Dependency Hell is NOT negated by APT and Yum. [...]
I ended up with over fifty things that I had to reinstall, to get my computer back in order after THAT fuckup.
Um, you've got a seriously FUBAR apt configuration if that's happening to you. I would suggest unfscking your/etc/apt/preferences for a start...
Seriously, the only time this sort of thing happens is when you're running Unstable or, especially, mixing Unstable packages into a Stable or Testing system -- and then you're intentionally putting yourself on the bleeding edge. The one exception I can recall is the recent and well-documented problem with the switch to GTK2-based Galeon; that only affected Testing, too, not Stable. And it was resolved in a few days; we just used Firebird in the interim.
That's curious. I wasn't aware of that. I wouldn't have expected many countries to implement such a law, mostly because even a place like Iraq (pre-invasion) recognized the benefits of having people on line. Places where things are out of control enough to have the rulers think banning modems seems like a good idea would not, I would think, have the technical base or the organization to enforce such a ban. (I've not been to Sudan, but when I lived in Egypt in the '90s I got the impression that it was only about one step above Somalia in terms of effective government... We sure had a lot of refugees from there.)
Another poster mentioned Burma; that one actually doesn't surprise me too much, I guess.
As for beyond the pale... If they were at an embassy they wouldn't need to send a telegram: they could use the satellite hookup. But not all diplomats operate out of an embassy: sometimes they need to deal with, say, N. Korea. (How else do you discuss the latest peace treaty, or whatever?)
By `beyond the pale' I simply meant that virtually nothing would surprise me coming from DPRK. I don't imagine there's any type of communication technology they allow free use of there.
That made me wonder if I've ever seen a DPRK TLD. I just checked, and even the official site of the DPRK is a.com, of all things (www.korea-dpr.com).
They look like they're in Vancouver, from a traceroute, and Netcraft says the netblock is owned by the CBC (!). So I'm guessing there's pretty much no Internet at all in DPRK.
Courier is preferred by people who have to read large volumes of text, such as those who work in the publishing industry, because they find it easier to read.
Proportional fonts look nicer, which is why they are used in areas where visual presentation is important, such as consumer goods.
I honestly can't say what they're smoking over at the university press if they prefer Courier... but I can quite categorically say that when I have a stack of three hundred pages of student papers to mark, they sure as fsck better be in a clean, serif font. Of course, getting them in Computer Modern is a bit too much to ask, but anything in the Times/Garamond/Georgia/Palatino camp is fine. Courier, though -- oy, after five pages I'm going crosseyed and my head hurts. Even Arial isn't as bad, although for long documents it is pretty hard on the eyes, too.
I know of countries where modems are outlawed. (They mess up the cheap bugs the local law enforcement has on all the phones. Not that the phones work...)
Um... for example? Barring N. Korea, which seems to be just a bit beyond the pale, where on earth have you heard of modems being totally banned?
Serif fonts offer increased readability for native English speakers. People who have picked up English as a second language do better with sans serif fonts.
Huh? That's certainly a new one. Perhaps you mean people whose native language uses a non-Western writing system do better with sans serif fonts? I can see how that might be the case, but only for a real beginner. When I taught ESL to Arabs, all but the most remedial students (who probably had literacy problems in Arabic, too) had enough exposure to the alphabet that it was pretty much second-nature to read it, unless they got dealt very weird fonts or handwriting.
English is my first language. I sure as hell don't want to read French in Arial, though, any more than I want to read English in it. I don't see why the reverse wouldn't be true for a Frenchman reading English.
Re:Games are the only reason I'm tempted to switch
on
Linux Going Mainstream
·
· Score: 1
scripsit still sick:
Hell if I care enough to figure out why, but the thing saw my drive, it saw my DVD, but wouldn't play.
I can't help you with your apathy problem, but you should know that the only reason you can't play commercial DVDs on Linux is the DMCA. The code is out there and it works, but no one in the U.S. is going to put it in a distro for fear of getting sued into the ground.
Don't you remember the transistion from DOS to Windows? I almost laughed at the thought of Windows games in the Quake 1 and Duke Nukem 3D era -- but now it's defacto standard.
Forget games, I just laughed at the thought of Windows.
Note to self: run the signing software *after* altering the image. If the image was alrady signed, display it, take screenshot, alter the image, and re-run the signing software.
Another note to self, remember to pick up a 3504 x 2336 pixel display , oops forgot about moire and aliasing, [...] I'm sure there are ways to fake these things but taking a picture of the screen is not one of them.
Um, he's talking about a screenshot (i.e., screen capture), not using a camera to photograph the monitor. All you're doing is dumping the image being displayed on the screen to a file. Unless you save the screencap to a lossy format, what you have is an exact, pixel-by-pixel copy of the image on the screen. (New versions of Windows can do this with a hotkey, BTW. I'm not aware of any *nix GUIs that do that, but it's pretty trivial to do with The GIMP.)
Of course, the simpler thing would be simply to use something like ImageMagick's convert to make a new file out of the image. The biggest problem, I suspect, would be that people tend to use JPEG for digital photography, and every time you run the compression (i.e., every time you save it) you get more artifacting. An astute analyst could probably detetermine that the image had been JPEGged more than once by studying the artifacting.
Well, that's not too different from what did in the professional armies last time around. It was all well and good when princes sent their mercs out to fight now and then, but when they ran up against screaming hordes of highly-motivated French conscripts after the French Revolution they started getting thrashed. They actually cared -- they weren't just working for a paycheck; they were fighting for a cause they believed in.
Oh, and in the interest of not wasting time with the obligatory French-slamming any time military subjects come up: ``French victory? What an oxymoron.'' There. Now we don't need a whole subthread of worn-out jokes.;)
Normally everyone whines that the minorities are the only ones ever sent out to fight, etc etc. Now that it fits your needs, all of a sudden its a mostly white army. Pick which tree you wanna hug and stick with it.
This is a good example of how what passes for the left in American politics has gotten totally sidetracked by race. What would worry me is the idea of the economic elite being able to make war without check; whether they're white or not is not really relevant. Anyone who thinks that Condoleeza Rice or Colin Powell is not part of the ``establishment'' is delusional. If ``white'' means being ``the Man,'' then it's a condition that has nothing to do with skin colour or anything else except political connections and wealth (which beget each other).
Except that these private armies brought misey upon the rural populations that populated the warfare areas; the quarreling lords often didn't have enough money to pay for the soldiers so these would redeem their take on loot and spoil.
Indeed. I certainly did not mean to imply that this transformation would be a good thing! Indeed, it brings to mind the old Ozzy song ``Thank God for the Bomb''... I wouldn't want to live in a world where the pols felt free to make war on a whim.
This is one reason I am made very nervous by the whole concept of professional armies, to be honest.
no, because you cant occupy a country with robots. You need people on the ground, working intelligence, getting among the people, all that hearts and minds stuff you hear so much about. Making friends with the natives can NEVER be done by robots. Plus not all the natives are friendly, so there will always be a need for the infantryman or MP on the ground in the streets. Robot armies might be good against conventional armies, but they suck at human to human contact.
You know, I was just about to post something very similar. It's the standard rebuttal to the airpower fanboys: you can have all the toys you want, but you will always need an 18-year-old with a gun to hold the terrain.
I just realized, though, that the argument sounds eerily like that made by the horse cavalry officers after WWI. They argued that these new `tank' things were great and certainly had their uses, but there were things horse cavalry could do that tanks never could -- like operating in rough terrain, long-range reconnaissance away from supply lines, etc. I've read essays written by horse-cav folks from as late as the 1950s arguing that the U.S. army was idiotic to have gotten rid of horses altogether, and that the fact the Russians still had horse cav was going to be a big disadvantage to the U.S. in WWIII.
This is clearly not an exactly analogous situation, but it's something to think about.
FWIW, old-timers in the Royal Navy made a similar argument about steam power in the mid to late 1800s. Battleships retained sails for a long time, because the idea that a fleet would rely totally on steam seemed inconceivable...
I agree that this will drastically change the battlefield, but I think eventually most other countries will adopt similar mechanized robotic armies and "winning" will become more an almost large scale public display of technologically and industrially productive might. The rules of engagement certianlly will change dramatically.
I have been wondering for a while if we aren't in for a return to 18th-century-style limited warfare fought by professional armies. The trend globally is definitely away from large-scale conscript armies. The more techno-gizmos like this we see, the more it seems like warfare is going to resemble more closely the low-casualty wars of manoeuvre of that era than the bloody, high-intensity wars since Napoleon, and especially in the 20th century.
OTOH, nationalism (which, depending on your perspective, either created the large-scale conscript armies and total war, or was necessary to implement them) is showing no signs of going away, so the trend may still reverse itself.
I had an install where either X or KDE magically stopped working. It was literally like this: the system worked, then we apt-get updated it, and then it didn't work anymore.
That's very odd. The only thing that should get changed on a Stable system is security fixes, which really shouldn't ever do something like that. What response did you get to your bug filing?
These days you need a couple of CDs for Debian.
When I was a lad we used to fit a full Debian distribution on one side of an 8" floppy disk.
LOL. Seriously, you don't even need ``a couple'' of CDs -- the netinstall ISO fits on one mini-CD. Unless you have no decent 'net access, that's all you need.
I had to give up on Debian because its "stable" distribution was frequently unstable. I know, I know, they have a different definition of stable to everybody else in the world, but fuck it... it's not okay.
How is Stable ``unstable''? ``Stale'' is the much more frequently levelled criticism agains Stable. Testing occasionally has its glitches in upgrades (for example, Galeon disappeared for a little while this winter because it had to be yanked temporarily for GTK2 to go in), but it's pretty damn stable itself. Other than the little Galeon situation, I haven't seen any problems with upgrades that I didn't cause myself by mixing different releases on the same box. My main workstation at home is pushing six months uptime, and I was over a hundred days before that, only cut off by a power outage. That's a Testing (not Stable) box that has had a fair number of Unstable packages mixed in from time to time.
You have installed Knoppix, not Debian. I made the same mistake myself, once, when a colleague needed a machine quickly. There are some packages specific for Knoppix and not compatible with standard Debian. Sadly, these include the kernel and a shell, that is used somewhere during boot process (by initrd?). I forgot the details. There were some USENET postings detailing the procedure, though.
I've never done this, as the Debian installer never struck me as particularly intimidating... but I was under the impression that if you point your sources.list at Debian servers and crank up the Pin-Priority in preferences, a simple apt-get dist-upgrade will get you a stock Woody, Sarge, or Sid box. (Pin-Priority>1000 will `upgrade' even if it is to an earlier version of the package.)
I'm going to have to call FUD on this. Why would installing Fedora Core require a complete re-install? Doing an upgrade from Red Hat Linux 9 works fine.
People seem to use the term FUD awfully freely sometimes. I don't know Frymaster (the user you quoted), so I'd just as soon give him or her the benefit of the doubt and assume it was a misapprehention rather than deliberate FUD. I know that for me, as a Debian user who has never administered Red Hat boxes (as opposed to simply using them), I was under the impression that RH upgrades in general required reinstallation, and it wouldn't have occurred to me that RH9 could become FC1 without it.
Personally, I think the Open Source community should set up a fund to add to the reward SCO is offering because of the black eye it gives the community if he was.
Even if it really is a Linux zealot who wrote this, having the free software community offer a bounty would send a strong message than we unequivocally condemn this sort of behaviour.
I am an Indian and I assure 11000 dollars is a lot of money. You should not be looking at per capita income. You have to look at purchasing parity power. In that terms 11,000 dollars is equivalent to 55000 dollars in purchasing power terms. In US also, isnt a 60000 dollar income in New Jersey better than having the same income in LA - California?
I'm not very familiar with New Jersey, but it's probably a bit cheaper than California. A better comparison is between California and somewhere like a small town in Indiana or even western New York state (the opposite end of the state from New York City). There can be a difference of something like ten times in the cost of buying a similar house between these places. Rent on flats doesn't seem to vary quite as drastically, but there can be many times difference. That's another thing that's misleading about comparing costs of living between countries: your cost of living can change radically, as can your wages, by moving around within the same country. (I have never lived in India, but I would have to assume that $11k/yr would get you a lot farther in a village in Gujarat than in the middle of Bombay/Mombasa.)
Slashdot Mirror
scripsit XO:
Um, you've got a seriously FUBAR apt configuration if that's happening to you. I would suggest unfscking your /etc/apt/preferences for a start...
Seriously, the only time this sort of thing happens is when you're running Unstable or, especially, mixing Unstable packages into a Stable or Testing system -- and then you're intentionally putting yourself on the bleeding edge. The one exception I can recall is the recent and well-documented problem with the switch to GTK2-based Galeon; that only affected Testing, too, not Stable. And it was resolved in a few days; we just used Firebird in the interim.
scrispit Daniel_Staal:
That's curious. I wasn't aware of that. I wouldn't have expected many countries to implement such a law, mostly because even a place like Iraq (pre-invasion) recognized the benefits of having people on line. Places where things are out of control enough to have the rulers think banning modems seems like a good idea would not, I would think, have the technical base or the organization to enforce such a ban. (I've not been to Sudan, but when I lived in Egypt in the '90s I got the impression that it was only about one step above Somalia in terms of effective government... We sure had a lot of refugees from there.)
Another poster mentioned Burma; that one actually doesn't surprise me too much, I guess.
By `beyond the pale' I simply meant that virtually nothing would surprise me coming from DPRK. I don't imagine there's any type of communication technology they allow free use of there.
That made me wonder if I've ever seen a DPRK TLD. I just checked, and even the official site of the DPRK is a .com, of all things (www.korea-dpr.com).
They look like they're in Vancouver, from a traceroute, and Netcraft says the netblock is owned by the CBC (!). So I'm guessing there's pretty much no Internet at all in DPRK.
scripsit LilMikey:
Photoshop runs under naked wine? Is it just me or does that sound like anti-Bayesian spam text....
scripsit julesh:
I honestly can't say what they're smoking over at the university press if they prefer Courier... but I can quite categorically say that when I have a stack of three hundred pages of student papers to mark, they sure as fsck better be in a clean, serif font. Of course, getting them in Computer Modern is a bit too much to ask, but anything in the Times/Garamond/Georgia/Palatino camp is fine. Courier, though -- oy, after five pages I'm going crosseyed and my head hurts. Even Arial isn't as bad, although for long documents it is pretty hard on the eyes, too.
scripsit Daniel Staal:
Um... for example? Barring N. Korea, which seems to be just a bit beyond the pale, where on earth have you heard of modems being totally banned?
scripsit akgoel:
Huh? That's certainly a new one. Perhaps you mean people whose native language uses a non-Western writing system do better with sans serif fonts? I can see how that might be the case, but only for a real beginner. When I taught ESL to Arabs, all but the most remedial students (who probably had literacy problems in Arabic, too) had enough exposure to the alphabet that it was pretty much second-nature to read it, unless they got dealt very weird fonts or handwriting.
English is my first language. I sure as hell don't want to read French in Arial, though, any more than I want to read English in it. I don't see why the reverse wouldn't be true for a Frenchman reading English.
scripsit still sick:
I can't help you with your apathy problem, but you should know that the only reason you can't play commercial DVDs on Linux is the DMCA. The code is out there and it works, but no one in the U.S. is going to put it in a distro for fear of getting sued into the ground.
scripsit sokk:
Forget games, I just laughed at the thought of Windows.
scripsit HughsOnFirst:
Um, he's talking about a screenshot (i.e., screen capture), not using a camera to photograph the monitor. All you're doing is dumping the image being displayed on the screen to a file. Unless you save the screencap to a lossy format, what you have is an exact, pixel-by-pixel copy of the image on the screen. (New versions of Windows can do this with a hotkey, BTW. I'm not aware of any *nix GUIs that do that, but it's pretty trivial to do with The GIMP.)
Of course, the simpler thing would be simply to use something like ImageMagick's convert to make a new file out of the image. The biggest problem, I suspect, would be that people tend to use JPEG for digital photography, and every time you run the compression (i.e., every time you save it) you get more artifacting. An astute analyst could probably detetermine that the image had been JPEGged more than once by studying the artifacting.
scripsit DoninIN:
Well, that's not too different from what did in the professional armies last time around. It was all well and good when princes sent their mercs out to fight now and then, but when they ran up against screaming hordes of highly-motivated French conscripts after the French Revolution they started getting thrashed. They actually cared -- they weren't just working for a paycheck; they were fighting for a cause they believed in.
Oh, and in the interest of not wasting time with the obligatory French-slamming any time military subjects come up: ``French victory? What an oxymoron.'' There. Now we don't need a whole subthread of worn-out jokes. ;)
scripsit andih8u:
This is a good example of how what passes for the left in American politics has gotten totally sidetracked by race. What would worry me is the idea of the economic elite being able to make war without check; whether they're white or not is not really relevant. Anyone who thinks that Condoleeza Rice or Colin Powell is not part of the ``establishment'' is delusional. If ``white'' means being ``the Man,'' then it's a condition that has nothing to do with skin colour or anything else except political connections and wealth (which beget each other).
scripsit kin_korn_karn:
Not a dead copy. Our version apparently improves on the design, making it more expensive and less reliable in the field. Oh, and more lightly armed.
scripsit curious.corn:
Indeed. I certainly did not mean to imply that this transformation would be a good thing! Indeed, it brings to mind the old Ozzy song ``Thank God for the Bomb''... I wouldn't want to live in a world where the pols felt free to make war on a whim.
This is one reason I am made very nervous by the whole concept of professional armies, to be honest.
scripsit painandgreed:
Shit, I'm not sure whether to pat myself on the back or crawl under the table and weep...
scripsit cybercuzco:
You know, I was just about to post something very similar. It's the standard rebuttal to the airpower fanboys: you can have all the toys you want, but you will always need an 18-year-old with a gun to hold the terrain.
I just realized, though, that the argument sounds eerily like that made by the horse cavalry officers after WWI. They argued that these new `tank' things were great and certainly had their uses, but there were things horse cavalry could do that tanks never could -- like operating in rough terrain, long-range reconnaissance away from supply lines, etc. I've read essays written by horse-cav folks from as late as the 1950s arguing that the U.S. army was idiotic to have gotten rid of horses altogether, and that the fact the Russians still had horse cav was going to be a big disadvantage to the U.S. in WWIII.
This is clearly not an exactly analogous situation, but it's something to think about.
FWIW, old-timers in the Royal Navy made a similar argument about steam power in the mid to late 1800s. Battleships retained sails for a long time, because the idea that a fleet would rely totally on steam seemed inconceivable...
scripsit Mephiska:
I have been wondering for a while if we aren't in for a return to 18th-century-style limited warfare fought by professional armies. The trend globally is definitely away from large-scale conscript armies. The more techno-gizmos like this we see, the more it seems like warfare is going to resemble more closely the low-casualty wars of manoeuvre of that era than the bloody, high-intensity wars since Napoleon, and especially in the 20th century.
OTOH, nationalism (which, depending on your perspective, either created the large-scale conscript armies and total war, or was necessary to implement them) is showing no signs of going away, so the trend may still reverse itself.
scripsit wally mean monkey:
scripsit Trejkaz:
That's very odd. The only thing that should get changed on a Stable system is security fixes, which really shouldn't ever do something like that. What response did you get to your bug filing?
scripsit Mateito:
LOL. Seriously, you don't even need ``a couple'' of CDs -- the netinstall ISO fits on one mini-CD. Unless you have no decent 'net access, that's all you need.
scripsit Trejkaz:
How is Stable ``unstable''? ``Stale'' is the much more frequently levelled criticism agains Stable. Testing occasionally has its glitches in upgrades (for example, Galeon disappeared for a little while this winter because it had to be yanked temporarily for GTK2 to go in), but it's pretty damn stable itself. Other than the little Galeon situation, I haven't seen any problems with upgrades that I didn't cause myself by mixing different releases on the same box. My main workstation at home is pushing six months uptime, and I was over a hundred days before that, only cut off by a power outage. That's a Testing (not Stable) box that has had a fair number of Unstable packages mixed in from time to time.
scripsit zapyon:
I've never done this, as the Debian installer never struck me as particularly intimidating... but I was under the impression that if you point your sources.list at Debian servers and crank up the Pin-Priority in preferences, a simple apt-get dist-upgrade will get you a stock Woody, Sarge, or Sid box. (Pin-Priority>1000 will `upgrade' even if it is to an earlier version of the package.)
scripsit Frymaster:
Could you explain this comment? I'm not sure I wholly follow your logical steps to arrive at that conclusion -- possibly I'm just undercaffeinated...
scripsit mattdm:
People seem to use the term FUD awfully freely sometimes. I don't know Frymaster (the user you quoted), so I'd just as soon give him or her the benefit of the doubt and assume it was a misapprehention rather than deliberate FUD. I know that for me, as a Debian user who has never administered Red Hat boxes (as opposed to simply using them), I was under the impression that RH upgrades in general required reinstallation, and it wouldn't have occurred to me that RH9 could become FC1 without it.
scripsit vanyel:
Even if it really is a Linux zealot who wrote this, having the free software community offer a bounty would send a strong message than we unequivocally condemn this sort of behaviour.
scripsit an AC:
I'm not very familiar with New Jersey, but it's probably a bit cheaper than California. A better comparison is between California and somewhere like a small town in Indiana or even western New York state (the opposite end of the state from New York City). There can be a difference of something like ten times in the cost of buying a similar house between these places. Rent on flats doesn't seem to vary quite as drastically, but there can be many times difference. That's another thing that's misleading about comparing costs of living between countries: your cost of living can change radically, as can your wages, by moving around within the same country. (I have never lived in India, but I would have to assume that $11k/yr would get you a lot farther in a village in Gujarat than in the middle of Bombay/Mombasa.)