Linux may be multiuser, but it is NOT realtime. If I eject ANY bit of mounted media (possibly excepting / or swap), the kernel should be able to handle this. As others have said, the Amiga did this by maintaining handles to named volumes, not devices. If you yank out a floppy and I am reading from it, I'll go to sleep and the OS will issue a requester that media X be inserted into any drive. I, the user, can ignore this until I'm ready and THEN put it back, and anyone waiting on it can continue.
Remember, the user sitting at the console is GOD. If they want their disk out, it should come out as soon as possible without causing filesystem corruption. Other users can wait or give up as they see fit.
In response to all the "but you just do this in this application...":
Not all applications do things the proper X11 way, so while X selection might work for one thing, it might not for another. It's no good crying "But the standard says..." because it's the end result that matters... If I select something in one window, paste it via middle button, then select something else using Edit->Copy, Edit->Paste in the other application pastes the OLD selection, not the one I just did. Sorry... that's broken, no matter whose fault it is.
Windoze and MacOS have it right, X11 has it wrong. Any time you select something, it should be copiable, and whether you use right-button, ctrl-C, or Edit->Copy... it should end up in the same buffer. Likewise, middle-button, ctrl-V, or Edit->Paste should always paste whatever went into that buffer last. If that breaks X11's network model, then that model needs to be extended.
I fought with this for years with all sorts of different window managers and finally just gave up. I use a windows workstation as a desktop, and open lots of ssh sessions and a couple cygwin shells. It works, and it works consistantly. If the Linux community can force that sort of consistancy and stop the X11 team and all the app developers from throwing the ball back and forth for another 10 years, maybe we'll get somewhere.
First of all, headlights from cars aren't all THAT bad a source of light pollution. In havily populated areas, they are a factor... but cars are transient light sources. In lower population centers, they are not a problem. I live in a city of ~50,000 and in most places I can drive out at 3am and see only an occasional car.
Secondly, why would work be any different than it is now? Don't you have lights indoors? I doubt the poster was arguing for the extinguishment of ALL lights, just the majority of light that leaks outdoors and pollutes the environment.
I just don't see where outdoor lighting gains you much. It makes nice dark shadows for thieves to sneak around in. Since you're probably working indoors if you work at night, it doesn't help you work. What's the point?
Yes, I'd like to have a no-outdoor-permenant-light zone... but I don't want hemp pants, and you can pry the T-3 I don't have from my cold dead fingers!
As a child in a small-ish midwestern town, I remember how I could go outdoors in the summer and watch the meteor showers. It was fairly bright (I lived on the edge of a city with ~4000 people), but it wasn't absurd yet. Even so, I used to complain that the curtains didn't block out the street lights enough to get to sleep.
When I visited my grandparents, It was very dark, with basically one street light (at the public landing), and then the neighbors up the hill. It was very relaxing.
I noticed that the sky is much brighter than it was 20 years ago, it is never really dark unless you live a long ways out in the country. I went back to where my grandparents used to live two years ago, and the sky-glow from the city and two towns had spread enough so there was really only a small patch of real darkness directly overhead.
The weird thing is... what GOOD does all this light really do? I mean, how many people actually USE it? Most of the people I know who work or do things at night basically drive to where they're going and then go indoors and therefore don't actually use the outdoor lights for much. You can argue for navigation, but isn't that what your headlights (on your car) supposed to be for? In Detroit, it's so bright that many people forget to turn their lights on when they drive -- and never notice!
What has changed is quality. 10 years ago, Digital Signal Processing (DSP) technology wasn't good enough to make boob toting hacks like Britany Spears sound good. Now we are inundated with manufactured bands who don't have the quality or maturity of the groups who cut their teeth playing in local pubs to crowds of 4 people. NSYNC isn't famous because of an increasing demand of local fans. They are famous because the RIAA packaged and marketed them down the throats of the 12 to 18 demographic.
This hasn't changed much in the last 40 years. The best example I can think of is The Monkees. They were a manufactured clone of The Beatles, carefully chosen and targeted at the young girls of the time. Much to the chagrin of the music industry, they actually developed some talent, and a desire to move away from the fluff they were playing and produced their own music after a while.
No, what's changed is that the RIAA has spent the last 30 years buying as much influence in politics as they can. Why else would a middling-sized outfit like them be able to push around the tech industry, whose gross sales figures outstrip them nearly 10 to 1?
The RIAA is scared, plain and simple. They now see that the power to create, publish, and promote music is available to ANYONE, and when you combine that with the degeneration of television advertising as a viable income (broadcast television is almost a thing of the past), they are about to become redundant, and they have no ideas for reinventing themselves. Their choices are:
Reinvent. Come up with a way to make money off the emerging trends in digital media, home and portable theatre, and live webcasts.
Fire-Sale. Drop the prices on everything to the point where people will want to buy the physical media again.
Sue. Use the political clout they've been cultivating over the years and make money by taking it from others, and stifling innovation in the process. This has worked for the oil companies for decades.
Fade away. All the top execs have money, they could liquidate the franchises, and leave a power vacuum after they take the cash. Let artists fend for themselves (as they do anyways).
Option 3 looks like it has the best potential for short term profit and a lingering continued existance.
No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's......Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
The only reason ALL telemarketers aren't in jail right now is that harassment laws require that the repetitive activity be carried out by the same person or persons. If there were such a thing as a class-action harassment suit, every telemarketer on the planet would be dead broke in jail.
I'm supposed to feel sorry for people who are so damn lazy that they'd rather sit on their ass at home and knowingly bother people, than walk to the local supermarket and bag groceries? Piss off.
Now, if they'd just enforce a national do-not-send-me-spam-email list too, and back it up with something appropriate like the death penalty, maybe we'd solve a few problems.:)
Yup, just like if someone breaks into your house and uses your (legally registered) gun to kill your family, you should go to jail since you are responsible for the firearm.
IANAL, but I think there's a lesser crime involving negligence, with which you should be charged... not the multiple murder raps the person doing the killing should get. Likewise, the RIAA shouldn't be able to sue you if someone else uses your computer to break the law... but since you are an unknowing accomplise, perhaps you should get a (smaller!) fine of some time?
You could never program a robot to say "Would you like fries with that?", or "May I take your order, Sir?"
Besides, if all the fast food employees were robots, we'd miss out on all the waste produced by orders that were wrong ("I said NO tomatoes or mayo, not JUST tomatoes and mayo!"), and all the burnt/inedible food they produce ("Hey Beavis, watch this... Would you like to try some of our seasoned curly fries?"). The amount of food ordered by these chains would drop, putting the farmers out of business. The amount of waste sitting in the dumpster would go down, causing mass famine amongst the seagull populations.
Switch to Light beer (Ugh).
Why not just slit your wrists and be done with it?
You can easily make your own light beer just like the big breweries do... empty half the bottle, refill with water, then add a bit of carbination back. If you don't want to waste tap water, you can always recycle the half you drank already.
You're going to have to do that eventually anyways... unless you're one of those people who still clings to their old 19" Curtis Mathis black&white tube type that nicely fills an entire wall... but looks really cool, and keeps the room warm in the winter.
So the best way to show your displeasure at RFID's is to swap the id tags on an item you intend to buy for another item you don't intend to buy. Since you're buying the item, not the tag, and since the price tag hasn't been tampered with, it seems like that should be legal (IANAL!), but very annoying.
If they stop you at the door, they can search for the "stolen" item all they want, since they'll only find the ID tag. If they ask you about it, you can either blame it on a mislabelling (darn new technology, you guys should be more careful), or explain exactly what you did and say you don't believe the law requires that they be able to monitor and track your movements.
Yes, of course you could just drop the tag on the floor... but that won't really accomplish much other than show a discrepency between the inventory system and the cashier system.
Merely receiving a copy without making or causing to be made, that copy, isn't possible in the online world.
Actually, it's very possible. All it takes is for someone to email you a copy of something that you didn't ask for. YOU didn't cause it to be made, but by your possession of it, you would be liable.
While most of the tracker sites offer up zillions of pirated , it is a nice protocol for distributing large files. The recent Redhat 9 example should have opened the eyes of at least a few people out there, if all the distros would offer permenant torrent links, they'd find their bandwidth bills going down sharply.
Of course, I will miss being able to download episodes of old TV shows that aren't available in any other format that I know of. Seeing a couple of Blake's 7 episodes again was pretty cool.
Since it seem that the United States Empire is moving more and more towards the concept of Guilty until proven innocent (or all the money is drained from you), perhaps the People should counter-sue DirecTV for all the future cancer cases that their satellite transmissions *MIGHT* be causing.
The neighbors on both sides of me have DirecTV dishes, and since they get good reception I know the waveforms must be penetrating my house, and thus myself and my family. If we magically develop cancer 20 years from now, who's to say it wasn't that particular does of radiation that caused it?
As long as the US still wants to pretend to be a democracy (rather than the commercial Oligarchy it really is), anything which enters my home belongs to me, and provided that my doing so doesn't infringe on other rights (making money is not a right!), I can use that signal however I choose. Heck, if I don't record it, I'm not even violating any copyright laws since I'm using the original signal, not a copy.
Alas, I don't have DirecTV... I am stuck with cable, so it's a moot point anyways. Maybe when they start suing everyone who bought a television, since they MIGHT be watching something that was once pirated from DirecTV....
I know that *I* am alot lazier now than I was 10 years ago... does anyone have an ISO image of the slackware 1.0 distribution? I'm almost willing to try and dig up a few floppies to do the base install, but I'd much rather try it from cd (even though most bios's (biosi?) wouldn't let you boot from a cd back then).
True, but I think it is the abridgement of the constitutional "right to bear arms" that is being mentioned. As a citizen of the US, you are supposed to be entitled to bear arms, so-as to put yourself on an even footing with criminals and invading infantry. Of course, since the criminals have automatic weapons, it's kindof a moot point.
Of more long-lasting harm is the fact that a convicted felon must report that felony to any potential employer when asked (usually on a job application). While the employer doesn't have to consider this, most will toss your application in the circular file if that box is checked, regardless of what kind of felony it was.
That means that as far as rejoining society as a useful, productive citizen, a person convicted of file sharing will have about the same chance as a murderer or rapist. Does that seem logical to you?
It's knee-jerk responses like this (by the congressmen) which unbalance our system so much. They all think about what will get them reelected next term, rather than what their laws will be used to do 20 years down the road.
The RIAA is not a government organization. They are not a police force. They are no different from Uncle Joe's Deli down the street. Why then does everyone in the legislature seem to think they should have special provisions and laws passed on their behalf? If *I* start a business, I'm sure they won't pass laws to make MY life any easier...(the rhetorical answer, of course, is money and the legal form of bribery known as contributions).
Why would I spend $900 on a PC that has to be maintained and then I still have to shell out extra for a DVD burner and hope they properly add support for it in my lifetime?
I can spend $500 and just buy a DVD recorder, plug my VCR and Cable box into it, and hit the record button. It is programmable the same way a VCR is, and while that's not as fancy as a TiVO, it worked fine for me over the last 15 years of VCR recording.
Unless they develop clever software like TiVO has, that learns your viewing habits and searches for moved showtimes (which you need a taxonomy for -- hence the service charge)... there's really no point.
Your Mom must be more 31337 than mine. My mom also has an iMac, but has never had any need to "switch users", let alone do it quickly.
Frankly, for most normal users, why would they ever want or need to run things with another user's priveledges? Even elevated privs are not something you generally need very often in a well designed system.
Slashdot Mirror
Element 110: Marklarium ...
Element 111: Marklarium
Linux may be multiuser, but it is NOT realtime. If I eject ANY bit of mounted media (possibly excepting / or swap), the kernel should be able to handle this. As others have said, the Amiga did this by maintaining handles to named volumes, not devices. If you yank out a floppy and I am reading from it, I'll go to sleep and the OS will issue a requester that media X be inserted into any drive. I, the user, can ignore this until I'm ready and THEN put it back, and anyone waiting on it can continue.
Remember, the user sitting at the console is GOD. If they want their disk out, it should come out as soon as possible without causing filesystem corruption. Other users can wait or give up as they see fit.
Hear hear!
In response to all the "but you just do this in this application...":
Not all applications do things the proper X11 way, so while X selection might work for one thing, it might not for another. It's no good crying "But the standard says..." because it's the end result that matters... If I select something in one window, paste it via middle button, then select something else using Edit->Copy, Edit->Paste in the other application pastes the OLD selection, not the one I just did. Sorry... that's broken, no matter whose fault it is.
Windoze and MacOS have it right, X11 has it wrong. Any time you select something, it should be copiable, and whether you use right-button, ctrl-C, or Edit->Copy... it should end up in the same buffer. Likewise, middle-button, ctrl-V, or Edit->Paste should always paste whatever went into that buffer last. If that breaks X11's network model, then that model needs to be extended.
I fought with this for years with all sorts of different window managers and finally just gave up. I use a windows workstation as a desktop, and open lots of ssh sessions and a couple cygwin shells. It works, and it works consistantly. If the Linux community can force that sort of consistancy and stop the X11 team and all the app developers from throwing the ball back and forth for another 10 years, maybe we'll get somewhere.
Ha!
First of all, headlights from cars aren't all THAT bad a source of light pollution. In havily populated areas, they are a factor... but cars are transient light sources. In lower population centers, they are not a problem. I live in a city of ~50,000 and in most places I can drive out at 3am and see only an occasional car.
Secondly, why would work be any different than it is now? Don't you have lights indoors? I doubt the poster was arguing for the extinguishment of ALL lights, just the majority of light that leaks outdoors and pollutes the environment.
I just don't see where outdoor lighting gains you much. It makes nice dark shadows for thieves to sneak around in. Since you're probably working indoors if you work at night, it doesn't help you work. What's the point?
Yes, I'd like to have a no-outdoor-permenant-light zone... but I don't want hemp pants, and you can pry the T-3 I don't have from my cold dead fingers!
As a child in a small-ish midwestern town, I remember how I could go outdoors in the summer and watch the meteor showers. It was fairly bright (I lived on the edge of a city with ~4000 people), but it wasn't absurd yet. Even so, I used to complain that the curtains didn't block out the street lights enough to get to sleep.
When I visited my grandparents, It was very dark, with basically one street light (at the public landing), and then the neighbors up the hill. It was very relaxing.
I noticed that the sky is much brighter than it was 20 years ago, it is never really dark unless you live a long ways out in the country. I went back to where my grandparents used to live two years ago, and the sky-glow from the city and two towns had spread enough so there was really only a small patch of real darkness directly overhead.
The weird thing is... what GOOD does all this light really do? I mean, how many people actually USE it? Most of the people I know who work or do things at night basically drive to where they're going and then go indoors and therefore don't actually use the outdoor lights for much. You can argue for navigation, but isn't that what your headlights (on your car) supposed to be for? In Detroit, it's so bright that many people forget to turn their lights on when they drive -- and never notice!
is based on $1 per in-house lawyer?
No, what's changed is that the RIAA has spent the last 30 years buying as much influence in politics as they can. Why else would a middling-sized outfit like them be able to push around the tech industry, whose gross sales figures outstrip them nearly 10 to 1?
The RIAA is scared, plain and simple. They now see that the power to create, publish, and promote music is available to ANYONE, and when you combine that with the degeneration of television advertising as a viable income (broadcast television is almost a thing of the past), they are about to become redundant, and they have no ideas for reinventing themselves. Their choices are:
- Reinvent. Come up with a way to make money off the emerging trends in digital media, home and portable theatre, and live webcasts.
- Fire-Sale. Drop the prices on everything to the point where people will want to buy the physical media again.
- Sue. Use the political clout they've been cultivating over the years and make money by taking it from others, and stifling innovation in the process. This has worked for the oil companies for decades.
- Fade away. All the top execs have money, they could liquidate the franchises, and leave a power vacuum after they take the cash. Let artists fend for themselves (as they do anyways).
Option 3 looks like it has the best potential for short term profit and a lingering continued existance.No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's... ...Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
But countries that have lots of sunshine already DO provide much of the world's power... OIL.
The only reason ALL telemarketers aren't in jail right now is that harassment laws require that the repetitive activity be carried out by the same person or persons. If there were such a thing as a class-action harassment suit, every telemarketer on the planet would be dead broke in jail.
:)
I'm supposed to feel sorry for people who are so damn lazy that they'd rather sit on their ass at home and knowingly bother people, than walk to the local supermarket and bag groceries? Piss off.
Now, if they'd just enforce a national do-not-send-me-spam-email list too, and back it up with something appropriate like the death penalty, maybe we'd solve a few problems.
That seems like about the right amount of time to finally play something original on the radio. I'll consider that a promise!
Yup, just like if someone breaks into your house and uses your (legally registered) gun to kill your family, you should go to jail since you are responsible for the firearm.
IANAL, but I think there's a lesser crime involving negligence, with which you should be charged... not the multiple murder raps the person doing the killing should get. Likewise, the RIAA shouldn't be able to sue you if someone else uses your computer to break the law... but since you are an unknowing accomplise, perhaps you should get a (smaller!) fine of some time?
So, where do I get my career chip?
You could never program a robot to say "Would you like fries with that?", or "May I take your order, Sir?"
Besides, if all the fast food employees were robots, we'd miss out on all the waste produced by orders that were wrong ("I said NO tomatoes or mayo, not JUST tomatoes and mayo!"), and all the burnt/inedible food they produce ("Hey Beavis, watch this... Would you like to try some of our seasoned curly fries?"). The amount of food ordered by these chains would drop, putting the farmers out of business. The amount of waste sitting in the dumpster would go down, causing mass famine amongst the seagull populations.
It would be mass hysteria!
You're going to have to do that eventually anyways... unless you're one of those people who still clings to their old 19" Curtis Mathis black&white tube type that nicely fills an entire wall... but looks really cool, and keeps the room warm in the winter.
So the best way to show your displeasure at RFID's is to swap the id tags on an item you intend to buy for another item you don't intend to buy. Since you're buying the item, not the tag, and since the price tag hasn't been tampered with, it seems like that should be legal (IANAL!), but very annoying.
If they stop you at the door, they can search for the "stolen" item all they want, since they'll only find the ID tag. If they ask you about it, you can either blame it on a mislabelling (darn new technology, you guys should be more careful), or explain exactly what you did and say you don't believe the law requires that they be able to monitor and track your movements.
Yes, of course you could just drop the tag on the floor... but that won't really accomplish much other than show a discrepency between the inventory system and the cashier system.
While most of the tracker sites offer up zillions of pirated , it is a nice protocol for distributing large files. The recent Redhat 9 example should have opened the eyes of at least a few people out there, if all the distros would offer permenant torrent links, they'd find their bandwidth bills going down sharply.
Of course, I will miss being able to download episodes of old TV shows that aren't available in any other format that I know of. Seeing a couple of Blake's 7 episodes again was pretty cool.
Since it seem that the United States Empire is moving more and more towards the concept of Guilty until proven innocent (or all the money is drained from you), perhaps the People should counter-sue DirecTV for all the future cancer cases that their satellite transmissions *MIGHT* be causing.
The neighbors on both sides of me have DirecTV dishes, and since they get good reception I know the waveforms must be penetrating my house, and thus myself and my family. If we magically develop cancer 20 years from now, who's to say it wasn't that particular does of radiation that caused it?
As long as the US still wants to pretend to be a democracy (rather than the commercial Oligarchy it really is), anything which enters my home belongs to me, and provided that my doing so doesn't infringe on other rights (making money is not a right!), I can use that signal however I choose. Heck, if I don't record it, I'm not even violating any copyright laws since I'm using the original signal, not a copy.
Alas, I don't have DirecTV... I am stuck with cable, so it's a moot point anyways. Maybe when they start suing everyone who bought a television, since they MIGHT be watching something that was once pirated from DirecTV....
Hehehe, well it looks like slackware.com has been slashdotted. Maybe they celebrated their 10th by firing up the old web server from '93?
I know that *I* am alot lazier now than I was 10 years ago... does anyone have an ISO image of the slackware 1.0 distribution? I'm almost willing to try and dig up a few floppies to do the base install, but I'd much rather try it from cd (even though most bios's (biosi?) wouldn't let you boot from a cd back then).
True, but I think it is the abridgement of the constitutional "right to bear arms" that is being mentioned. As a citizen of the US, you are supposed to be entitled to bear arms, so-as to put yourself on an even footing with criminals and invading infantry. Of course, since the criminals have automatic weapons, it's kindof a moot point.
Of more long-lasting harm is the fact that a convicted felon must report that felony to any potential employer when asked (usually on a job application). While the employer doesn't have to consider this, most will toss your application in the circular file if that box is checked, regardless of what kind of felony it was.
That means that as far as rejoining society as a useful, productive citizen, a person convicted of file sharing will have about the same chance as a murderer or rapist. Does that seem logical to you?
It's knee-jerk responses like this (by the congressmen) which unbalance our system so much. They all think about what will get them reelected next term, rather than what their laws will be used to do 20 years down the road.
The RIAA is not a government organization. They are not a police force. They are no different from Uncle Joe's Deli down the street. Why then does everyone in the legislature seem to think they should have special provisions and laws passed on their behalf? If *I* start a business, I'm sure they won't pass laws to make MY life any easier...(the rhetorical answer, of course, is money and the legal form of bribery known as contributions).
Why would I spend $900 on a PC that has to be maintained and then I still have to shell out extra for a DVD burner and hope they properly add support for it in my lifetime?
I can spend $500 and just buy a DVD recorder, plug my VCR and Cable box into it, and hit the record button. It is programmable the same way a VCR is, and while that's not as fancy as a TiVO, it worked fine for me over the last 15 years of VCR recording.
Unless they develop clever software like TiVO has, that learns your viewing habits and searches for moved showtimes (which you need a taxonomy for -- hence the service charge)... there's really no point.
Your Mom must be more 31337 than mine. My mom also has an iMac, but has never had any need to "switch users", let alone do it quickly.
Frankly, for most normal users, why would they ever want or need to run things with another user's priveledges? Even elevated privs are not something you generally need very often in a well designed system.