Maybe not quite that many, but I still think the Lay of Luthien would make a great movie. It's about the right length; it already has romance, and it rides LotR's coat-tails nicely. Seriously!
"No niggard are you, Eomer, thus giving to Gondor that which is fairest in all your realm!"
--Aragorn, RotK, Tolkien
American Nuclear Control Center Guard: What's this about giving you all the faggots in the city?
British Witchfinder Private: Yes, so we can burn them
AHCCG: And they told me you British boys were soft!
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Just thought this thread could do with a little literature. Not that Tolkien necessarily counts as a non-archaic source:-).
Now what I wonder about is how will we conjugate it?
At present, most people conjugate verbs following a singular "they" with the plural forms, for greater euphony. I would much rather it go the other way -- singular conjugations could de-ambigouize the singular they. After all, very few English verbs have the same singular and plural forms in the third person (well, not in the present, anyway)
It would also be logically consistant. Then it would really be a matter of a single word taking on a new meaning, a common phenomenon which all linguists accept, and not a matter of adding further convolutions to English grammer. Does anyone really want their grandchildren to have to memorize another exception?
While there has been occasional violence from the "anti-globalization" (a rediculous label, but that's a seperate rant) movement, the anti-war movement has kept itself extremely legal. Even jay-walking is rare. There are documented instances of grafitti and disrupting traffic, but that's about it. The form of civil disobediance favored by the peace movement is to go directly to jail, without doing anything first (such actions are co-ordinated with the police in advance).
Any molotov cocktails you may have heard about were mixed by the same people who put SCO code into Linux: crack-induced hallucinations.
Have you ever noticed how during major protests, lots of people get arrested, but nobody gets charged? It's usually because there aren't any crimes.
When your app hits ports, THEN install it using ports... referring to your notes on manual build to remove any stuff that may conflict
What a mess!
Am I not the user? Am I not root? Am I not master of my machine? Why should not my installations be first-class citizens? Why should I take the programs I follow by minor-versions, the programs I upgrade most often, and replace them twice as often to satisfy a measely package management system?
Maybe average users won't have this problem, and certainly my rhetoric has gotten a bit overblown in this post, but this is still the fundamentla philisophical split that drove me to Slackware, and I've seen little that might entice me to come back.
I'm thinking of something that handles binary packages. I'm well aware that source-based systems are much more fault-tolerant (I came up with this by thinking about./configure scripts) but they also take a long time for large packages, and I occasionally am forced to install something closed-source (Sun's JVM seems to be distributed as binary only, unless I've missed something, and there are plenty of programs that depend on it).
I used Debian a while back, and I didn't find apt to be a complete solution to my dependancy needs. It wasn't long before I found myself needing things outside of the apt repository -- even in the dependancy lists of packages inside it! It was probably some sort of temporary error or delay, but I wasn't going to wait around. I went to the project pages, and upgraded manually.
The problem came when I tried to go back, and use apt again. The entire apt system maintained its own list of installed packages with no awareness of what was actually on the system, so as soon as it fell out of sink, the entire apt manageer collapsed. My experience on Redhat and Mandrake were similar.
It doesn't have to be like this! It is possible to find out what's on a system. Does a package require python>=2.1? Parse python -V and get an answer you can trust. Do you need a library, get its version with for i in `cat/etc/ld.so.conf`/lib/usr/lib;do ls $i/libraryName.so*;done 2>/dev/null | grep -v @ | sed 's/.*\.so\.//g' | sed 's/\*//g'
There's nothing about your system that can't be tracked down by a little intelligent scriptwork. If package managers worked like that, then you'd be able to ignore them on occasion or even break small pieces and the rest wouldn't come tumbling down.
Is anybody working on this? Is anybody interested in working on this?
Keep excellent logs. Redirect everything through a proxy if you have to, but LOG EVERYTHING.
Never watch what they are doing. It creates the wrong impression.
What, the impression that you're watching their every move when you are? The simple truth? This is what you don't want your children to know?
If they can't trust you, why should you be able to trust them. Don't imagine you can get away with it. Kids aren't stupid, especially not around technology.
Your parental status doesn't mean you hold all the cards -- eventually, you're going to need your children's respect, and that has to be earned.
Off the top of my head, if more than 25% of desktops ran GNU/Linux:
Hardware vendors would write Linux drivers, or release accurate specs so that the community could write drivers. Many of those drivers would be open source. (this is already happenning in the server market)
Independant software vendors would generally write GNU/Linux ports, so we'd never miss that one obscure program that only runs under windows. (this too)
Laws that truly endangered free software would be shot dead because of the economic risks.
Microsoft would no longer be able to close protocols and formats against us, a tactic which costs even the most MS-free time and effort.
Websites would never require IE
ISPs and similar entities would offer tech-support for GNU/Linux-using customers, though it would probably still suck.
All technical students would grow up around GNU/Linux, granting us a larger influx of developers (this one is already starting)
Artists, musicians, designers, and other non-technical creative people who we have a poor record at contacting will become aware of us, and some of them will help out.
An enormous testing base, granting us an even greater opportunity to perfect our software.
So it's not the only worthwhile goal, but it certainly would do a lot of good. Besides, don't you want your code run on as many computers as possible? I certainly want mine to be!
I was about to mod you -1 troll, but I think I'll respond instead.
I don't know what IBM is paying RedHat. I'm sure IBM negotiates hard for any services they need to pay for. IBM's negotiating position is good because they don't need Redhat.
I run Redhat on multi-processor boxen without paying for it. When the next version comes out (which will be called Fedora, but whatever) I might upgrade. If they actually go so far as to remove SMP support, I'll just download an SMP-enabled kernal. If I want RH's extra SMP patches (which only kick in above 4-proc, IIRC) I'll download them. It's all GPL -- they don't have to support it, but they have to give it to me.
And if Redhat doesn't want to support it at a reasonable cost, IBM is perfectly capable of doing it in-house. That's their primary business at this point.
It's still around. Many Solaris workstations (and, therefore, their AFS servers) have iexplore on them, which claims to be version 5.
The bizarre thing is that X forwarding allows it to run on my GNU/Linux desktop. It stands out like a sore thumb -- the hideousness hand-drawn icons clashing with gtk, qt and xul.
It doesn't use many libraries. I wonder if it would be possible to machine-translate it into x86-elf, and if it would then run on Linux. If the threading APIs match, I can't see why not....
As I recall, one of the less radical concepts in MMM was to use source code. That is, to write userland apps in a high-level language (like APL) and not in assembly. Using source code couldn't have been credited or discredited at that time, because most software didn't have it.
More relevantly, Brooks proposed that every software project have its own 'toolsmith' -- a full time coder who built development tools for the others. This was in addition to whatever tools the platform shipped with, so that the tools could always be modified to meet the real coders exact needs. Open Source wasn't much of an option at that point (at least not on IBM hardware) but the idea of controlling the software you use was clearly important.
I won't claim there's no hypocrisy in the replies to this articles (or any article), but this particular point makes sense. SCO, unlike 'music pirates' is actually trying to steal Linux. They are trying to make it so that they own it and the authors don't. They want exclusive power of disribution.
If they just wanted to enjoy it, or pass it around on kazaa, we wouldn't object. That's why we gave them permission to do that.
But they're trying to tell us that we can't do that, simply on the authority that they bluff well and have a lot of lawyers (actually, that they bluff mediocerly, and have some lawyers). They're more like the RIAA, only with no grounds for their actions.
Hopefully they'll overstep so far that even PHB's will laugh at them, and then IBM will swat them like a bug, and the SEC will through the ringleaders in jail for securities fraud. It really could happen.
I think it has something to do with fonts, because it's in a <w:font w:name="Tahoma"> block, but other than that, I'm lost.
Even in the section you quoted, what do the 1440 and 1800 mean? I would assume margins, but in what units? I suppose that would be easy to find out -- assuming they're something sensible (some real multiple of inches).
It's not good enough to extract the text. The task is to retrieve all information in the document.
You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
* a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code,
...
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
(emphass added)
So, unless you plan to do maintainance on obfuscated code, this is no good for GPL software. In fact, it's no good for Open Source software of any kind.
Admitadly, you could use unobfuscated code and refuse to reveal the watermark, but it's kind of tricky to keep things secret in the OSS world.
Samples of MS-XML have been
posted here on/., and they are pretty opaque. They don't seem to be using base64 tricks, but they're doing everything else.
Just because XML is open doesn't mean everything built on it is open. TCP/IP is open, but there's plenty of proprietary applications and data flowing over it.
OpenOffice uses zip to combine several xml files (one for content, others for meta-info and editor advice) and any image files or similar embedded content in their native formats. IIRC, KOffice uses tar.bzip2 and Abiword uses tar.gz, but I don't have those in front of me at the moment.
Remember that the variant of HTML that IE speaks is incompletely documented, and there are plenty of straight-out bugs to avoid. Also remember that a validator can only tell you if IE will accept it -- not what it will look like. Maybe some legitamate nested table will force horizontal scrolling on a 640x480 display -- not good, but hard for a validator to catch.
Of course, if you stick to HTML 3, use logical page layout, and cncentrate on content, you really only need to test in one browser -- but that doesn't look very 'professional'.
We're not comparing pound-to-pound, we're comparing radiation levels.
Yes, coal-burning plants put out radiation, too. A lot of it, in fact. It's because of natural impurities in the coal which are impractical to filter.
I don't know off-hand how radiation levels are compared, but it's probably just the number of gamma rays. That's a good metric for how much harm is done.
Oh please, a nuclear reactor accident would be nothing like Hiroshima.
Do read about Hiroshima some time. Se how precisely the timing had to be constructed. Check the purity and mass and density specifications. Then try to construct a scenario in which a nuclear plant could even vaguly resemgle that.
Chernobyl is pretty much the worst that could happen, and there are plenty of safety precautions that could have prevented it.
If you look carefully at the linux and windows "worries" graphs and noted that they're on different scales. If you check the numbers, about 36% of admins worry about Linux accountability and about 33% worry about Windows accountability.
They're quite right to worry, and it's very nice to see that message getting through. I wonder if there's any platform in which the vendor makes a binding promise that the product will work?
Re:Imagine that you are an alcoholic...
on
The Next Path for Joy
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There are intermediate steps between C and garbage collection. One I personally like is Cyclone which delivers almost all the power of C and the ability to link directly to C code. There are plans to write a kernel in it, and they look very credible.
For user-land software, things like python are becoming very practical. Java is probably acceptable for daemons and such (so long as they're not massively performance critical) but isn't ready to be used for anything with a GUI or where startup time matters.
19% would be vaguely believable, though very surprising, but the number together don't work. 90% use MS Office, 6% use OOo (presumably 4% use other stuff). If 19% run Linux, then 13% of desktops run Linux but not OOo -- whether they do no office suitish work or use Gnome or KDE office or whatever is anyone's guess. That's even harder to believe. What's even worse, is that if we assume basically all small business desktops do wrd processing or spreadsheets, then about 9% or SMB desktops run MS Office on Linux. Now I know about CrossOver Wine and all that, but there's just no way.
They probably meant that 19% of businessess had a Linux desktop, or something like that. I wish they'd say things clearly, though.
With a few exceptions (such as starting the network) Linux services could be started in arbitrary parrellel order. I think that someone, somewhere, has dones this. The question is, would you really want it?
On windows, it boots up and quickly presents the creen in a finished-looking way, but the daemons launching take up so much CPU that the widgets are unresponsive. With intermittant splash screens disrupting focus. I've gotten in the habit of listening carefully for the hard drive to stop growling, and then a few more seconds just to be sure. I'd much rather it get it over with first, and show me the desktop when its actually ready for it.
Maybe if all daemons were +20 nice this could work tolerably, but you'd think windows would have tried that?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not quite that many, but I still think the Lay of Luthien would make a great movie. It's about the right length; it already has romance, and it rides LotR's coat-tails nicely. Seriously!
--Aragorn, RotK, Tolkien
American Nuclear Control Center Guard: What's this about giving you all the faggots in the city?
British Witchfinder Private: Yes, so we can burn them
AHCCG: And they told me you British boys were soft!
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Just thought this thread could do with a little literature. Not that Tolkien necessarily counts as a non-archaic source :-).
At present, most people conjugate verbs following a singular "they" with the plural forms, for greater euphony. I would much rather it go the other way -- singular conjugations could de-ambigouize the singular they. After all, very few English verbs have the same singular and plural forms in the third person (well, not in the present, anyway)
It would also be logically consistant. Then it would really be a matter of a single word taking on a new meaning, a common phenomenon which all linguists accept, and not a matter of adding further convolutions to English grammer. Does anyone really want their grandchildren to have to memorize another exception?
Any molotov cocktails you may have heard about were mixed by the same people who put SCO code into Linux: crack-induced hallucinations.
Have you ever noticed how during major protests, lots of people get arrested, but nobody gets charged? It's usually because there aren't any crimes.
Am I not the user? Am I not root? Am I not master of my machine? Why should not my installations be first-class citizens? Why should I take the programs I follow by minor-versions, the programs I upgrade most often, and replace them twice as often to satisfy a measely package management system?
Maybe average users won't have this problem, and certainly my rhetoric has gotten a bit overblown in this post, but this is still the fundamentla philisophical split that drove me to Slackware, and I've seen little that might entice me to come back.
I'm thinking of something that handles binary packages. I'm well aware that source-based systems are much more fault-tolerant (I came up with this by thinking about ./configure scripts) but they also take a long time for large packages, and I occasionally am forced to install something closed-source (Sun's JVM seems to be distributed as binary only, unless I've missed something, and there are plenty of programs that depend on it).
The problem came when I tried to go back, and use apt again. The entire apt system maintained its own list of installed packages with no awareness of what was actually on the system, so as soon as it fell out of sink, the entire apt manageer collapsed. My experience on Redhat and Mandrake were similar.
It doesn't have to be like this! It is possible to find out what's on a system. Does a package require python>=2.1? Parse python -V and get an answer you can trust. Do you need a library, get its version with /etc/ld.so.conf` /lib /usr/lib;do ls $i/ libraryName .so*;done 2>/dev/null | grep -v @ | sed 's/.*\.so\.//g' | sed 's/\*//g'
for i in `cat
There's nothing about your system that can't be tracked down by a little intelligent scriptwork. If package managers worked like that, then you'd be able to ignore them on occasion or even break small pieces and the rest wouldn't come tumbling down.
Is anybody working on this? Is anybody interested in working on this?
If they can't trust you, why should you be able to trust them. Don't imagine you can get away with it. Kids aren't stupid, especially not around technology.
Your parental status doesn't mean you hold all the cards -- eventually, you're going to need your children's respect, and that has to be earned.
- Hardware vendors would write Linux drivers, or release accurate specs so that the community could write drivers. Many of those drivers would be open source. (this is already happenning in the server market)
- Independant software vendors would generally write GNU/Linux ports, so we'd never miss that one obscure program that only runs under windows. (this too)
- Laws that truly endangered free software would be shot dead because of the economic risks.
- Microsoft would no longer be able to close protocols and formats against us, a tactic which costs even the most MS-free time and effort.
- Websites would never require IE
- ISPs and similar entities would offer tech-support for GNU/Linux-using customers, though it would probably still suck.
- All technical students would grow up around GNU/Linux, granting us a larger influx of developers (this one is already starting)
- Artists, musicians, designers, and other non-technical creative people who we have a poor record at contacting will become aware of us, and some of them will help out.
- An enormous testing base, granting us an even greater opportunity to perfect our software.
So it's not the only worthwhile goal, but it certainly would do a lot of good. Besides, don't you want your code run on as many computers as possible? I certainly want mine to be!Which I already am, of course
I don't know what IBM is paying RedHat. I'm sure IBM negotiates hard for any services they need to pay for. IBM's negotiating position is good because they don't need Redhat.
I run Redhat on multi-processor boxen without paying for it. When the next version comes out (which will be called Fedora, but whatever) I might upgrade. If they actually go so far as to remove SMP support, I'll just download an SMP-enabled kernal. If I want RH's extra SMP patches (which only kick in above 4-proc, IIRC) I'll download them. It's all GPL -- they don't have to support it, but they have to give it to me.
And if Redhat doesn't want to support it at a reasonable cost, IBM is perfectly capable of doing it in-house. That's their primary business at this point.
The bizarre thing is that X forwarding allows it to run on my GNU/Linux desktop. It stands out like a sore thumb -- the hideousness hand-drawn icons clashing with gtk, qt and xul.
It doesn't use many libraries. I wonder if it would be possible to machine-translate it into x86-elf, and if it would then run on Linux. If the threading APIs match, I can't see why not....
More relevantly, Brooks proposed that every software project have its own 'toolsmith' -- a full time coder who built development tools for the others. This was in addition to whatever tools the platform shipped with, so that the tools could always be modified to meet the real coders exact needs. Open Source wasn't much of an option at that point (at least not on IBM hardware) but the idea of controlling the software you use was clearly important.
If they just wanted to enjoy it, or pass it around on kazaa, we wouldn't object. That's why we gave them permission to do that.
But they're trying to tell us that we can't do that, simply on the authority that they bluff well and have a lot of lawyers (actually, that they bluff mediocerly, and have some lawyers). They're more like the RIAA, only with no grounds for their actions.
Hopefully they'll overstep so far that even PHB's will laugh at them, and then IBM will swat them like a bug, and the SEC will through the ringleaders in jail for securities fraud. It really could happen.
Even in the section you quoted, what do the 1440 and 1800 mean? I would assume margins, but in what units? I suppose that would be easy to find out -- assuming they're something sensible (some real multiple of inches).
It's not good enough to extract the text. The task is to retrieve all information in the document.
Just because XML is open doesn't mean everything built on it is open. TCP/IP is open, but there's plenty of proprietary applications and data flowing over it.
OpenOffice uses zip to combine several xml files (one for content, others for meta-info and editor advice) and any image files or similar embedded content in their native formats. IIRC, KOffice uses tar.bzip2 and Abiword uses tar.gz, but I don't have those in front of me at the moment.
Remember that the variant of HTML that IE speaks is incompletely documented, and there are plenty of straight-out bugs to avoid. Also remember that a validator can only tell you if IE will accept it -- not what it will look like. Maybe some legitamate nested table will force horizontal scrolling on a 640x480 display -- not good, but hard for a validator to catch.
Of course, if you stick to HTML 3, use logical page layout, and cncentrate on content, you really only need to test in one browser -- but that doesn't look very 'professional'.
Yes, coal-burning plants put out radiation, too. A lot of it, in fact. It's because of natural impurities in the coal which are impractical to filter.
I don't know off-hand how radiation levels are compared, but it's probably just the number of gamma rays. That's a good metric for how much harm is done.
Do read about Hiroshima some time. Se how precisely the timing had to be constructed. Check the purity and mass and density specifications. Then try to construct a scenario in which a nuclear plant could even vaguly resemgle that.
Chernobyl is pretty much the worst that could happen, and there are plenty of safety precautions that could have prevented it.
They're quite right to worry, and it's very nice to see that message getting through. I wonder if there's any platform in which the vendor makes a binding promise that the product will work?
For user-land software, things like python are becoming very practical. Java is probably acceptable for daemons and such (so long as they're not massively performance critical) but isn't ready to be used for anything with a GUI or where startup time matters.
They probably meant that 19% of businessess had a Linux desktop, or something like that. I wish they'd say things clearly, though.
On windows, it boots up and quickly presents the creen in a finished-looking way, but the daemons launching take up so much CPU that the widgets are unresponsive. With intermittant splash screens disrupting focus. I've gotten in the habit of listening carefully for the hard drive to stop growling, and then a few more seconds just to be sure. I'd much rather it get it over with first, and show me the desktop when its actually ready for it.
Maybe if all daemons were +20 nice this could work tolerably, but you'd think windows would have tried that?