And pulseaudio is a mixed bag -- some good, some not-so-good.
Just a small comment - this is what I like less about KDE4, as pulseaudio always had problems on my netbooks, but fortunately it is optional. In Kubuntu all you need to do is "sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio*" and you're rid of it.
Yes, and this is what I do for most people that don't want to deal with Pulse; however this comes with some other unexpected issues, which is that now that audio is direct to ALSA, a lot more audio devices show up, and this leads to confusion about how to configure audio output in programs. And it's not exactly easy to configure ALSA itself.
mac did not invent the gui http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYlYSzMqGR8 1974 xerox alto which probably wasn't the first gui, so much as the oldest remaining record of such a computer.
And I knew this, but the Xerox Alto never saw the light of day. Managers at Xerox didn't know what they had and didn't know what to do with it, because their main business was in photocopiers.
i mean by 1996 Xwindows was already at version X11R6. now it's at x11r7.6.
Back in the early days of Unix and before Linux existed, very few people could afford the expensive machine and a commercial copy of Unix to get access to Xwindows. And I'm not sure why you bring up Xwindows of today because AFAIK the majority of new development has moved over to Xorg.
now - you tell me that it's a great idea that KDE spent an entire multi-million Euros EU grant merely copying the UI of the most vilified and failed version of windows, ever, known as "Vista", and then make yourself known to me some day face-to-face i'll punch your fucking lights out.
As a KDE 4 user I don't equate it with Vista (for better or for worse). However I will say that the early versions of KDE 4 were just plain terrible -- it was unfinished, was was missing icons, and it was quite unstable. Somewhere around KDE 4.2 was where it became stable and feature complete enough to be usable on a daily basis. So if you had installed one of those early versions, I don't blame you for having a hate for it. But I'll also point out an irony here, which is that it's likely that the reason you wanted to install KDE4 for your friend was because it was most likely to be "similar to Windows".;-) So in that sense it's not at all a surprise that you consider it to be "like Vista".:-P
As for EU grant money being spent on KDE4, if true (as this is the first I'm aware of that) all I can say is that I appreciate the EU's donation and that I honestly think it went for a good cause. KDE4 is very nice today, although not quite where KDE 3.5 was at its peak -- I still can't find a way to see the print queue, for instance. And the fact that "Desktop Search" is turned on by default (Nepomuk and Strigi) means that by default performance is bad until you learn to turn these things off. And pulseaudio is a mixed bag -- some good, some not-so-good. All those things aside, I like KDE4, and would be willing to recommend it (as long as you're not looking for something lightweight, in which case I normally recommend XFCE).
As for punching someone's lights out -- dude -- this isn't worth that. I understand you had a bad experience, but please try to get over it -- it's quite unhealthy for you going around and punching people over discussing KDE. For now all I'll suggest is that for new people, try to stick to giving them a stable version of the OS, with known well-tested software -- and not the "bleeding edge" stuff that you might personally be more familiar with running yourself.
Well written piece. I definitely wouldn't use "minicomputer" for DOS and "dumb terminal" is the more common term for what you are calling "teletype". I'd say the KDE 3 -> KDE 4 change is a lot smaller than the teletype -> DOS -> GUI change. It is not the same sort of transition.
Heh heh. No, I really meant "teletype", not "dumb terminal", and they're not the same thing. Remember loooong ago when the "terminal" you typed on looked like a big typewriter? And when it wanted to display some text back to you, it literally typed that text onto trackfeed paper? That's a teletype machine; it had a serial interface that sent what you typed onto the paper, and when it was sent data back, that data was typed onto the same paper by the mainframe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype#Teleprinters_in_computing
A "dumb terminal" is something different, because it doesn't use paper as the display medium -- it uses a screen to do that instead. This was a huge improvement because it meant you could type to the computer and get back data from the computer, even when you were out of paper.;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_terminal#Historical
Now from here, you're correct that "minicomputer" was the wrong term -- the correct term was actually "microcomputer". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcomputer It refers to the fact that the computer will fit on your desk, rather than require its own room full of support structure in order to operate. The term doesn't actually refer to anything concerning the operating system it runs. But at the time I wrote the reply post, I had forgotten that "minicomputer" was actually still a fairly large computer.:-P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer#The_minicomputer's_industrial_impact_and_heritage
It's not that people hate GUIs; most people would prefer them over a command line interface. The problem with major GUI changes is people have to re-learn step one all over again about how to navigate in order to work. [More details below.]
... KDE 4, Windows 7, Windows Vista... some people hate ALL GUIs.
Me? I like Windows 7. I find it nicer and faster than XP's interface, actually. I also like gnome better than KDE in general, but I preferred KDE 3x or 4x. I have not tried gnome3/unity yet, so can't comment there.
I sometimes wonder how long this debate has gone on. I'm guessing people hated Windows 95 when compared to 3.1 (or equivalent Mac OS version changes).
They did. The reason was essentially the same; the navigation was totally restructured, so it required knowledge that nobody had to begin with in order to use it. I didn't like the changeover, either; however I was eventually glad of it after I learned how to use it. Before then it was a pain because I was lost at my own computer, the same way everybody else was lost when they first started trying to use it.
People probably tried to show how a monitor was a disadvantage from the teletype; afterall, with teletypes you had a permanent hard copy and didn't risk losing it!... (I have no source for this, I'm just speculating;) )
I do think there are some things that don't make sense though - such as touch-screen-GUIs used on non-touch-screens, or the other way around.
I was around for the tail end of the teletype days, but I never heard many complaints concerning leaving them. The mainframe computers that had teletypes attached usually ran low on disk space, so most users' programs were routinely archived off to tape, and then for the most part they were lost. This was highly annoying for users to deal with, so most of them longed to have a computer at their desk, mainly so that this would stop happening and so they had control of their own work. To begin with this was with DOS, so the teletype -> minicomputer changeover wasn't terribly painful, because the interface was similar. When the GUI just started to appear (with the Macintosh), for the most part it was well received because it was easier to navigate through the system and find programs visually, rather than having to remember program names and type them at a command line. Also these steps from teletype -> DOS -> GUI were over many years, so people had time to adjust and the old systems were also still in place in the meantime. Meanwhile, the major transitions we're expected to deal with today like KDE 3 -> KDE 4 or Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3 generally don't come with the ability to keep the the old system installed to allow falling back to it if we don't like the new system. This is what really makes these transitions painful -- because people are forced to be lost at their computer, trying to re-learn how to use the new system, all while remembering how to use the old system that is now gone, so these memories are in their way.
So please -- cut users some slack. Try to understand their plight. Because you were there once, too -- you've just forgotten about it.
These benchmarks say that Linux is usually faster than any BSD flavor.
I don't think that's the conclusion to come to from those benchmarks. Only two benchmarks occurred where Linux was significantly faster than FreeBSD; onewas the Himeno Benchmark test doing a "Poisson Pressure Solver" -- and only one of the two systems tested had this issue, not the other. The other benchmark where Debian Linux was faster than BSD was the Threaded I/O tester. For all the other tests the differences were minor, and in several cases BSD was faster. I don't think there's any clear conclusion to draw from these tests.
I don't personally run FreeBSD (thusfar) so I don't have personal experience to draw on for comparing BSD vs Linux speed. However I will say that speed is not the reason I run Linux rather than BSD.
If initrd is sufficient to mount/usr and/, what would it change if the file system recovery tools are in / rather than/usr ?
Well, for one thing, it would require changing all of the initramfs scripts that are used to build an initrd image from, and for building a generic kernel it would require including in all of the possible recovery programs, which includes recovery programs for filesystems your system isn't using. However -- the more I think about this, the more it seems like this would be fine on modern desktop or laptop hardware (just not on embedded).
And if we need file system recovery tools to mount/, they need to be in initrd.
Yes, on this I agree with you, and I've had this problem myself and had wished that the recovery utilities were in the initrd. These days I've been using XFS on top of encrypted LUKS; this is a bit of a crazy thing to do, because XFS generally gets some minor corruption if the kernel panics or the system is otherwise hard-powered-off without a proper shutdown and without using the Magic SysRq emergency shutdown sequence. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key Recovering / then becomes a multi-step process of booting a Linux LiveCD that has both cryptsetup and xfs_repair available on it, mounting the encrypted partition via cryptsetup, then running xfs_repair. (Typically I use a newer CD version of Knoppix to do this.) The initrd image already has to have cryptsetup in it (AFAIK) to mount the encrypted partitions, so it's not that much of an extension to add the recovery programs, and if they were there it would be more convenient, as I wouldn't have to boot a recovery LIveCD to recover/.
The point is simplification, instead of having initrd to mount / that is used to mount/usr, just have initrd to do the job o / and/usr, with regards to boot.
I'm still skeptical that bundling together all of the executables on the system into one directory is going to end up being a simplification. That sounds more like a mess you'd expect on Windows in the/system or/system32 directories than something you'd expect on a modern *nix system. However; long ago some Unix systems used to have startup binaries in/etc which I thought was ugly; at least HP-UX did that at one time.
Binaries are not allowed to be in/lib nor/lib64 in terms of the FHS (which at least Debian does its best to follow). These areas are supposed to be for libraries only. The reason you don't want binaries in there is that this is a path that the linker (ld) looks to load dynamic libraries. At minimum there would be a performance hit for ld looking through the extensive list of binaries that normally live in/usr/bin.
Basically what you're suggesting could probably be done in theory, but there would be a performance and possibly security impacts that may be more detrimental than the benefit.
Although this proposal sounds reasonable at first, actually implementing it is troublesome. Linux systems have an expectation that the root directory / and the/usr directory may be on different filesystems; thus/bin is expected to come with / and be available at boot time, where/usr may not be. This means that making/bin ->/usr/bin via a softlink would break that.
Although the article summary claims that the Filesystem Hirearchy Standard (FHS) isn't used very often, some distributions such as Debian actually do try their best to follow it and even have it as one of the specs for how to build packages. Debian developers discussed the idea of trying to follow Fedora in this proposal, but it looks like it's too troublesome to be worth it. For one thing, all of the filesystem recovery tools or anything else that would be required in an emergency at the command line would need to be built into the kernel initrd images, which could be done but which doesn't seem terribly reasonable.
As such I think most Linux distributions are going to need to wait and see how well it works out for Fedora on this effort.
It's not just you; a lot of people are avoiding coming to the U.S. [or even traveling within the U.S.] because of what's going on here.
Last year I had the pleasure of going to the Debian conference at Columbia University -- DebConf10. http://debconf10.debconf.org/ A few people who traveled to the U.S. did get harassed by TSA security; at least one married couple was held overnight and had their laptop confiscated. [There were not many such incidents reported.]
This year, DebConf11 was held in Bosnia. So I had a look at how many people attended. However more people attended DebConf11 in Bosnia than DebConf10 in the U.S. One of the reasons for fewer DebConf10 attendees was because of all the perceived harassment travelers would have to go through, which included American citizens being concerned of this harassment within their own country.
Next year's DebConf12 is going to be in Nicaragua -- and I suspect that conference will have more attendees than the one held in the U.S., too. When Bosnia and Nicaragua are perceived to be safer to travel to than the U.S., you know we've got a problem.
You can either scorn apathy, or become apathetic yourself, but somehow you've done both. Interesting dichotomy.
I think the acronym "E-PARASITE" makes it clear that the bill is a big "fuck you". This is good, because it gives us something obvious to hate, rather than calling the bill something like "PROTECT " and making it seem as if we're supposed to like the shit sandwich that it is. However my concern is that with all of this trying to "protect IP", there doesn't seem to be any recognition within government that all of the protected "IP" is greatly slowing down innovation. Yet the U.S. in general wants it both ways -- to be leading innovators, and yet also be leading in IP protection which slows down innovation. Yet another interesting dichotomy.
Linus Torvalds did indeed release Linux 3.1, but where are the git repos for all the kernels that are on the front page of http://www.kernel.org/ ? Linus's development tree is there, but none of the release trees are, so all of the "gitweb" links are broken links. Specifically, I'm really looking for the git "stable" trees, and I have not been able to find where they've gone.
This means that Apple also has the right not to stop posting the source for Growl anytime in the future. BSD advocates would argue that being able to ship binary-only is a freedom for developers, and GPL advocates would argue that the GPL is more free because it mandates that users have the freedom to always see the source code. Which license is "more free" depends on your point of view.
Basically the answer is a HOME COMPUTER is a better and more flexible virtualization platform than a CLOUD machine will be.
If you want a solution that is online and accessible to the rest of the world for some reason, you can rent a server to do virtualization on, but it does NOT need to be a CLOUD machine if that is all you're interested in. In addition, one of the more expensive items to get on rented servers is RAM dedicated to your machine or VM instance, and you need as much RAM as you can get on a box that is going to be doing heavy virtualization.
"You don't" isn't quite right, but "you don't send him to public school" probably is.
Depending on what state you live in, you'll likely find that there are laws stating that your child must be in school until a certain age (usually around 16). However that does NOT mandate that the child go to public school.
Basically because the child in this case is so smart, I see two basic options:
1. Homeschooling. There are several styles of this, one of which is called "unschooling", where the child choose for [him|her]self the direction school takes. There are a few schools in the U.S. that are trying this model if you want to look into a school he can be sent to, but this can't be done in public school due to mandates AFAIK. If you want to homeschool your child, generally all you need to do by law is to send a letter of intent to the school saying so, and then send over a very very basic curriculum that fits mandated standards, and keep records of what your child is taught after that in case you need to prove that you've been "properly" schooling your child. If you want to go this route, search for a local homeschooling group, who can advise you for your state more specifically what's required.
2. Send him to college now. It's been done before.
Or, a combination of both of the above; homeschooling along with one college class on the side to start with, and gradually switching over to college classes as you see fit.
For anyone not familiar: there are a series of Fallout video games, wherein your character runs across all kinds of junk cars that are powered by radioactivity. Up until this story it seemed as if it were a running joke... but... now it seems like it could eventually happen.
Actually, the fact that they are non-ionizing doesn't prevent them from harming DNA.
? Ionizing means the particle has enough energy to disturb molecular structure. Non-ionizing means it doesn't.
You brought up the Microwave Oven -- this is another example of non-ionizing radiation. A lot of people are concerned about "denaturing proteins" in a microwave -- but that happens anytime you "cook" or "burn" food, so the same thing happens in a frying pan or cook on a charcoal grill. And considering a charcoal grill, that is KNOWN to generate carcinogens -- but despite the risks we're still cooking with them anyway (me included).
The huge problem concerning trying to prove that microwaves are non-cancerous is that it's trying to prove a negative. For example -- prove to me that pink elephants never existed. Even though you have a pretty darn good idea that they never did, it's nearly impossible to PROVE it, especially such that everyone else will be assured that it's true. And, so, the speculation continues...
Hate to admit it, as much as MS got made fun of for rebooting after every update, it really is the way to go in a practical perspective if you don't want to be bitten by some kernel/glibc vulnerability even after you *think* you've updated.
For the moment I'm simply going to explain what a major update on a Debian box is like: 1. If glibc is updated, then a question comes up which gives the operator an opportunity to restart any and all programs currently using glibc. 2. If the kernel is updated for the same version of the kernel, the operator is warned to reboot into the new kernel as soon as possible, but is not mandated.
What you may not realize is that the reason MS's updates often require a reboot is because MS systems lack inode abstraction, where a filename points to an inode rather than to a file. This is the reason why Unix and Unix-like systems can replace files on disk without changing out the running file in memory, but MS systems can't and instead have store the files to replace in an area to do so at the next reboot.
This isn't an advantage of MS systems, it's a weakness. Because updates likely require a reboot, the updates must be avoided until such time that the machine can be rebooted. Anytime you can install updates without having to take down critical services, it's a win; and you often can't get that on a MS system. Taking that weakness and calling it a strength just doesn't make sense.
I used to work for a dentist, and the other X-Ray technician always told patients that the Digital x-rays we used were "about 1/100th of the radiation of those old X-Rays". I was actually instructed by the DDS to tell patients the same thing. In actual practice, though, it was exactly the same dose of radiation, for exactly half the amount of time. I would take that to mean 1/2 the radiation.
:-( Oh, wow. I've been told this by the dentist's assistant; I think she's honest but doesn't know this herself and is just going by what she was told, which is probably a lie. That sucks.
Just because someone is trained doesn't mean they're honest. Anyone who thinks they can trust anyone with something to gain by convincing them is naive at best. Any time someone tells you something, ask yourself; "do they have something to gain by my belief?" If they do, you should fully vett everything they say. Especially if they have more than 2 years of college, or work for the government.
Yeah I have to agree with you. If you look into the Zeitgeist Movement, they talk about the incentives to lie that are built in due to the Monetary System. Somehow I think you'll appreciate the movies they have available (there are three, and they can be legally torrented for free).
The point is a sonogram doesn't use radio waves at all.
The point is that Airport scanners DO use radio waves, meaning that they have nothing to do with sonograms. This response the TSA gave the mother was one given out of ignorance of how the scanner actually works, and is sad, because you'd like to think the people operating the scanning equipment would have at least some form of clue as to its operation so that they could answer basic questions about it. What this really means is that they haven't been given any form of comprehensive training on the scanners, and are therefore unable to properly inform the public that they're used on.
A lot of people drive, and if you do then you have to carry your Drivers License and vehicle Registration. It's also a darn good idea to carry your health insurance card in case you're injured and unable to respond. If you're an Amateur Radio operator, you're supposed to carry your Ham license with you. And then there's credit cards, business cards, etc. Sadly, I still think we need a wallet and/or a purse.
Considering the technology, paying by phone is a bit crazy because there's no way to verify the owner. A credit card has a signature on it, and some come with a photo on them. What do you get on the phone? If there's no way to even vaguely catch fraud and identity theft, then how is paying by Phone supposed to become ubiquitous? Is FRAUD also supposed to become ubiquitous?
Nothing in the story covers this. Until someone comes up with a solution for this, I'm not even vaguely interested in Payment By Phone.
What is being discussed in TFA are the known requests, but the article is completely unclear if each of these requests involved a warrant.
The more critical problem that "we the people" are most concerned about are the surveillance requests that do NOT involve a warrant, meaning that there is NO oversight into any reasoning or explanation for Just Cause, and instead tapping is done "just because". Previous stories seem to indicate that these warrantless taps are often under-reported or unreported.
Was there non-secret judicial oversight or not? Because the article is missing this critical piece of information, I don't know how to evaluate this or how to feel about it.
Nothing seems so simple as Time and Attendance software until you to write/consult on/implement Time and Attendance software.
Would you mind going into more detail as to why?
1) Dates and Times aren't simple.
An easy example is Daylight Savings Time; in the fall, clocks are rolled back two hours such that two hours are repeated. During these two repeated hours you can work graveyard shift, and the "Time and Attendance software" has to know that 11pm - 5am is actually an 8-hour work day. And it needs to know that this is/going/ to happen ahead of time. And daylight savings time needs to be changeable, too, so that Presidents can alter them for political reasons.
Now consider what happens when as an employee, you're sent to an area with a different timezone. To be able to accurately account for night-time differential, the system requires entering in the dates and times in the time zone local to the employee, who now is no longer in Eastern Standard Time.
2) "Attendance" means all kinds of different things.
Mainly "attendance" really means needing to know how to pay an employee. But employees can be full or part-time, be "on call", be on vacation, sick, on disability leave, on maternity leave, etc. So the system needs to account for all of that. Exactly how to interpret all of the nuances of all this can be quite a mess, as it's dependent on corporate or governmental policies, so "business logic" becomes part of the "attendance" meaning.
3) Employees may need to account for partial hours.
Partial hours are an interesting problem. Kronos at one time used 1/10th hour increments, for instance, but people don't think in 1/10th hours -- they generally at most think in 1/4 hours in terms of billing. And if you use floating-point arithmetic for.1 hours, you'll run into another ugly problem, which is that it is impossible to hold.1 as a floating-point number with perfect accuracy because the number is stored as fractional binary. Add.1 a thousand or a million times, and you'll get an offset that shouldn't be there. So you need to store the fractional hours separately as an integer from the whole hours, but yet use the two separate numbers as if they were one.
These are just a start of some of the issues I know of, and I'm sure there are more that I don't know of.
There are basically two meanings of "The Cloud":
1) "You don't need to know where your data is"
2) Rapid automatic server provisioning
The thing that's wrong about 1) above is that "The Cloud" is sold as "don't worry about the man behind the curtain." Being ignorant about where your data is actually stored doesn't mean that it's safe -- quite the opposite -- it means that there is elevated risks involved. Because laws change with location, not knowing where your data is means not knowing what laws are applicable.
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And pulseaudio is a mixed bag -- some good, some not-so-good.
Just a small comment - this is what I like less about KDE4, as pulseaudio always had problems on my netbooks, but fortunately it is optional. In Kubuntu all you need to do is "sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio*" and you're rid of it.
Yes, and this is what I do for most people that don't want to deal with Pulse; however this comes with some other unexpected issues, which is that now that audio is direct to ALSA, a lot more audio devices show up, and this leads to confusion about how to configure audio output in programs. And it's not exactly easy to configure ALSA itself.
mac did not invent the gui http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYlYSzMqGR8
1974 xerox alto which probably wasn't the first gui, so much as the oldest remaining record of such a computer.
Why did you send me to a video that's verbally in an Asian language? There are better videos available. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q&feature=related
And I knew this, but the Xerox Alto never saw the light of day. Managers at Xerox didn't know what they had and didn't know what to do with it, because their main business was in photocopiers.
i mean by 1996 Xwindows was already at version X11R6. now it's at x11r7.6.
Back in the early days of Unix and before Linux existed, very few people could afford the expensive machine and a commercial copy of Unix to get access to Xwindows. And I'm not sure why you bring up Xwindows of today because AFAIK the majority of new development has moved over to Xorg.
Just one section I need to comment on:
now - you tell me that it's a great idea that KDE spent an entire multi-million Euros EU grant merely copying the UI of the most vilified and failed version of windows, ever, known as "Vista", and then make yourself known to me some day face-to-face i'll punch your fucking lights out.
As a KDE 4 user I don't equate it with Vista (for better or for worse). However I will say that the early versions of KDE 4 were just plain terrible -- it was unfinished, was was missing icons, and it was quite unstable. Somewhere around KDE 4.2 was where it became stable and feature complete enough to be usable on a daily basis. So if you had installed one of those early versions, I don't blame you for having a hate for it. But I'll also point out an irony here, which is that it's likely that the reason you wanted to install KDE4 for your friend was because it was most likely to be "similar to Windows". ;-) So in that sense it's not at all a surprise that you consider it to be "like Vista". :-P
As for EU grant money being spent on KDE4, if true (as this is the first I'm aware of that) all I can say is that I appreciate the EU's donation and that I honestly think it went for a good cause. KDE4 is very nice today, although not quite where KDE 3.5 was at its peak -- I still can't find a way to see the print queue, for instance. And the fact that "Desktop Search" is turned on by default (Nepomuk and Strigi) means that by default performance is bad until you learn to turn these things off. And pulseaudio is a mixed bag -- some good, some not-so-good. All those things aside, I like KDE4, and would be willing to recommend it (as long as you're not looking for something lightweight, in which case I normally recommend XFCE).
As for punching someone's lights out -- dude -- this isn't worth that. I understand you had a bad experience, but please try to get over it -- it's quite unhealthy for you going around and punching people over discussing KDE. For now all I'll suggest is that for new people, try to stick to giving them a stable version of the OS, with known well-tested software -- and not the "bleeding edge" stuff that you might personally be more familiar with running yourself.
Well written piece. I definitely wouldn't use "minicomputer" for DOS and "dumb terminal" is the more common term for what you are calling "teletype".
I'd say the KDE 3 -> KDE 4 change is a lot smaller than the teletype -> DOS -> GUI change. It is not the same sort of transition.
Heh heh. No, I really meant "teletype", not "dumb terminal", and they're not the same thing. Remember loooong ago when the "terminal" you typed on looked like a big typewriter? And when it wanted to display some text back to you, it literally typed that text onto trackfeed paper? That's a teletype machine; it had a serial interface that sent what you typed onto the paper, and when it was sent data back, that data was typed onto the same paper by the mainframe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype#Teleprinters_in_computing
A "dumb terminal" is something different, because it doesn't use paper as the display medium -- it uses a screen to do that instead. This was a huge improvement because it meant you could type to the computer and get back data from the computer, even when you were out of paper. ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_terminal#Historical
Now from here, you're correct that "minicomputer" was the wrong term -- the correct term was actually "microcomputer". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcomputer It refers to the fact that the computer will fit on your desk, rather than require its own room full of support structure in order to operate. The term doesn't actually refer to anything concerning the operating system it runs. But at the time I wrote the reply post, I had forgotten that "minicomputer" was actually still a fairly large computer. :-P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer#The_minicomputer's_industrial_impact_and_heritage
It's not that people hate GUIs; most people would prefer them over a command line interface. The problem with major GUI changes is people have to re-learn step one all over again about how to navigate in order to work. [More details below.]
... KDE 4, Windows 7, Windows Vista... some people hate ALL GUIs.
Me? I like Windows 7. I find it nicer and faster than XP's interface, actually. I also like gnome better than KDE in general, but I preferred KDE 3x or 4x. I have not tried gnome3/unity yet, so can't comment there.
I sometimes wonder how long this debate has gone on. I'm guessing people hated Windows 95 when compared to 3.1 (or equivalent Mac OS version changes).
They did. The reason was essentially the same; the navigation was totally restructured, so it required knowledge that nobody had to begin with in order to use it. I didn't like the changeover, either; however I was eventually glad of it after I learned how to use it. Before then it was a pain because I was lost at my own computer, the same way everybody else was lost when they first started trying to use it.
People probably tried to show how a monitor was a disadvantage from the teletype; afterall, with teletypes you had a permanent hard copy and didn't risk losing it! ... (I have no source for this, I'm just speculating ;) )
I do think there are some things that don't make sense though - such as touch-screen-GUIs used on non-touch-screens, or the other way around.
I was around for the tail end of the teletype days, but I never heard many complaints concerning leaving them. The mainframe computers that had teletypes attached usually ran low on disk space, so most users' programs were routinely archived off to tape, and then for the most part they were lost. This was highly annoying for users to deal with, so most of them longed to have a computer at their desk, mainly so that this would stop happening and so they had control of their own work. To begin with this was with DOS, so the teletype -> minicomputer changeover wasn't terribly painful, because the interface was similar. When the GUI just started to appear (with the Macintosh), for the most part it was well received because it was easier to navigate through the system and find programs visually, rather than having to remember program names and type them at a command line. Also these steps from teletype -> DOS -> GUI were over many years, so people had time to adjust and the old systems were also still in place in the meantime. Meanwhile, the major transitions we're expected to deal with today like KDE 3 -> KDE 4 or Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3 generally don't come with the ability to keep the the old system installed to allow falling back to it if we don't like the new system. This is what really makes these transitions painful -- because people are forced to be lost at their computer, trying to re-learn how to use the new system, all while remembering how to use the old system that is now gone, so these memories are in their way.
So please -- cut users some slack. Try to understand their plight. Because you were there once, too -- you've just forgotten about it.
These benchmarks say that Linux is usually faster than any BSD flavor.
I don't think that's the conclusion to come to from those benchmarks. Only two benchmarks occurred where Linux was significantly faster than FreeBSD; onewas the Himeno Benchmark test doing a "Poisson Pressure Solver" -- and only one of the two systems tested had this issue, not the other. The other benchmark where Debian Linux was faster than BSD was the Threaded I/O tester. For all the other tests the differences were minor, and in several cases BSD was faster. I don't think there's any clear conclusion to draw from these tests.
I don't personally run FreeBSD (thusfar) so I don't have personal experience to draw on for comparing BSD vs Linux speed. However I will say that speed is not the reason I run Linux rather than BSD.
If initrd is sufficient to mount /usr and /, what would it change if the file system recovery tools are in / rather than /usr ?
Well, for one thing, it would require changing all of the initramfs scripts that are used to build an initrd image from, and for building a generic kernel it would require including in all of the possible recovery programs, which includes recovery programs for filesystems your system isn't using. However -- the more I think about this, the more it seems like this would be fine on modern desktop or laptop hardware (just not on embedded).
And if we need file system recovery tools to mount /, they need to be in initrd.
Yes, on this I agree with you, and I've had this problem myself and had wished that the recovery utilities were in the initrd. These days I've been using XFS on top of encrypted LUKS; this is a bit of a crazy thing to do, because XFS generally gets some minor corruption if the kernel panics or the system is otherwise hard-powered-off without a proper shutdown and without using the Magic SysRq emergency shutdown sequence. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key Recovering / then becomes a multi-step process of booting a Linux LiveCD that has both cryptsetup and xfs_repair available on it, mounting the encrypted partition via cryptsetup, then running xfs_repair. (Typically I use a newer CD version of Knoppix to do this.) The initrd image already has to have cryptsetup in it (AFAIK) to mount the encrypted partitions, so it's not that much of an extension to add the recovery programs, and if they were there it would be more convenient, as I wouldn't have to boot a recovery LIveCD to recover /.
The point is simplification, instead of having initrd to mount / that is used to mount /usr, just have initrd to do the job o / and /usr, with regards to boot.
I'm still skeptical that bundling together all of the executables on the system into one directory is going to end up being a simplification. That sounds more like a mess you'd expect on Windows in the /system or /system32 directories than something you'd expect on a modern *nix system. However; long ago some Unix systems used to have startup binaries in /etc which I thought was ugly; at least HP-UX did that at one time.
Binaries are not allowed to be in /lib nor /lib64 in terms of the FHS (which at least Debian does its best to follow). These areas are supposed to be for libraries only. The reason you don't want binaries in there is that this is a path that the linker (ld) looks to load dynamic libraries. At minimum there would be a performance hit for ld looking through the extensive list of binaries that normally live in /usr/bin.
Basically what you're suggesting could probably be done in theory, but there would be a performance and possibly security impacts that may be more detrimental than the benefit.
A nice theory, but completely wrong. See: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.systemd.devel/1337
There's no such conclusion in the above thread. They're certainly discussing it, so I appreciate you pointing me to the thread anyway.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.systemd.devel/1352
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.systemd.devel/1349
I still stand by my original statement.
Although this proposal sounds reasonable at first, actually implementing it is troublesome. Linux systems have an expectation that the root directory / and the /usr directory may be on different filesystems; thus /bin is expected to come with / and be available at boot time, where /usr may not be. This means that making /bin -> /usr/bin via a softlink would break that.
Although the article summary claims that the Filesystem Hirearchy Standard (FHS) isn't used very often, some distributions such as Debian actually do try their best to follow it and even have it as one of the specs for how to build packages. Debian developers discussed the idea of trying to follow Fedora in this proposal, but it looks like it's too troublesome to be worth it. For one thing, all of the filesystem recovery tools or anything else that would be required in an emergency at the command line would need to be built into the kernel initrd images, which could be done but which doesn't seem terribly reasonable.
As such I think most Linux distributions are going to need to wait and see how well it works out for Fedora on this effort.
It's not just you; a lot of people are avoiding coming to the U.S. [or even traveling within the U.S.] because of what's going on here.
Last year I had the pleasure of going to the Debian conference at Columbia University -- DebConf10. http://debconf10.debconf.org/ A few people who traveled to the U.S. did get harassed by TSA security; at least one married couple was held overnight and had their laptop confiscated. [There were not many such incidents reported.]
This year, DebConf11 was held in Bosnia. So I had a look at how many people attended. However more people attended DebConf11 in Bosnia than DebConf10 in the U.S. One of the reasons for fewer DebConf10 attendees was because of all the perceived harassment travelers would have to go through, which included American citizens being concerned of this harassment within their own country.
Next year's DebConf12 is going to be in Nicaragua -- and I suspect that conference will have more attendees than the one held in the U.S., too. When Bosnia and Nicaragua are perceived to be safer to travel to than the U.S., you know we've got a problem.
You can either scorn apathy, or become apathetic yourself, but somehow you've done both. Interesting dichotomy.
I think the acronym "E-PARASITE" makes it clear that the bill is a big "fuck you". This is good, because it gives us something obvious to hate, rather than calling the bill something like "PROTECT " and making it seem as if we're supposed to like the shit sandwich that it is. However my concern is that with all of this trying to "protect IP", there doesn't seem to be any recognition within government that all of the protected "IP" is greatly slowing down innovation. Yet the U.S. in general wants it both ways -- to be leading innovators, and yet also be leading in IP protection which slows down innovation. Yet another interesting dichotomy.
Linus Torvalds did indeed release Linux 3.1, but where are the git repos for all the kernels that are on the front page of http://www.kernel.org/ ? Linus's development tree is there, but none of the release trees are, so all of the "gitweb" links are broken links. Specifically, I'm really looking for the git "stable" trees, and I have not been able to find where they've gone.
Concerning not posting the source code yet, Apple is within their rights because the license for Growl is BSD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growl_(software)
This means that Apple also has the right not to stop posting the source for Growl anytime in the future. BSD advocates would argue that being able to ship binary-only is a freedom for developers, and GPL advocates would argue that the GPL is more free because it mandates that users have the freedom to always see the source code. Which license is "more free" depends on your point of view.
Basically the answer is a HOME COMPUTER is a better and more flexible virtualization platform than a CLOUD machine will be.
If you want a solution that is online and accessible to the rest of the world for some reason, you can rent a server to do virtualization on, but it does NOT need to be a CLOUD machine if that is all you're interested in. In addition, one of the more expensive items to get on rented servers is RAM dedicated to your machine or VM instance, and you need as much RAM as you can get on a box that is going to be doing heavy virtualization.
"You don't" isn't quite right, but "you don't send him to public school" probably is.
Depending on what state you live in, you'll likely find that there are laws stating that your child must be in school until a certain age (usually around 16). However that does NOT mandate that the child go to public school.
Basically because the child in this case is so smart, I see two basic options:
1. Homeschooling. There are several styles of this, one of which is called "unschooling", where the child choose for [him|her]self the direction school takes. There are a few schools in the U.S. that are trying this model if you want to look into a school he can be sent to, but this can't be done in public school due to mandates AFAIK. If you want to homeschool your child, generally all you need to do by law is to send a letter of intent to the school saying so, and then send over a very very basic curriculum that fits mandated standards, and keep records of what your child is taught after that in case you need to prove that you've been "properly" schooling your child. If you want to go this route, search for a local homeschooling group, who can advise you for your state more specifically what's required.
2. Send him to college now. It's been done before.
Or, a combination of both of the above; homeschooling along with one college class on the side to start with, and gradually switching over to college classes as you see fit.
Assuming cars start getting powered with Thorium:
Welcome to the "Fallout" universe. ;-)
For anyone not familiar: there are a series of Fallout video games, wherein your character runs across all kinds of junk cars that are powered by radioactivity. Up until this story it seemed as if it were a running joke... but... now it seems like it could eventually happen.
Actually, the fact that they are non-ionizing doesn't prevent them from harming DNA.
? Ionizing means the particle has enough energy to disturb molecular structure. Non-ionizing means it doesn't.
You brought up the Microwave Oven -- this is another example of non-ionizing radiation. A lot of people are concerned about "denaturing proteins" in a microwave -- but that happens anytime you "cook" or "burn" food, so the same thing happens in a frying pan or cook on a charcoal grill. And considering a charcoal grill, that is KNOWN to generate carcinogens -- but despite the risks we're still cooking with them anyway (me included).
The huge problem concerning trying to prove that microwaves are non-cancerous is that it's trying to prove a negative. For example -- prove to me that pink elephants never existed. Even though you have a pretty darn good idea that they never did, it's nearly impossible to PROVE it, especially such that everyone else will be assured that it's true. And, so, the speculation continues...
Cellphones are safe.
I'm going to focus on your last statement:
Hate to admit it, as much as MS got made fun of for rebooting after every update, it really is the way to go in a practical perspective if you don't want to be bitten by some kernel/glibc vulnerability even after you *think* you've updated.
For the moment I'm simply going to explain what a major update on a Debian box is like:
1. If glibc is updated, then a question comes up which gives the operator an opportunity to restart any and all programs currently using glibc.
2. If the kernel is updated for the same version of the kernel, the operator is warned to reboot into the new kernel as soon as possible, but is not mandated.
What you may not realize is that the reason MS's updates often require a reboot is because MS systems lack inode abstraction, where a filename points to an inode rather than to a file. This is the reason why Unix and Unix-like systems can replace files on disk without changing out the running file in memory, but MS systems can't and instead have store the files to replace in an area to do so at the next reboot.
This isn't an advantage of MS systems, it's a weakness. Because updates likely require a reboot, the updates must be avoided until such time that the machine can be rebooted. Anytime you can install updates without having to take down critical services, it's a win; and you often can't get that on a MS system. Taking that weakness and calling it a strength just doesn't make sense.
I used to work for a dentist, and the other X-Ray technician always told patients that the Digital x-rays we used were "about 1/100th of the radiation of those old X-Rays". I was actually instructed by the DDS to tell patients the same thing. In actual practice, though, it was exactly the same dose of radiation, for exactly half the amount of time. I would take that to mean 1/2 the radiation.
:-( Oh, wow. I've been told this by the dentist's assistant; I think she's honest but doesn't know this herself and is just going by what she was told, which is probably a lie. That sucks.
Just because someone is trained doesn't mean they're honest. Anyone who thinks they can trust anyone with something to gain by convincing them is naive at best. Any time someone tells you something, ask yourself; "do they have something to gain by my belief?" If they do, you should fully vett everything they say. Especially if they have more than 2 years of college, or work for the government.
Yeah I have to agree with you. If you look into the Zeitgeist Movement, they talk about the incentives to lie that are built in due to the Monetary System. Somehow I think you'll appreciate the movies they have available (there are three, and they can be legally torrented for free).
The point is a sonogram doesn't use radio waves at all.
The point is that Airport scanners DO use radio waves, meaning that they have nothing to do with sonograms. This response the TSA gave the mother was one given out of ignorance of how the scanner actually works, and is sad, because you'd like to think the people operating the scanning equipment would have at least some form of clue as to its operation so that they could answer basic questions about it. What this really means is that they haven't been given any form of comprehensive training on the scanners, and are therefore unable to properly inform the public that they're used on.
A lot of people drive, and if you do then you have to carry your Drivers License and vehicle Registration.
It's also a darn good idea to carry your health insurance card in case you're injured and unable to respond.
If you're an Amateur Radio operator, you're supposed to carry your Ham license with you.
And then there's credit cards, business cards, etc.
Sadly, I still think we need a wallet and/or a purse.
Considering the technology, paying by phone is a bit crazy because there's no way to verify the owner. A credit card has a signature on it, and some come with a photo on them. What do you get on the phone? If there's no way to even vaguely catch fraud and identity theft, then how is paying by Phone supposed to become ubiquitous? Is FRAUD also supposed to become ubiquitous?
Nothing in the story covers this. Until someone comes up with a solution for this, I'm not even vaguely interested in Payment By Phone.
What is being discussed in TFA are the known requests, but the article is completely unclear if each of these requests involved a warrant.
The more critical problem that "we the people" are most concerned about are the surveillance requests that do NOT involve a warrant, meaning that there is NO oversight into any reasoning or explanation for Just Cause, and instead tapping is done "just because". Previous stories seem to indicate that these warrantless taps are often under-reported or unreported.
Was there non-secret judicial oversight or not? Because the article is missing this critical piece of information, I don't know how to evaluate this or how to feel about it.
Nothing seems so simple as Time and Attendance software until you to write/consult on/implement Time and Attendance software.
Would you mind going into more detail as to why?
1) Dates and Times aren't simple.
An easy example is Daylight Savings Time; in the fall, clocks are rolled back two hours such that two hours are repeated. During these two repeated hours you can work graveyard shift, and the "Time and Attendance software" has to know that 11pm - 5am is actually an 8-hour work day. And it needs to know that this is /going/ to happen ahead of time. And daylight savings time needs to be changeable, too, so that Presidents can alter them for political reasons.
Now consider what happens when as an employee, you're sent to an area with a different timezone. To be able to accurately account for night-time differential, the system requires entering in the dates and times in the time zone local to the employee, who now is no longer in Eastern Standard Time.
2) "Attendance" means all kinds of different things.
Mainly "attendance" really means needing to know how to pay an employee. But employees can be full or part-time, be "on call", be on vacation, sick, on disability leave, on maternity leave, etc. So the system needs to account for all of that. Exactly how to interpret all of the nuances of all this can be quite a mess, as it's dependent on corporate or governmental policies, so "business logic" becomes part of the "attendance" meaning.
3) Employees may need to account for partial hours.
Partial hours are an interesting problem. Kronos at one time used 1/10th hour increments, for instance, but people don't think in 1/10th hours -- they generally at most think in 1/4 hours in terms of billing. And if you use floating-point arithmetic for .1 hours, you'll run into another ugly problem, which is that it is impossible to hold .1 as a floating-point number with perfect accuracy because the number is stored as fractional binary. Add .1 a thousand or a million times, and you'll get an offset that shouldn't be there. So you need to store the fractional hours separately as an integer from the whole hours, but yet use the two separate numbers as if they were one.
These are just a start of some of the issues I know of, and I'm sure there are more that I don't know of.
There are basically two meanings of "The Cloud":
1) "You don't need to know where your data is"
2) Rapid automatic server provisioning
The thing that's wrong about 1) above is that "The Cloud" is sold as "don't worry about the man behind the curtain." Being ignorant about where your data is actually stored doesn't mean that it's safe -- quite the opposite -- it means that there is elevated risks involved. Because laws change with location, not knowing where your data is means not knowing what laws are applicable.