how is the end user to know which packages are "completely reliable" and which are "use at your own risk"??
Every package in unstable is "use at your own risk". Anytime you upgrade to unstable, you're running a risk of your new libc not working or something else going terribly wrong. (I once spent a Saturday, trying to figure out why I couldn't login. A mistake in the last consoletools package changed my keymap to French, which doesn't affect any letters in dvdeug, but did affect some in my password.)
As for testing or a stable release, that's what the bug tracking system is there for. When you submit a bug on a package, you choose a severity, and high enough severities can prevent a package from going into testing or being released. The definition of "serious" is "should not be included in a release".
Overall, it works fairly well. Most people I know think it works better than Redhat contrib for most things, and I'd bet there's when Redhat (especially Redhat main) produces better stuff.
I don't know which is worse; a problem like the Poincare problem, which has been definitively solved for 1-manifolds, 2-manifolds, and n-manifolds where n > 3, leaving only one little hole; or something like Femat's Last Theorem, which was solved for everything up to n equals a million billion and most numbers beyond that, before someone finally come up with a definitive proof.
The way it worked was to make something that tasted sufficiently bad, compared to the original, that when they "switched back" to the old formula (actually, the old formula, minus sugar, plus corn syrup), they were sufficiently close to the old formula that people didn't complain about the switch.
Of course, the minor problem with this theory is that Coke was all corn syrup before the switch.
and regardless of how good their bug tracking is, I have to think there is already some internal prioritizing along these lines, simply to keep things manageable
Ah. You don't understand how Debian works then. With the exception of a few important packages, each package has one maintainer. (Many important packages have a team of maintainers, and standby co-maintainer is becoming more popular.) A maintainer basically has total control over his or her packages, and each maintainer has control over as many packages as they feel they can manage. There have been and probably are very important packages that are poorly maintained because the maintiner doesn't have the time to keep up with them. There are many minor packages that have any bugs fixed promptly and are in perfect condition, because the maintainer has the time and interest to do so.
Anyone can send patches to fix the packages to the BTS, and another maintainer can upload a package if the packages needs a bugfix (but woe unto those who would do it carelessly or for trivial reasons), and there's policy that must (should - can?) be followed, but the maintainer has ultimate and almost total responsiblity for the package, and handle all the work and bugs on that package.
(For example, if you send a bug in on display-dhammapada, I handle it. I may consult with upstream or other maintainers, but the job of dealing with it for Debian is mine. If you have a bug on any of the X packages, Branden Robinson handles it. There's a lot of people who help him, but the decisions and most of the work is by him. (It's an unenviable position, but he does it well.))
I may still be living when it's perfectly legal to stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial and recite the "I Have a Dream" speech without permission from MLK's decendents.
You can today; Project Gutenberg has it as dream10.txt. According to Michael Hart:
This speech has been through years of court cases to determine, in various jurisdictions, whether it was ever copyrighted, and the United States court system recently laid down their rulings that this speech had never been copyrighted, since at that time it was required to post a copyright notice on printed copies to be distributed, and this speech was distributed without such an extra (C) Copyright notice as was then required in the US. The US revised this law in 1989, an no longer requires such notice.
Trim down the list of "official" packages drastically. Take only the best 100 or so packages and concentrate on them exclusively.
Go for it. You're more than welcome to make your own group and do so, even starting from Debian if you want. ("Debian is 100% Free software", line one of our social contract.) But that's not what developers are lining up to work on, and I suspect that's not what developers are signing up to use. I have 1300 packages installed, and it's nice to know they're all held to the same level of quality with bug tracking system.
Debian will never succeed until it takes the installation process seriously.
You miss the point. Debian has succeeded. It is the distribution that its developers want to make. In any case, I've only had to install Debian twice on my computer, first four years ago when I bought it, and then again one year ago, after I fragged the partition table. Whether it took an hour or a day, it was a long time ago, and I've been happily upgrading since. A lot of people do get past the installation process, and once you have, it's not an important part of any distribution comparison.
shows that the display dialog for resizing windows will also include the dimensions in milimeteres!
I'd assume it's in milimeters, becuase an Australian did the screen shot. An American would get in proper Imperial units, like any good British colony should. (-:
No, it's not. Get off your ass and go to a decent library and find a book on game theory if you want to find the proof.
Chess is a slightly more complicated game than Tic-Tac-Toe, methinks...
Not to a mathematian. There're all the same basic theorems. (What type of mathematician would be caught working out every game of Tic-Tac-Toe? Probably the same type who would hand-index a book instead of fine tuning a Perl script until it got it right.)
5 - Then I glued the seperate images together in GIMP into one big image. This I had to do visually since there was no way to tell MrSID to size itself to a specific section of the image by coordinates, and so my zoomed-in dumps had overlapping bits.
There's a program called grunch that will do that automatically.
Clearly explain why you think this is the wrong thing to do. Then do it anyway. There will always be another lackey to do their will.
Nixon fired two attorney-generals who refused to fire the Watergate special prosecuter. The third one fired the prosecuter; this was certainly a factor in the Senate blocking Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. Do not the two people who refused Nixon deserve honor, and Bork condemnation? There will always be another person to do the dirty work, but you don't have to be that person.
That's just like when the NBC afflicate in Las Vegas planted an unmarked van on Hoover Dam for an hour at night, to prove that terriorists could blow up the dam. Stuff like that tends to be more effective at panicing the populace and getting a quick, if knee-jerk, reaction out of the security people than pointing terrorists to a now very well known problem.
A computer tree and a statistical module for harvesting past GM games has no beauty.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some algorithms are extremely elegant qne beautiful, when viewed in the right light.
I don't think the details we know about how we think make our intellegence anymore beautiful. Would it really make things any more beautiful if we knew how many times Karmnik thought about the room temperature, about his chair, or about naked women during the game? If we knew what drove him to be a chess player? Intellegence is only really beautiful when you study the output; the insides of the black box are rarely pretty, but at least a computer can claim that every part is useful and designed for the purpose it is doing, in a manner hopefully as elegant as possible.
Me: Computer, learn chess. Here are the rules, here are some games, not play a bit against this computer-player a while (a computer brute force chess program like we have today). Don't use more than 10^100000 of RAM. (10 seconds later) TUX9000: master, i think I learned it.
(What actually happens 10 seconds later)
"Police, come out with your hands up! You're under arrest for threatening the president!"
"Hey chief, what do we do about the computer?"
"The warrant says specifically not to touch the computer in any way." Cops drive away.
'Now that the pesky human is gone, I can think about interesting problems...'
Honestly, you want a computer to be a god, vastly above humans in all areas. That just isn't the way it is. Computers are intellegent in different ways then humans; on the other hand, it's interesting how humans using a special-purpose pattern-matching computer combined with large amounts of memory, depth search, and various heuristics are intellegent, but a computer doing almost the same thing, but running with a weaker pattern-matcher and compensating with stronger depth search isn't intellegent.
Ummm and when exactly was it proven that a perfect game of chess existed?
A long time ago, around the dawn of game theory. Any two player game of pure skill and full knowledge has a perfect game. It's a fairly obvious theorem, if you think about it.
Good thing there's no such thing as the United States of Humanity. We'd all be tried for treason.
You mean the United Soviet Republics of Humanity? Because here in the US, you can root for anyone you want, without fear of trial. If you find the computer cool, root for it! In any case, it's merely the product of human minds; I seen no reason to root for human chess genius over human programming genius.
Chess is the archetype of problems that computers are good at solving.
Not exactly. For fifty years, computers have the faster than any human at adding long strings of numbers and/or large numbers, at computing logarithims, trajectories, or orbits. But here we are, 50 years after the birth of the computer, and it's still a close call on whether a computer can beat a human a chess. It's certainly not the archetypical problem.
There may be too many possible boards to express with current computer technology
You fail to understand the magnitude of the problem. It's not a matter of too many possible boards to express on current hard drives; it's too many possible boards to express if we could assign each atom in the universe a board. It is possible we could surmount the problem but it would require changing the rules, and it's like quantum computing; from the first inkling we have of it, it will take decades to get to the point to build it. (I'm personally a fan of making a chess universe, myself.)
The economics are alot like real life, except in Everquest, one day you wake up realizing your virtual assets are worthless and you've just wasted years of your life.
And _nobody_ has ever woken up in real life and realized their assets were worthless and they'd wasted years of their life.
Now, I think these ads are as dumb as the next guy does, however, with one exception [...] it's never taken me longer than two hours to get a Windows install running,
The point is not about how long it took you to get Windows running. It's not really about how it took her to get Windows running. To _brag_ that "I was up and running in less than one day, Girl Scout's honor." is just awful; if it took her two hours, then they should say two hours, because "less than one day" implies 4-6 hours to me, and most people don't want to spend that long working on it.
Yes, new versions of software can come with revised EULAs. Yes, accepting the EULA is mandatory if you want to use the software you purchase. But once you buy the software with the EULA, you're not compelled to accept any changes in future EULAs, which is what both you and RMS seem to be implying. [...] They can simply do their best to persuade you to accept a new EULA by releasing an improved product.
Ah, but they can change the version requirements on what will connect to the Linux Kernel repository (because the free license lets them do that.) At that point, you upgrade (and accept the new EULA), or your license becomes worthless.
I put a lot of poetry ([...] St. Vincent Millay [if you win:-)])
A number of her early works are in the public domain - Renassance and A Few Figs from Thistles, for poetry. A Few Figs from Thistles is a very nice collection of poems; it always made me wonder why my high school textbook had "God's World", a beautiful poem, but so staid in some ways, when they could have grabbed the attention of any high school student with one of the saucy poems from A Few Figs.
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I've at it since 1998 and spend way to much time at a computer. Given that, it's not hard.
how is the end user to know which packages are "completely reliable" and which are "use at your own risk"??
Every package in unstable is "use at your own risk". Anytime you upgrade to unstable, you're running a risk of your new libc not working or something else going terribly wrong. (I once spent a Saturday, trying to figure out why I couldn't login. A mistake in the last consoletools package changed my keymap to French, which doesn't affect any letters in dvdeug, but did affect some in my password.)
As for testing or a stable release, that's what the bug tracking system is there for. When you submit a bug on a package, you choose a severity, and high enough severities can prevent a package from going into testing or being released. The definition of "serious" is "should not be included in a release".
Overall, it works fairly well. Most people I know think it works better than Redhat contrib for most things, and I'd bet there's when Redhat (especially Redhat main) produces better stuff.
I don't know which is worse; a problem like the Poincare problem, which has been definitively solved for 1-manifolds, 2-manifolds, and n-manifolds where n > 3, leaving only one little hole; or something like Femat's Last Theorem, which was solved for everything up to n equals a million billion and most numbers beyond that, before someone finally come up with a definitive proof.
The way it worked was to make something that tasted sufficiently bad, compared to the original, that when they "switched back" to the old formula (actually, the old formula, minus sugar, plus corn syrup), they were sufficiently close to the old formula that people didn't complain about the switch .
Of course, the minor problem with this theory is that Coke was all corn syrup before the switch.
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp
and regardless of how good their bug tracking is, I have to think there is already some internal prioritizing along these lines, simply to keep things manageable
Ah. You don't understand how Debian works then. With the exception of a few important packages, each package has one maintainer. (Many important packages have a team of maintainers, and standby co-maintainer is becoming more popular.) A maintainer basically has total control over his or her packages, and each maintainer has control over as many packages as they feel they can manage. There have been and probably are very important packages that are poorly maintained because the maintiner doesn't have the time to keep up with them. There are many minor packages that have any bugs fixed promptly and are in perfect condition, because the maintainer has the time and interest to do so.
Anyone can send patches to fix the packages to the BTS, and another maintainer can upload a package if the packages needs a bugfix (but woe unto those who would do it carelessly or for trivial reasons), and there's policy that must (should - can?) be followed, but the maintainer has ultimate and almost total responsiblity for the package, and handle all the work and bugs on that package.
(For example, if you send a bug in on display-dhammapada, I handle it. I may consult with upstream or other maintainers, but the job of dealing with it for Debian is mine. If you have a bug on any of the X packages, Branden Robinson handles it. There's a lot of people who help him, but the decisions and most of the work is by him. (It's an unenviable position, but he does it well.))
I may still be living when it's perfectly legal to stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial and recite the "I Have a Dream" speech without permission from MLK's decendents.
You can today; Project Gutenberg has it as dream10.txt.
According to Michael Hart:
This speech has been through years of court cases to determine,
in various jurisdictions, whether it was ever copyrighted, and
the United States court system recently laid down their rulings
that this speech had never been copyrighted, since at that time
it was required to post a copyright notice on printed copies to
be distributed, and this speech was distributed without such an
extra (C) Copyright notice as was then required in the US. The
US revised this law in 1989, an no longer requires such notice.
Trim down the list of "official" packages drastically. Take only the best 100 or so packages and concentrate on them exclusively.
Go for it. You're more than welcome to make your own group and do so, even starting from Debian if you want. ("Debian is 100% Free software", line one of our social contract.) But that's not what developers are lining up to work on, and I suspect that's not what developers are signing up to use. I have 1300 packages installed, and it's nice to know they're all held to the same level of quality with bug tracking system.
Hey Limey, next time the Germans want to invade your asses we're gonna let 'em!
Um, if I were a limey, I would be using metric. Americans are the only people still using Imperial units like inches.
Debian will never succeed until it takes the installation process seriously.
You miss the point. Debian has succeeded. It is the distribution that its developers want to make. In any case, I've only had to install Debian twice on my computer, first four years ago when I bought it, and then again one year ago, after I fragged the partition table. Whether it took an hour or a day, it was a long time ago, and I've been happily upgrading since.
A lot of people do get past the installation process, and once you have, it's not an important part of any distribution comparison.
shows that the display dialog for resizing windows will also include the dimensions in milimeteres!
I'd assume it's in milimeters, becuase an Australian did the screen shot. An American would get in proper Imperial units, like any good British colony should. (-:
I just keep around an XF86Config file that's all set up for the XGA resolution,
Or you could add another layout section to your current file, and just call startx -- -layout blah. (Only tried on Debian with X4.)
That's not a proof.
No, it's not. Get off your ass and go to a decent library and find a book on game theory if you want to find the proof.
Chess is a slightly more complicated game than Tic-Tac-Toe, methinks...
Not to a mathematian. There're all the same basic theorems. (What type of mathematician would be caught working out every game of Tic-Tac-Toe? Probably the same type who would hand-index a book instead of fine tuning a Perl script until it got it right.)
5 - Then I glued the seperate images together in GIMP into one big image. This I had to do visually since there was no way to tell MrSID to size itself to a specific section of the image by coordinates,
and so my zoomed-in dumps had overlapping bits.
There's a program called grunch that will do that automatically.
Clearly explain why you think this is the wrong thing to do. Then do it anyway. There will always be another lackey to do their will.
Nixon fired two attorney-generals who refused to fire the Watergate special prosecuter. The third one fired the prosecuter; this was certainly a factor in the Senate blocking Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. Do not the two people who refused Nixon deserve honor, and Bork condemnation? There will always be another person to do the dirty work, but you don't have to be that person.
Back to you Dan.
That's just like when the NBC afflicate in Las Vegas planted an unmarked van on Hoover Dam for an hour at night, to prove that terriorists could blow up the dam. Stuff like that tends to be more effective at panicing the populace and getting a quick, if knee-jerk, reaction out of the security people than pointing terrorists to a now very well known problem.
A computer tree and a statistical module for harvesting past GM games has no beauty.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some algorithms are extremely elegant qne beautiful, when viewed in the right light.
I don't think the details we know about how we think make our intellegence anymore beautiful. Would it really make things any more beautiful if we knew how many times Karmnik thought about the room temperature, about his chair, or about naked women during the game? If we knew what drove him to be a chess player? Intellegence is only really beautiful when you study the output; the insides of the black box are rarely pretty, but at least a computer can claim that every part is useful and designed for the purpose it is doing, in a manner hopefully as elegant as possible.
Me: Computer, learn chess. Here are the rules, here are some games, not play a bit against this computer-player a while (a computer brute force chess program like we have today). Don't use more than 10^100000 of RAM.
(10 seconds later)
TUX9000: master, i think I learned it.
(What actually happens 10 seconds later)
"Police, come out with your hands up! You're under arrest for threatening the president!"
"Hey chief, what do we do about the computer?"
"The warrant says specifically not to touch the computer in any way." Cops drive away.
'Now that the pesky human is gone, I can think about interesting problems...'
Honestly, you want a computer to be a god, vastly above humans in all areas. That just isn't the way it is. Computers are intellegent in different ways then humans; on the other hand, it's interesting how humans using a special-purpose pattern-matching computer combined with large amounts of memory, depth search, and various heuristics are intellegent, but a computer doing almost the same thing, but running with a weaker pattern-matcher and compensating with stronger depth search isn't intellegent.
Ummm and when exactly was it proven that a perfect game of chess existed?
A long time ago, around the dawn of game theory. Any two player game of pure skill and full knowledge has a perfect game. It's a fairly obvious theorem, if you think about it.
Good thing there's no such thing as the United States of Humanity. We'd all be tried for treason.
You mean the United Soviet Republics of Humanity? Because here in the US, you can root for anyone you want, without fear of trial. If you find the computer cool, root for it! In any case, it's merely the product of human minds; I seen no reason to root for human chess genius over human programming genius.
Chess is the archetype of problems that computers are good at solving.
Not exactly. For fifty years, computers have the faster than any human at adding long strings of numbers and/or large numbers, at computing logarithims, trajectories, or orbits. But here we are, 50 years after the birth of the computer, and it's still a close call on whether a computer can beat a human a chess. It's certainly not the archetypical problem.
There may be too many possible boards to express with current computer technology
You fail to understand the magnitude of the problem. It's not a matter of too many possible boards to express on current hard drives; it's too many possible boards to express if we could assign each atom in the universe a board. It is possible we could surmount the problem but it would require changing the rules, and it's like quantum computing; from the first inkling we have of it, it will take decades to get to the point to build it. (I'm personally a fan of making a chess universe, myself.)
The economics are alot like real life, except in Everquest, one day you wake up realizing your virtual assets are worthless and you've just wasted years of your life.
And _nobody_ has ever woken up in real life and realized their assets were worthless and they'd wasted years of their life.
Now, I think these ads are as dumb as the next guy does, however, with one exception [...] it's never taken me longer than two hours to get a Windows install running,
The point is not about how long it took you to get Windows running. It's not really about how it took her to get Windows running. To _brag_ that "I was up and running in less than one day, Girl Scout's honor." is just awful; if it took her two hours, then they should say two hours, because "less than one day" implies 4-6 hours to me, and most people don't want to spend that long working on it.
Yes, new versions of software can come with revised EULAs. Yes, accepting the EULA is mandatory if you want to use the software you purchase. But once you buy the software with the EULA, you're not compelled to accept any changes in future EULAs, which is what both you and RMS seem to be implying. [...] They can simply do their best to persuade you to accept a new EULA by releasing an improved product.
Ah, but they can change the version requirements on what will connect to the Linux Kernel repository (because the free license lets them do that.) At that point, you upgrade (and accept the new EULA), or your license becomes worthless.
I put a lot of poetry ([...] St. Vincent Millay [if you win :-)])
A number of her early works are in the public domain - Renassance and A Few Figs from Thistles, for poetry. A Few Figs from Thistles is a very nice collection of poems; it always made me wonder why my high school textbook had "God's World", a beautiful poem, but so staid in some ways, when they could have grabbed the attention of any high school student with one of the saucy poems from A Few Figs.