This is not going to work for domains that have dynamic IP addresses. Yet another reason we need to migrate to IPv6 and eliminate the need for dynamic IP addresses.
Despite the fact that more than half of Earth is covered in water, we're currently unable to provide enough clean water for our population to drink (...)Future space travellers will be happy to learn that Earth can produce more food than its population requires, but they may be dismayed to realize that we haven't yet figured out how to distribute it to the Earthlings that need it
The ideology behind this is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need",
an ideology that has resulted in poverty everywhere it has been tried. You want to take my hard-earned $ from me and give them to people you think "need" it - thereby killing their incentive to better themselves. I think I should have a big say in what my tax $ are used for, and I'd rather see them used on great achievements like space exploration than on handouts to the people you think are "needy".
Executive compensation is way out of whack, and it's because the executive club takes care of itself.
You're absolutely right. The problem with CEO salaries is that they're decided by CEOs and their cronies.
But the solution to the problem is harder to find, and I fear political action is required. The part of any executive salary in a company over a certain size which exceeds (say) 40 times the median salary in that company, should be regarded as the proceeds of theft. That's what it really is, after all. "Salary" here should include all compensation - pension rights, stock options, forgiven interest on loans, etc. The result would be to bring CEO salaries down from "obscenely bloated" (which they are now) to merely "excessive" (which is what they used to be), because the CEOs would mostly like to avoid the risk of a jail sentence for theft.
Don't most computer come with a rudimentary work processor and spreadsheet?
OpenOffice is not a "rudimentary" word processor and spreadsheet. The "rudimentary" stuff you mention is intentionally inadequate for a lot of people.
Can someone say 'I don't need MS Office so take that off my bill." I think we have already tried and failed to get MS to refund licensing costs.
It's much easier to get a PC without paying for Office than to get a PC without paying for Windows.
Is giving away copies of OOo going to reduce the cost of buying a computer so that it is affordable to everyone?
Well, it sure makes a big difference. You can buy a PC for less than the price of MS Office these days. So eliminating MS Office from the package halves the price. I'd say that makes a computer affordable to a lot more people, wouldn't you?
checking if image is initramfs... I couldn't google much info on it. Anybody know more about it?
The short answer is that the purpose of this message is to help people familiar with the kernel diagnose problems which prevent completion of bootup. Your system works, so ignore it. Preventing the message is more trouble than it's worth.
If you are interested, there is a little more info here.
There are Gnome zealots and there are KDE zealots, and then there are the people who say, "They are both OK and neither is clearly better."
At risk of losing all my karma, I have to say that I disagree with all of the above. Both Gnome and KDE suck. In a world which has seen Windows, both UIs seem half-finished. For the developer, KDE's API is unsatisfactory (see Al Stevens' articles in Dr Dobbs in Sept/Oct 2001 - AFAIK they're not on the web, unfortunately) for details. And actually Gnome's is too, because Gnome's base is in C, not C++. Development is bogged down by being based on an obsolete language. True, there is now a C++ API glued on top of Gnome, but it's exactly that, with the inefficiency implied.
So we have two unsatisfactory UIs instead of one satisfactory UI. The quicker we pick one of them and run with it and fix it, the better.
Why should I research anything at all? When someone else can take my idea and sell it without compensation to me?
Without patent law, we stifle innovation.
Not everyone is motivated solely by money.
Michael Faraday, one of the greatest inventors of all time (he invented the electric motor) never patented anything.
The most significant drug discovery ever made was that of penicillin, by Alexander Fleming in 1928. He did not take out a patent because he believed his discovery would benefit humanity more if it were not encumbered by a patent.
Most research used to be done at universities, by researchers who until relatively recently (the last 30 years) did not normally take out patents.
The Microsoft article pointed to by the story claimed that the first version of the FAT file system appeared in 1976. Any 1976 patent has, as you say, expired.
But the FAT design was such a half-assed pile of crap that it became obsolete very quickly, and Microsoft patched it up several times. Presumably, they patented the fixes.
It is difficult to understand how even the notoriously permissive US Patent Office could grant a patent to something as far behind the state of the art as the FAT file system. Its only original features were steps backwards from the state of the art. Not only the Unix filesystem, but several proprietary minicomputer filesystems which have since died, were significantly better than the FAT filesystem.
Phoenix is not the only BIOS company, there's also AMI at least (and of course HP and IBM roll their own BIOSs). Does anyone know whether any of the other generic BIOS companies will continue to produce BIOSes that don't have this Microsoft-specified stuff in them? Is there any real evidence one way or the other out there?
most industrial PC104 form factor PC's are running 386 processors.
The 386 is a 32-bit processor.
(There was a later variant called the 386SX that used a 16-bit bus, but it wasn't popular, and anyway the CPU was still 32-bit).
The main problem I had with the Debian installation process was their specification of what should be included in "installation".
Debian install includes setting up the refresh rate of your monitor, for example. This can't always be autodetected reliably, and the Debian install has always made a bad choice for me (usually too low a refresh rate, because the install picks the maximum possible resolution). You can fix this, but you have to be willing to dig and (horrors!) think.
The right thing to do is what Windows has always done: make it easy to change. The guys at Redmond occasionally get something right. The Display Properties | Settings dialog box is very right, and it's time GNU/Linux had something equivalent. We're not too childish to learn from our opponents... are we?
For your information, it's a great deal easier to add a gui to an installer than it is to get the underlying functionality of the installer right. Debian is certainly not short of people who can program GUIs.
Somebody at Debian has probably thought about whether a GUI would really add value to an installer. He/she presumably came to the conclusion that it adds little or none. He/she is probably right.
Even on its own terms, it predicts we run out of IPv4 addresses in about 20 years. That seems like the age of the universe to the 20-something kid who wrote the article. To those of us with a little more experience, it is not a long time at all to do something as major as converting the Internet to a different addressing scheme.
But the basic assumption of the article, that the present situation is OK and the only reason to migrate is to avoid it worsening, is wrong. In many countries, the IPv4 address shortage is very severe today, not in 20 years from now. IP addresses are expensive in the countries where most people live.
Finally, NAT is not a solution, it's a workaround. Many peer-to-peer applications simply do not work behind a NAT. Sure it lets machines surf the web, send email, and use clients like ftp, telnet, and ssh, but the Internet is much more than a handful of client/server apps. NAT is strangling it.
Does anybody know why TPTB decided on 128 bits for IPv6? 64 would have been more than enough. IP addressing is not like memory or disk space, where you can envisage ever-increasing requirements. It's an addressing scheme for devices. 64-bit addresses are big enough to have nearly a billion uniquely addressable devices for every human being on Earth. Why isn't that enough, even allowing for some spare bits to make address-assignment easier? Do you plan to ask for a billion addresses for the billion devices you plan to attach to the Internet?
* Delegates Congress' constitutional authority to decide terms for international commerce at negotiations.
Wrong. Congress gets to vote yes or no to the agreement. Congress still has final authority.
Without so-called "fast-track", negotiations with 100 other countries would be impossible, because the US negotiators would have no authority whatsoever to negotiate anything. Do you seriously expect all the other negotiators to waste their time hammering out an agreement, knowing that Congress would then "amend" the US position, so the negotiations would have to start all over again? "Fast track" is just one of those political terms intended to mislead the electorate (it means "normal negotiating procedure"). Like "Most favored nation" (means a nation with the same trade terms as most other nations). Like "Patriot Act". Like "Homeland Security". Like... but if you don't understand politician double-talk by now, you never will.
I hope RMS reads the slides. They're in German at the link I used, so here's a translation of slide 13 which is page 14 of the PDF file:
"The memory required for an empty process is shockingly large on current Linux systems. However, this is not the fault of Linux, it's the fault of GNU libc.
GNU libc leads all libc implementations by a large margin in bloat and waste of memory. One day it got so painful that I wrote my own libc. With this, a static binary of 'Hello world' took only 300 bytes..."
I've long suspected that FSF stands for Fat Software Foundation.
(He doesn't say, but I assume his home-brew libc was a subset, otherwise we'd all want it).
First, you will never win your market by suing your customers
SCO is not suing its main customers. SCO knows it doesn't really have a viable Unix business. It knows its Unix customers will go away, whatever it does.
Its real customers are Microsoft and Sun. They have paid (and Microsoft will continue to pay) millions of dollars to SCO. They are buying a service, the service of generating FUD around Linux. Selling this service looks like being a viable business, until the IBM lawsuit comes to court in 2005, when SCO will presumably cease to exist.
only around 10^35 or so. (A rough approximation would be 64!/32!, or the number of different ways you can set up a chessboard.)
64!/32! is actually a few times 10^53, not 10^35.
Also, the number of possible ways to arrange 32 pieces on a chessboard is much less than 64!/32! because some of them are identical. For example, the number of ways of placing 2 white rooks on a chessboard is not 64x63, it's only 32x63.
Oh, please. Do you really believe that more than 10% of these are likely to be false accusations? I don't "believe" anything about the % of false accusations, because there's no evidence beyond some specific cases which demonstrate that some accusations are false.
And it doesn't change the point any way you look at it. 40 false accusations are just as big a pain as 40 true accusations.
The point isn't that it's a pain, the point is who to blame - who should suffer the consequences of a proposed solution. It makes all the difference whether the accusations are true or false.
And don't think it was any better in 1980's, 1940's, 1920's or
Actually, it was better. Between the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the destruction of civil rights which started with the "War On Drugs" in about 1990, the USA was a fairly free country. The best period was probably between the end of the Vietnam War and the start of Bush Snr's presidency.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not going to work for domains that have dynamic IP addresses. Yet another reason we need to migrate to IPv6 and eliminate the need for dynamic IP addresses.
Despite the fact that more than half of Earth is covered in water, we're currently unable to provide enough clean water for our population to drink (...)Future space travellers will be happy to learn that Earth can produce more food than its population requires, but they may be dismayed to realize that we haven't yet figured out how to distribute it to the Earthlings that need it
The ideology behind this is
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need",
an ideology that has resulted in poverty everywhere it has been tried. You want to take my hard-earned $ from me and give them to people you think "need" it - thereby killing their incentive to better themselves. I think I should have a big say in what my tax $ are used for, and I'd rather see them used on great achievements like space exploration than on handouts to the people you think are "needy".
Executive compensation is way out of whack, and it's because the executive club takes care of itself.
You're absolutely right. The problem with CEO salaries is that they're decided by CEOs and their cronies.
But the solution to the problem is harder to find, and I fear political action is required. The part of any executive salary in a company over a certain size which exceeds (say) 40 times the median salary in that company, should be regarded as the proceeds of theft. That's what it really is, after all. "Salary" here should include all compensation - pension rights, stock options, forgiven interest on loans, etc.
The result would be to bring CEO salaries down from "obscenely bloated" (which they are now) to merely "excessive" (which is what they used to be), because the CEOs would mostly like to avoid the risk of a jail sentence for theft.
Don't most computer come with a rudimentary work processor and spreadsheet?
OpenOffice is not a "rudimentary" word processor and spreadsheet. The "rudimentary" stuff you mention is intentionally inadequate for a lot of people.
Can someone say 'I don't need MS Office so take that off my bill." I think we have already tried and failed to get MS to refund licensing costs.
It's much easier to get a PC without paying for Office than to get a PC without paying for Windows.
Is giving away copies of OOo going to reduce the cost of buying a computer so that it is affordable to everyone?
Well, it sure makes a big difference. You can buy a PC for less than the price of MS Office these days. So eliminating MS Office from the package halves the price. I'd say that makes a computer affordable to a lot more people, wouldn't you?
checking if image is initramfs...
I couldn't google much info on it. Anybody know more about it?
The short answer is that the purpose of this message is to help people familiar with the kernel diagnose problems which prevent completion of bootup. Your system works, so ignore it. Preventing the message is more trouble than it's worth.
If you are interested, there is a little more info here.
There are Gnome zealots and there are KDE zealots, and then there are the people who say, "They are both OK and neither is clearly better."
At risk of losing all my karma, I have to say that I disagree with all of the above. Both Gnome and KDE suck. In a world which has seen Windows, both UIs seem half-finished. For the developer, KDE's API is unsatisfactory (see Al Stevens' articles in Dr Dobbs in Sept/Oct 2001 - AFAIK they're not on the web, unfortunately) for details. And actually Gnome's is too, because Gnome's base is in C, not C++. Development is bogged down by being based on an obsolete language. True, there is now a C++ API glued on top of Gnome, but it's exactly that, with the inefficiency implied.
So we have two unsatisfactory UIs instead of one satisfactory UI. The quicker we pick one of them and run with it and fix it, the better.
Why should I research anything at all? When someone else can take my idea and sell it without compensation to me?
Without patent law, we stifle innovation.
Not everyone is motivated solely by money.
Michael Faraday, one of the greatest inventors of all time (he invented the electric motor) never patented anything.
The most significant drug discovery ever made was that of penicillin, by Alexander Fleming in 1928. He did not take out a patent because he believed his discovery would benefit humanity more if it were not encumbered by a patent.
Most research used to be done at universities, by researchers who until relatively recently (the last 30 years) did not normally take out patents.
The Microsoft article pointed to by the story claimed that the first version of the FAT file system appeared in 1976. Any 1976 patent has, as you say, expired.
But the FAT design was such a half-assed pile of crap that it became obsolete very quickly, and Microsoft patched it up several times. Presumably, they patented the fixes.
It is difficult to understand how even the notoriously permissive US Patent Office could grant a patent to something as far behind the state of the art as the FAT file system. Its only original features were steps backwards from the state of the art. Not only the Unix filesystem, but several proprietary minicomputer filesystems which have since died, were significantly better than the FAT filesystem.
Phoenix is not the only BIOS company, there's also AMI at least (and of course HP and IBM roll their own BIOSs). Does anyone know whether any of the other generic BIOS companies will continue to produce BIOSes that don't have this Microsoft-specified stuff in them? Is there any real evidence one way or the other out there?
Is this not basically a map of the PSTN with webservers instead of phones at the end of the line or am I missing something here.
You're missing the servers that hang off cable connections, at least.
Hell 16 bit processors are alive and well!
most industrial PC104 form factor PC's are running 386 processors.
The 386 is a 32-bit processor.
(There was a later variant called the 386SX that used a 16-bit bus, but it wasn't popular, and anyway the CPU was still 32-bit).
The main problem I had with the Debian installation process was their specification of what should be included in "installation".
... are we?
Debian install includes setting up the refresh rate of your monitor, for example. This can't always be autodetected reliably, and the Debian install has always made a bad choice for me (usually too low a refresh rate, because the install picks the maximum possible resolution). You can fix this, but you have to be willing to dig and (horrors!) think.
The right thing to do is what Windows has always done: make it easy to change. The guys at Redmond occasionally get something right. The Display Properties | Settings dialog box is very right, and it's time GNU/Linux had something equivalent. We're not too childish to learn from our opponents
For your information, it's a great deal easier to add a gui to an installer than it is to get the underlying functionality of the installer right. Debian is certainly not short of people who can program GUIs.
Somebody at Debian has probably thought about whether a GUI would really add value to an installer. He/she presumably came to the conclusion that it adds little or none. He/she is probably right.
The article is rubbish for several reasons.
Even on its own terms, it predicts we run out of IPv4 addresses in about 20 years. That seems like the age of the universe to the 20-something kid who wrote the article. To those of us with a little more experience, it is not a long time at all to do something as major as converting the Internet to a different addressing scheme.
But the basic assumption of the article, that the present situation is OK and the only reason to migrate is to avoid it worsening, is wrong. In many countries, the IPv4 address shortage is very severe today, not in 20 years from now. IP addresses are expensive in the countries where most people live.
Finally, NAT is not a solution, it's a workaround. Many peer-to-peer applications simply do not work behind a NAT. Sure it lets machines surf the web, send email, and use clients like ftp, telnet, and ssh, but the Internet is much more than a handful of client/server apps. NAT is strangling it.
Does anybody know why TPTB decided on 128 bits for IPv6? 64 would have been more than enough. IP addressing is not like memory or disk space, where you can envisage ever-increasing requirements. It's an addressing scheme for devices. 64-bit addresses are big enough to have nearly a billion uniquely addressable devices for every human being on Earth. Why isn't that enough, even allowing for some spare bits to make address-assignment easier? Do you plan to ask for a billion addresses for the billion devices you plan to attach to the Internet?
We are, in essense, the minority. The majority are those who need to be informed. The guys without computers, the guys without internet service.
You're several years behind the times. A substantial majority of US residents have internet access, see
statistics here.
Fast Track ...
... but if you don't understand politician double-talk by now, you never will.
* Delegates Congress' constitutional authority to decide terms for international commerce at negotiations.
Wrong. Congress gets to vote yes or no to the agreement. Congress still has final authority.
Without so-called "fast-track", negotiations with 100 other countries would be impossible, because the US negotiators would have no authority whatsoever to negotiate anything. Do you seriously expect all the other negotiators to waste their time hammering out an agreement, knowing that Congress would then "amend" the US position, so the negotiations would have to start all over again? "Fast track" is just one of those political terms intended to mislead the electorate (it means "normal negotiating procedure"). Like "Most favored nation" (means a nation with the same trade terms as most other nations). Like "Patriot Act". Like "Homeland Security". Like
I hope RMS reads the slides. They're in German at the link I used, so here's a translation of slide 13 which is page 14 of the PDF file:
"The memory required for an empty process is shockingly large on current Linux systems. However, this is not the fault of Linux, it's the fault of GNU libc.
GNU libc leads all libc implementations by a large margin in bloat and waste of memory. One day it got so painful that I wrote my own libc. With this, a static binary of 'Hello world' took only 300 bytes..."
I've long suspected that FSF stands for Fat Software Foundation.
(He doesn't say, but I assume his home-brew libc was a subset, otherwise we'd all want it).
First, you will never win your market by suing your customers
SCO is not suing its main customers. SCO knows it doesn't really have a viable Unix business. It knows its Unix customers will go away, whatever it does.
Its real customers are Microsoft and Sun. They have paid (and Microsoft will continue to pay) millions of dollars to SCO. They are buying a service, the service of generating FUD around Linux. Selling this service looks like being a viable business, until the IBM lawsuit comes to court in 2005, when SCO will presumably cease to exist.
only around 10^35 or so. (A rough approximation would be 64!/32!, or the number of different ways you can set up a chessboard.)
64!/32! is actually a few times 10^53, not 10^35.
Also, the number of possible ways to arrange 32 pieces on a chessboard is much less than 64!/32! because some of them are identical. For example, the number of ways of placing 2 white rooks on a chessboard is not 64x63, it's only 32x63.
Oh, please. Do you really believe that more than 10% of these are likely to be false accusations?
I don't "believe" anything about the % of false accusations, because there's no evidence beyond some specific cases which demonstrate that some accusations are false.
And it doesn't change the point any way you look at it. 40 false accusations are just as big a pain as 40 true accusations.
The point isn't that it's a pain, the point is who to blame - who should suffer the consequences of a proposed solution. It makes all the difference whether the accusations are true or false.
40 copyright violations a month is a pain in the ass to deal w/
BZZZZT!
There were not 40 copyright violations a month. In fact, you do not know whether there were any copyright violations at all.
There were 40 accusations of copyright violations.
Ask every Windows user in the world why they are not using Linux and ...
Some will say they need better office apps
Some will say they need better device support
Some will say they need more games
Some will say the desktop should look sharper
Not one will say that Linux needs a better init mechanism.
This is a totally pointless project, let's ignore it and hope it just goes away.
The subject of your post is a good candidate for
"Oxymoron Of The Month".
And don't think it was any better in 1980's, 1940's, 1920's or
Actually, it was better. Between the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the destruction of civil rights which started with the "War On Drugs" in about 1990, the USA was a fairly free country. The best period was probably between the end of the Vietnam War and the start of Bush Snr's presidency.