artists who had pre-released tracks as mp3s. Is this accurate? Surely this should be between the record company and the artist? What business is it of a record shop if the artist chooses to release their work in alternate formats? Sounds like a good enough reason for boycotting an overpriced retailer!
Slashdot Mirror
Note, however, that the documentation on the website is out of date - the 'a' and 'n' package series are no longer split up into floppy-sized chunks (since 8.0). You can still do an ext2 (etc.) installation from floppies by initially installing the split version of Zipslack on to a FAT/FAT32 partition, and moving the complete system over to a Linux-native partition (moving instructions are in the Zipslack docs).
Note also that there's no longer a UMSDOS installation rootdisk, as there was in 8.0 and earlier versions - you have to start with Zipslack as a base system, and build up from there.
The System V init stuff is in the 'sysvinit' package, and is really just to support third party software that expects it to be there - Slackware is still primarily a BSD-style init system.
Looks like you're right about it being a stop codon. Actually, the article does tell you which one (in jargon):
"Then in 1998, they published a paper showing that the gene had a component called an in-frame amber codon that behaved unusually."
"Amber" = UAG
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,682 031,00.html
Curiously, the expedition does not seem to include any professional archaeologists:
http://www.india-atlantis.org/
Graham Hancock, the most prominent member of the expedition, is well known for what might kindly be described as 'fringe' theories of ancient civilizations, Faces on Mars, etc:
http://www.grahamhancock.com/
For a critical view, see:
http://www.ramtops.demon.co.uk/
Even easier:
t ml
.pdf in two mouse clicks.
http://www.et.dtu.dk/Software/GhostWord/Index.h
It's a free(beer)ware interface to Ghostscript that works from within MS-Office applications, and enables conversion to a
There was an interesting discussion on this topic last year over on bionet.software, with contributions from several authors of significant bioinformatics software (search for 'open source' in the bionet.software group at groups.google.com).There's also a good interview with Ewan Birney (of BioPerl and EnsEMBL fame) about open source bioinformatics here:
http://conferences.oreilly.com/biocon/
Like some of the other contributors to this thread, the argument I find most convincing is that peer-reviewed scientific publications usually (and for very good reasons) require full disclosure of methods - why should software be exempt from this? Similarly valid criticisms were made about _Science_'s decision to publish the Celera human genome paper with only conditional access to the primary data. Biotech companies are of course free to conceal both their data and methodology, but the scientists involved should not then expect the right to contribute to the peer-reviewed literature.
There are also sound economic reasons for an open source approach to significant scientific software: it's ironic that software developed with public funding has in some cases been commercialized by the host institution of the programmers, leading to a situation where other laboratories that receive grants from the same funding body end up paying substantial license fees! (some funding agreements are now savvy enough to include a clause preventing this). In fields like molecular biology, there's also the risk that initially reasonable license fees can rocket when the software proves to be useful. This is pretty much what happened in the case of GCG, a set of sequence manipulation utilities originally developed by a university department, but later acquired by a large biotech company. The increasingly restrictive and expensive license was one of the factors that led to the creation of EMBOSS:
http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/Software/EMBOSS/
a GPL/LGPL'd alternative that in many respects now surpasses GCG, and runs on a wider range of Unix-like platforms (including Linux, Cygwin and MacOS X).
To this list, I would add:
Alan Garner - Red Shift
Keith Roberts - Pavane
Alasdair Gray - Lanark
Angela Carter - Burning Your Boats (collection)
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
So how would you classify (for example):
Feanor (& sons),
Turin,
the later kings of Numenor,
Boromir,
Denethor,
the Haradrim,
'The Dead',
or even Smeagol..?
From the CD-R FAQ at http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq02.html#S2-4-2
"One last piece of advice: do not assume that any disc that doesn't extract cleanly is copy-protected. There have been many, many postings on message boards from people who think they have found a protected disc, or how some specific piece of software can defeat the protection (sorry guys, CDFS.VXD is not magic)."
The evidence at the cdfreaks sites seems rather thin ("Recently someone reported to our site that there is software that is able to rip SafeAudio protected CD's very easy."). Shouldn't we reserve judgement until there are more specific details? Can anyone name a single title with this type of copy protection?
I guess this would be an argument for never porting Free software to a proprietary OS, though. Personally I think your second point outweighs your first - having (e.g.) high quality Free tools like gcc and Perl available on multiple platforms has been a Good Thing overall (even after complete Free OSs had become available to replace the proprietary systems many of these tools were developed on in the first place). RMS may well disagree, however :-)
Would Troll Tech actually lose anything by extending this licensing policy to the Windows version of Qt? Allowing the GPL as an option would open up an excellent toolkit for cross-platform development of Free software without significantly affecting licensing revenue from closed-source commercial developers. Troll would get good publicity, lots of Qt/X apps that would otherwise never be ported would show up on Windows (also good for Troll's profile), and all the C++ developers would get a free new toy to play with. Surely everyone wins?
UMSDOS still has it's uses, and isn't 'crippled' except in the sense of being slower for some operations than ext2. Rather than making people prefer Windows, I'd argue that this type of installation can ease the transition to Linux by removing the 'risk' of repartitioning. Lots of users who start out with distributions like Zipslack then progress to a native installation. It's also useful to have a quick and dirty method of reversibly installing Linux on a Windows machine.
However, the real issue here isn't the filesystem but the boot loader. Having no access to real mode DOS would prevent the use of loadlin, which many people still use to boot their ext2 installations. Of course, using a Win9x bootdisk is still an option, but you won't be able to use loadlin without one.
Been there, done that, even gave it the same name! It would be interesting to see how it benchmarks vs UMSDOS ~ both methods obviously have a performance penalty with respect to native ext2.
By the way, the nastier UMSDOS bugs in the 2.2x kernels have been fixed over the last few months:
http://linux.voyager.hr/umsdos/
so it's once again a viable option for situations where repartitioning is undesirable (& the flexibility of disk usage is nice). UMSDOS in 2.4-pre-x is still screwed, however.
...is the quote from the HMV guy claiming that they'd be boycotting releases from artists who had pre-released tracks as mp3s. Is this accurate? Surely this should be between the record company and the artist? What business is it of a record shop if the artist chooses to release their work in alternate formats? Sounds like a good enough reason for boycotting an overpriced retailer!