This description of Bandwidth and Latency in CPU's and memory is almost the same as in network transmissions. Really easy to increase the bandwidth (10 Mbit to 100 Mbit to 1000MBit)... But try as hard as you can to make those electrons go faster along with the equipment...
Since the author didnt mention it...
on
Design Patterns
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Is this book worthy of my money or is it antiquated piece of shit? The author of this review didn't include any sort of this question.
I have only limited funds, and I cant afford something that wont help me. So... all those who bought it, is it WORTH IT?
Feh. I really hate arguments like this article. MS deserves a fine, but really.. let them go on with what they do now. Why? Many users legitly hate Windows and "tech support" with them. That alone is making users try Linux. Some of those users like it at first, others complain about lack of apps.
We already have tons of killer apps for Linux. Doesnt seem enough to convert users over to Linux. We have Evolution for Mail, Mozilla/Phoenix for web surfing, OpenOffice for an office suite, MySQL along with guis to use with it, Gnome AND Kde as desktop environments, an Xserver that allows fine grained "remote desktop" capibility, tons of network GUI clients, can read any FS... Still what's the "BIG" switch for users to Linux? And no, usability is pretty good now. With KDE, it's better than windows.
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi *and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, 'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time. Ed, man! !man ed ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1) NAME
ed - text editor SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ] DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor. --- Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED! "Ed is the standard text editor." And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929/bin/ed -rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970/usr/ucb/vi -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990/usr/bin/emacs
Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor." Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem$ ed
? help ? ? ? quit ? exit ? bye ? hell o? ? eat flaming death ? ^C ? ^C ? ^D ? --- Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor." Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all. ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
---BELOW this is garbage filled to pass IDIOTIC lameness filter the fuckwads at Slashdot implemented. I know Me how antidest guerge Now heusdys I dont qwnas Prutwew
Yeah, like any court's going to buy that argument.
I'm not sure what law says what about this, but It's the one about: The buyer has an idea what's for sale. The seller has the same idea of what is for sale. Essentially, it's a trade between 2 goods. If the 2 ideas coincide, it's the meeting of the minds (and therefore sale can occur). I also believe Lemon laws fall under this similar conception. "You get less than what you expected when the buisness transaction took place (cause someone screwed you)".
In this case of ISP's, I'm sure the "no guarantees as to the continuous availability" is covering their asses about the fiber-seeking backhoe chewing the ds-3. Noone in any state of mind is just going to fork over monthly amount of cash without expecting SOMETHING (wether that be goods, services, or the knowledge of donations for those damn starving children).
I can understand not 100% uptime and all, but just plain fucking over an account is wrong.
The problem's worse than that. I'm reminded of an article here that was "Libraries asked to destroy reports and databases". Something by a user caught my eye.. her Name is Chasing Amy. I didnt get permission, so hopefully she will forgive me for re-posting it here, as it is on-topic.
__________
by Chasing Amy on Monday November 19, @03:24AM (Score:5, Insightful) (#2583692) (User #450778 Info)
I think our government has become unsound because of two things: the reliance on money and power for becoming a viable candidate to the legislative and executive branches, and the detachment of the judicial branch from the actual letter and intent of the Constitution.
As for the first, it is more or less self-evident. We've had several different political parties come and go over the course of our history--the idea that we are a two-party system and better for it is a relatively new and completely untrue one. In any given geographical area, there were always several parties--groups of people interested in politics who wished to back and promote a candidate who agrees with their ideals. Some of these were directly affiliated with national parties which were the most prominent, such as Democrats or Whigs or later Republicans. While they therefore had an advantage thanks to networking and name recognition and improved fundraising, politics was essentially still local. Local parties had almost equal power to field candidates and get them recognized within a given district. And, an individual with a great reputation and local name recognition could build up his own group of supporters--essentially his own local party--and do damn well.
This is no longer true thanks to the fact that the national party structure is able to raise so much money for paid media advertising, that the national parties have raised the bar for entry of third-party or independant candidates ridiculously high, and that media outlets like television--which is now sadly the only way most people get information--only give coverage to the candidates from the Big Two parties in most cases, being motivated to save their costly airtime, and seldom cover third-party or independant candidates with equal vigor.
The current Big Two parties have secured through legislation their ability to get candidates on the ballot automatically, while anyone else has to work very, very hard to get his name there. In the old days, everyone had to work at the same level. Why give such preferences to an organization simply because it happens to be dominant at a particular time? If the Democrats and the Whigs had done the same thing back when they were the two most prominent parties, well, the Whigs would still be around and the Republicans would never have had a chance to rise to the same level.
Because of this artificial prominence, almost all the money goes to these two parties, since most people believe in the two-party mythos and believe--rightly since the playing field has become so tilted--that very few third-party or independent candidates can win. Such huge warchests and powerful backing and lobbying have been amassed behind the Republicans and Democrats, that few others can compete--television is now the primary medium, and it costs a lot of money to buy a little bit of airtime. Money is therefore primary to getting a candidate elected, whereas originally it was a minor consideration since most campaigning was done in person by stumping and through local newspaper coverage. Now, local newspapers are the things nobody reads that are given away at the grocery store and elsewhere; almost everyone reads their nearest big-city paper instead, which is usually more of a regional or national paper in which local issues aren't the most important, and so local candidates not backed by a major party are given little or no shrift. And nobody really stumps, since they can get more coverage by buying airtime and ads, and doing the occasional speech instead of hurriedly going around the election district trying to explain your beliefs to everyone in person. TV is just so much more effective, and so much more expensive...
The result is entrenched parties which will always be in power thanks to their artificial advantages. Would the Founders believe that two parties with great prominence at a pearticular time should be able to pass legislation to make getting elected harder for everyone else and easier for them? No. To make it worse, as Noam Chomsky points out throughout his writings and videos (though I don't take him seriously on many other things), the Big Two really aren't at all far apart in philosophy. They're both for Big Government and extreme federalism, just to different ends and in different areas. They seem different to the average person, because each party is for or against certain things like abortion--but at the core, they both agree on the same sort of system, the same sort of political philosophy; they only disagree on details, not on major structures. The result is that voters usually get to choose between two sides of the same coin. Where's the party that, for example, wants to reduce federal government to only those things explicitly authorized and reasonably implied by the constitution? Plenty of people want that--yet the artificial obstacles prevent such people from banding together and having any reasonable chance of fielding candidates.
As for the judicial branch, I think it went awry when it started interpreting the Constitution instead of just reading it as literally as possible. Today there is no dispute about whether we should interpret the Constitution or not--there are just "strict constructionists" who try to interpret it narrowly and "loose constructionists" who try to interpret it broadly. Why not just read the damn thing instead? If the Constition says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."--that's pretty self-explanatory. Congress shouldn't pass any laws regarding religions or churches whatsoever; it can pass no laws which restrict speech or writing; it can pass no law to prevent people from peacefully assembling. What's there to interpret? The Court should just decide what laws do and do not violate this; no interpretation is necessary. Interpretations are used for justifications of decisions, but unfortunately under our system they then become precedent and have the force of law themselves. So, don't interpret at all. Explain why a law violates or does not violate, but don't add or remove meanings by making grand pronouncements about what you think the Constitution means. It's written in plain language after all, and for good reason.
An example of what goes wrong when the judiciary interprets instead of simply reading the Constitution word for word is the mess about what the 2nd Amendment "means," hinging around interpretation of the word "militia". "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Why does this need interpretation? Militia had a very simple meaning at the time--any able-bodied man over the age of majority and under a certain age, who was therefore eligible to serve in a military capacity. But that doesn't matter anyway, because just reading the sentence, any English major can tell you that that sentence is equivalent in meaning to this one, which is easier for modern readers to parse since they no longer teach us so well about subordinate clauses and such: "Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Again, unless you are a moron you understand this sentence. It needs no interpretation. It is entirely self-evident. If you believe in gun control, fine--pass a Constitutional amendment to add restrictions; just don't try to read things you want to see into words which are so simple and straightforward. I should add that we can keep convicted felons from owning firearms, though, because felons do not have and never had full rights unless they are restored by legislative action, which is why we can keep them from voting, owning firearms, etc.
This is the cause of much of our legal cruft--people want to interpret the Constitution and the laws to suit their own desires, even when it obviously contradicts them. What they should do is campaign for those changes, not try to twist the Constitution and laws through interpretation to fit those changes. It demeans and diminishes the letter and spirit of those documents, and makes it progressively easier for everyone else to twist and tweak them to fit into their own ideologies and wishes--especially since we have a system of precedent. The Founders wrote the Constitution in very simple language--excruciatingly simple for the day, when flowery embellishments were the norm. It's simple to understand. People need to stop trying to make it conform to their own beliefs. Campaign to change it if you don't agree with it--just don't reduce it to meaninglessness because you want to interpret it to allow your opinions rather than what it clearly says.
Because of this judicial love of interpreting things to avoid the obvious, we've lost the last bastion of our rights. For example, the legislation passed recently to allow law enforcement agencies to read anyone's Net traffic headers without a warrant is blatantly contrary to the Fourth Amendment's admonishment that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." You have to have a particular reason to look at anything which would otherwise be private, and you have to have a warrant which specifies exactly what you can look at. Pretty simple. But the Court can and will interpret these words however it wants, instead of just reading them literally and if need be asking the simple question WWTJD--What Would Thomas Jefferson Do? After all, he wrote those words. If they seem at all ambiguous--which they don't really--simply honestly thinking about what Jefferson and others directly involved meant by them is the only valid method of clarification. They were amazing people, a generation of thinkers and doers who threw off the bonds of subjugation and created a new and thriving, trend-setting nation. They wrote the Constitution as plainly and unambiguously as they could, to avoid the need for interpreting it.
And the Bill of Rights was an afterthought which many of them thought was unnecessary since such rights were so obvious at the time. It was a time when people and state governments were put ahead of the federal government. It was a time when national government was expected to conduct foreign policy, regulate interstate commerce and interstate disputes, and to otherwise leave us all alone. It was a time when the Ninth and Tenth Amendments still meant something: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." We had the full rights and protections of the Common Law. The federal government was there to assist the people and the states, not to extend its regulations into every facet of our lives.
Now our rights are not so obvious--at least to those full of interpretations and agendas, and to the majority of people who just don't know our proud history and heritage. Anyone who's read the writings of Jefferson and Madison, and Washington's journal, Franklin's papers, etc., knows that they would be appalled at our current system. Again, they were brilliant men, and created a system which still functions better than could be expected even after 200 years of cruft weigh it down and pervert it. There is no single government in the world which has operated for so long without very fundamental changes to its structure. (Before someone mentions England, it changed fundamentally at the beginning of the 20th century, when the House of Lords was finally rendered impotent.)
What I'd like to see is a return to this core. The Constitution should be enforced, not interpreted. The federal government should leave domestic law enforcement (except where it crosses state or national boundaries) and any other function not dealing with what the Constitution explicitly delagates to them, except for a few useful things not enumerated like printing the national currency, to the states. Most of our tax money could be spent at the state level, instead of having a national government dominated by pork barrel politics which loses big chunks of our money while filtering it back down to the states. Why not just have that money go directly to the states through state taxes? Why not have the federal government leave us alone, and just worry about protecting the people and their rights, as the Constitution charges it? Our federal tax dollars should be spent on defense and national infrastructure, not on foreign aid to bolster corporate sales penetration into foreign markets and on tax breaks to whatever interests got the President elected. Big political parties should be given no preferential treatment over small ones--they all need to jump through the same hoops to get on the ballot. Basically, I'd like to see a return to the federal government we had in 1805, with changes, additions, and subtractions only where obviously needed thanks to the changes that have taken place in the intervening years. It would be a small, lean, efficient government. It wouldn't need to hide things from the people. It wouldn't need to promote corporate interests. You wouldn't need to be in the pocket of a big corporate interest just to viably enter it.
But this will never, ever happen without outright revolution. Politicians would never willingly give up their corporate perks. Politicians are not visionary enough to look to the Constitution rather than their petty opinions. Politicians don't want to give up the powers they have which are not enumerated by the Constitution, since most things would become the province of state governments again rather than the national government--for example, abortion would be up to the States to decide individually, since the Constitution does not give the federal government the authority to regulate such things except where they become interstate issues. Unless a state violates a Constitutional right of its people, or an issue involves national defense or foreign policy, the federal government would largely let the state governments and the people who elect them decide what to do.
What I see is a large bureaucratic government that has taken the place of the nimble and responsive government we once had. What I see is a government which seeks to monitor its people, without reason, without probable cause, without warrant. What I see is a government which killed Randy Weaver's family because he advocated gun ownership rights and was therefore branded suspect--and which does similar things all the time albeit with much less publicity. What I see is a government which wants to keep everything about itself secret, even to the point of not letting the public know if toxic nuclear waste is being stored near them. What I see is a government which is owned by corporations, and more directly beholden to them and their money than to the people themselves.
I've gone on and on far too long; everyone gets the point. But right now, I don't see the cruft being removed without a real Jeffersonian revolution. It's time to collect all the information and all the arms while it's still legal to do so, because at some point both may be outlawed just when they're most necessary. I love my country, and I love its history. But I want a real government of the people, by the people, for the people, to take the place once more of our current government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. I want accountability where there is none. And I know I'm not alone.
I've had debates with a few politicians about different issues. The first thing you must remember is don't play dirty if at all possible. It discredits you in thier eyes.
And here's a few things I see about this situation, in no particular order...
1: All of you are extremists whining about a "seemingly small" issue. 2: He probably has little to do with technology.. He just has to please his friends 3: One of his biggest contributors is Microsoft. 4: He's a republican, so he's supposed to "ally" with the corps.
Those may seem simplistic, but there are hints in those statements. Since he's a republican, he's going to be a bit sensitive about his campaign funding from MS. It won't sound simple on your end, but don't mention this point. Another thing is you should explain the major licenses (GPL, BSD) along with public domain. Try to give the pros and cons of each so that you don't sound like neo-hippies. Personally, I'd try arguing for public domain or BSD license. Both are "free" for everybody. One just makes the developers have a "namestamp" of deriving.
The reason you explain the ideas behind all these "tech issues" is probably he doesn't understand much of anything past what he's being paid to say. Overall, try to be couretious, and answer his questions the best you can. Try to best him on his own terms. After all, if you can inject a "public domain" thought into his thought processes, it might change him enough.
Perhaps the argument might go along with these lines..
you--"Yes sir, the companies do make the software, but we pay the taxes that pay for the software" Him--"But this GPL says that my representative citizens and companies cant sell it and make money on it" (totally false, but that's the way they'll see it--dont fall for the trap) you--"You are right, sir. In certain projects the GPL does work best, but we totally agree with you that we should NOT lock out any tax paying individual , wether that be a corporation or a citizen going into the software consulting business. That's why we look at the BSD license or Public Domain. Both do not have corporate lockout " Him--"You do have a point there. You pay taxes, I pay taxes, and corporations pay taxes. It seems you want equality.".....
And one last note, go in acting as professionals (if you are, sorry about talking down to you). Suits, ties, no facial hair (ala RMS). Remember, First impressions DO count.
---This is a personal opinion, not company policy.
Company Policy: Screw customers and probably emplyees too, eh?
---The details of the disaster recovery scheme are of course confidential.
Declare bancrupcy? Sure as hell recovers money for the stockholders...
---However I can tell people that we did think about these issues during the design.
Ahhhhhhhhhhh!! I thought Al Gore designed the internet. Now it's you fucks. Sure.
---We have always known that people might think the DNS was a single physical point of failure for the internet.
Backhoeing a few sonet cables is much easier failure than your Piece of Shit DNS servers.
---That is why we designed it so that it is not.
There you go again saying you "designed a method of redundant fail points".
---There are multiple locations. The 'A root' is NOT a single machine. There are actually multiple instances of the A root with multiple levels of hotswap capability.
Nawwww. I thought it was a P2 beowulf clusterfuck.
---Incidentally it is no accident that the VeriSign root servers stayed up.
And it's no accident that WE don't use Verisign. Sooo, how many reboot monkies do you have?
---They were designed to handle loads way beyond normal load. The ATLAS cluster is reported to handle 6 billion transactions a day with a capacity very substantially in excess of that.
Who gives a fuck about transaction speeds? You flood a data line, you fuck the connection. Doesnt matter if it's a 10 transaction/sec chip or 10 qudra-gagilla-motherfucka-zillion.
---Even if all the A roots were physically destroyed the roots can be reconstructed at other locations. Basically all that is needed is a site with a very fast internet connection.
Y'ur a fookin gein-ass. All ya'll need for that dere rooterrewter server is hot bandwidth. Yessiree!
---In the case of a major terrorist attack AOL or UUNet or even an ARPAnet node could be comandered.
Gotta mention those terrorists, eh? I'd fear your PRIOR angry customers waving thier torches and pick-axes outside your office.
---The root could even be moved out of the country entirely, British Telecom is a VeriSign affiliate,
And what Brit likes BT? heh heh heh
---there are also several other affiliates with nuclear hardened bunkers.
And your PR firm has nuclear hardended heads.
---Most Americans have only been thinking about terrorism since 9-11. VeriSign security was largely designed by people who thought about terrorism professionaly,
Who gives a rats ass about your "terrorism I think's" shit. We have a website for that kind of thinking (kuro5hin.org)
---unless of course they were in charge of securing nuclear warheads.
And they cant talk. Your point?
---All a terrorist could do is to kill a lot of people,
Or he MIGHT take our uptime from 99.999999999 to 99.999998
---there is absolutely no single point of failure.
Knock off GPS. Kills sync network connections over a WAN in a few days due to time loss.
---Even if the entire constellation is destroyed it would result in an outage of no more than a day given the resources that would become available in the aftermath.
SO you mean only a nuke will do it, and your considering about fucking DNS servers?!
The houses sound sweet and all, but this stuff'll be obsoleted in a few years anyways. How about some easily upgradeable houses, like conduit wiring or upgradable wall-stereos?
We all know there is "book warez" out there, along with hacked versions or ebook readers. Still, instead of filling the greedy with money, we ought to look at a richer source of information: Gutenberg Library.
They don't use.lockout formats. They use text with a copyright warning at the beginning. The are truley free. The library may be quite old though...
Still I've got this idea talking about this. Gutenberg has "how many documents?"... Add the amount of space (uncompressed) to a database like MySql along with a web interface. Also have some way of grepping text inside all those files. Slap it al together using Linux, and you now have a "Library Server". That one server could be put under a desk or wherever and have web interfaces to it. Even the medium-small librarys could legitly quadruple thier colllections fo books, wether it be dead tree or electronic.
Thinking of that, I just might do that..... I bet the library would pay a bif for the setup like that. Get a decent machine like a 1.4 Athlon with 1 gig of ram. Depending on the load, you might be able to store everything Gzipped.
----The Debian Project announced the release of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 "Woody" on July 19, 2002. Woody is the first version of Debian to feature cryptographic software. OpenSSH and GNU Privacy Guard are included by default, and strong encryption is present in web browsers, web servers, databases, and so on. The Debian Project's Social Contract
Any user of a Linux system isn't going to wait for a distro to "feature" a certain program to get it. Pointless
----ensures that Debian GNU/Linux will always be free. Debian has traditionally been given some room on inovation due to the way it is developed by a team of volunteer developers. But in order to compete with other distributions changes need to be made.
Compete?!? Who says Debian is trying to Compete? (other than these fucks)
----Debian is available free over the Internet. You can download it from any of Debian's mirrors. The Debian project does not manufacture CDs but you can purchase CDs from a number of CD vendors. Debian recommends first time installers purchase CDs and most vendors offer Debian for around $5 plus shipping, although downloading via the Internet allows you to only install those packages you really need and want.
I didn't know you could download the cd images off the net. All ther is at the debain site is a DOWNLOAD lonk, then proceeding that, asking if you'd like to download ISO's. (sarcasm)
----dpkg provides the lowest level of package management. apt-get is an excellent utility for downloading and installing.deb packages and also provides an easy way to update packages for security or other reasons. The alien command is available to install Red Hat, Stampede and Slackware packages.
I thought that Slackware WAS a debian without real package management. Great for servers though.
----The software included with the Disc 1 installation is very slim. (Trim about downloading lots off the net)
Try NOT downloading the Net install ISO, you dumbass. I guess he found that download page.
-----The Debian installation is a bit rough around the edges.
My ISO's didn't have edges.
----The install program is text-based which most other distributions have passed by. In a nutshell, the program is just unintelligent.
And so are you. Your point?
----There are no automatic detection routines for your hardware,
I'll give you that one.
----no automatic disk partitioning.
Absolutely not. I'm glad having to set it up myself.
----It took us several attempts to get everything installed and working correctly. Control is definitely given to the user, allowing you to change kernel module options and driver installations and the install program is very stable.
I've NEVER had the debian installer crash. RedHat and Mandrake installer is really bad about that. Actually, I like the SuSE console installer. Pretty clean interface. The debian dselect interface is disgusting.
----After the first reboot, the system walks you through setting up a root password and any user accounts you would like it create. apt-get is then configured, asking where you would like to retrieve your packages from: CD, HTTP, FTP. We downloaded our packages via FTP ensuring we had the most recent.
You bitch and moan about long download times, but insist to use net install. Get your story straight.
----Tasksel allows you to choose a predefined configuration based on what you will use your system for, from X Window workstation to Web Server. dselect offers the ability to add additional packages that aren't included in the tasksel profile. But dselect is horrible. Navigating it's 80's era interface is difficult for the average user if not impossible.
Do you mean the luser who downst know why his monitor isnt showing Windows, and you tell him to turn the power on "average user"? Or the "Average user" who cant install Windows, or the "Average user" who puts a disk to the side of his metal computer case using a harddrive magnet? Ahhhhh, that "average user". Speak for yourself.
----The X configuration isn't any better. We found no autodetection for your video chipset, forcing us to find the driver that worked for ours. We didn't receive any option to login using a graphical login, forced to login at a text console to type startx.
I didn't know that running xfree86setup was soooo time consuming. Oh, wait... You're an "average user".
----At the end of the installation, we found the whole proceedure to be far behind the competition.
I see no competition for debain. They're not compeating.REdHat is, but debian isnt.
----When using X, the default windows manager is TDM. We grabbed KDE 2.2 using apt-get. After restarting the X server we found ourselves with the full KDE desktop. The menu could have been better organized. Under several categories we found ourselves having to go 2 or 3 menus deep to get to the program we wanted.
My God! The travesty! Oh wait. How many menus deep is solitare? Sure doesnt stop my fellow students playing it in class.
----The first time we started KDE we found that our sound didn't work. Now having on of those wonderful on-board cards we didn't spend much time troubleshooting it, but we do know it works with most other distributions that provide some form of autodetection.
Figure it out, or start modprobing sound drivers in and wait to hear sound. Or if you want KDE 3.whatever, all you need is 1 lib package from unstable(libc6 I believe) to run it. Your choice wether you want to run unstable.....
----Debian runs smoothly and fairly efficiently on our test machine. "Woody" is the first version of Debian to include a journaling filesystem, either ext3 or ReiserFS.
_-=YAWN=-_ It had BETTER run smooth. It's in stable, after all.
-----I'm using fvwm, because I actually want multiple things on the screen at once (since I want to watch for changes in one window while doing things in another window, or type notes on the things I'm reading in a different window; having overlapping windows is nice for this). I don't actually use the virtual desktops much (unless I find I want to do something totally different for a while, with an entirely separate set of windows). Fvwm, at least, can be controlled with keys and key combinations not normally used by other programs (rather than "^O"). I use mostly left-windows, shift-left-windows, alt-left-alt, alt-right-alt, shift-left-shift, and shift-right-shift; this leaves free every non-modifier key with every combination of modifiers on the traditional PC keyboard. This makes "left-windows 1" the X equivalent of "^A ^A". Fvwm is also good for mapping random keys and key combinations to scripts; I have the Pause/Break key start, pause, or resume the CD player.
Ummm, yeah. I'm waiting for a comboH^H^H^H^H^keyboard command that I can enter up-down-up-down-left-right-left-right-a-b-select.
Can some keyboard manufacturer put Select on a keyboard? TNX
I know that macs havent had floppys on standard systems, but some of us want floppy support. When we went to the Mac builder on the site, we added a floppy drive. The cost went up 100$.
Does Apple still do that, or have they even quit building computers (special orders) with floppys altogether?
What I'd like to see is a state here in the US to fully denounce DMCA act and put a bill in with the state congress nullifying the DMCA. If the state was a less tech oriented state (my state, Indiana), they'd have an overflow of 'Interesting' jobs not able anywhere else.
Course, the main problem with Indiana is the Inventory Tax racket. That alone is kicking shitloads of jobs out;-(
That's my point. We give cycles to them for free, because we think it's a noble thing to do. I was totallly sure they wern't going to find ET or whatever, but I'd have liked to know what they did with all the terabytes of data.
Perhaps a 4 page findings report (like slashdot articles: first in, last out). That would have been nice... But oh well.
When has Seti@home actually provided any useful knowledge about interstellar ANYTHING? They just chew bandwidth and cycles for what purpose? Using FFT's to find seemingly coherant signals buried in electomagnetic background.
This project does seem quite interesting, in that it's trying to determine signals of life, but hasn't provided a thing (unless I'm wrong).
Slashdot Mirror
This description of Bandwidth and Latency in CPU's and memory is almost the same as in network transmissions. Really easy to increase the bandwidth (10 Mbit to 100 Mbit to 1000MBit)... But try as hard as you can to make those electrons go faster along with the equipment...
Is this book worthy of my money or is it antiquated piece of shit? The author of this review didn't include any sort of this question.
I have only limited funds, and I cant afford something that wont help me. So... all those who bought it, is it WORTH IT?
Thanks.
Feh. I really hate arguments like this article. MS deserves a fine, but really.. let them go on with what they do now. Why? Many users legitly hate Windows and "tech support" with them. That alone is making users try Linux. Some of those users like it at first, others complain about lack of apps.
We already have tons of killer apps for Linux. Doesnt seem enough to convert users over to Linux. We have Evolution for Mail, Mozilla/Phoenix for web surfing, OpenOffice for an office suite, MySQL along with guis to use with it, Gnome AND Kde as desktop environments, an Xserver that allows fine grained "remote desktop" capibility, tons of network GUI clients, can read any FS... Still what's the "BIG" switch for users to Linux? And no, usability is pretty good now. With KDE, it's better than windows.
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi *and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, 'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
/bin/ed /usr/ucb/vi /usr/bin/emacs
l o?
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
---
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED! "Ed is the standard text editor." And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990
Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor." Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem$ ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hel
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
---
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor." Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
---BELOW this is garbage filled to pass IDIOTIC lameness filter the fuckwads at Slashdot implemented. I know Me how antidest guerge Now heusdys I dont qwnas Prutwew
Yeah, like any court's going to buy that argument.
I'm not sure what law says what about this, but It's the one about:
The buyer has an idea what's for sale. The seller has the same idea of what is for sale. Essentially, it's a trade between 2 goods. If the 2 ideas coincide, it's the meeting of the minds (and therefore sale can occur). I also believe Lemon laws fall under this similar conception. "You get less than what you expected when the buisness transaction took place (cause someone screwed you)".
In this case of ISP's, I'm sure the "no guarantees as to the continuous availability" is covering their asses about the fiber-seeking backhoe chewing the ds-3. Noone in any state of mind is just going to fork over monthly amount of cash without expecting SOMETHING (wether that be goods, services, or the knowledge of donations for those damn starving children).
I can understand not 100% uptime and all, but just plain fucking over an account is wrong.
What about the guys who dont like the "silver dollars". I like these too.
(.)Y(.)
Fist Prost
'Ol taco is kinda stupid. He wants a load test, just offer "FREE PR0N". Then mirror the first 50 clips from autopr0n.com archive.
;-)
Now THAT'S a load test
The problem's worse than that. I'm reminded of an article here that was "Libraries asked to destroy reports and databases". Something by a user caught my eye.. her Name is Chasing Amy. I didnt get permission, so hopefully she will forgive me for re-posting it here, as it is on-topic.
__________
by Chasing Amy on Monday November 19, @03:24AM (Score:5, Insightful) (#2583692)
(User #450778 Info)
I think our government has become unsound because of two things: the reliance on money and power for becoming a viable candidate to the legislative and executive branches, and the detachment of the judicial branch from the actual letter and intent of the Constitution.
As for the first, it is more or less self-evident. We've had several different political parties come and go over the course of our history--the idea that we are a two-party system and better for it is a relatively new and completely untrue one. In any given geographical area, there were always several parties--groups of people interested in politics who wished to back and promote a candidate who agrees with their ideals. Some of these were directly affiliated with national parties which were the most prominent, such as Democrats or Whigs or later Republicans. While they therefore had an advantage thanks to networking and name recognition and improved fundraising, politics was essentially still local. Local parties had almost equal power to field candidates and get them recognized within a given district. And, an individual with a great reputation and local name recognition could build up his own group of supporters--essentially his own local party--and do damn well.
This is no longer true thanks to the fact that the national party structure is able to raise so much money for paid media advertising, that the national parties have raised the bar for entry of third-party or independant candidates ridiculously high, and that media outlets like television--which is now sadly the only way most people get information--only give coverage to the candidates from the Big Two parties in most cases, being motivated to save their costly airtime, and seldom cover third-party or independant candidates with equal vigor.
The current Big Two parties have secured through legislation their ability to get candidates on the ballot automatically, while anyone else has to work very, very hard to get his name there. In the old days, everyone had to work at the same level. Why give such preferences to an organization simply because it happens to be dominant at a particular time? If the Democrats and the Whigs had done the same thing back when they were the two most prominent parties, well, the Whigs would still be around and the Republicans would never have had a chance to rise to the same level.
Because of this artificial prominence, almost all the money goes to these two parties, since most people believe in the two-party mythos and believe--rightly since the playing field has become so tilted--that very few third-party or independent candidates can win. Such huge warchests and powerful backing and lobbying have been amassed behind the Republicans and Democrats, that few others can compete--television is now the primary medium, and it costs a lot of money to buy a little bit of airtime. Money is therefore primary to getting a candidate elected, whereas originally it was a minor consideration since most campaigning was done in person by stumping and through local newspaper coverage. Now, local newspapers are the things nobody reads that are given away at the grocery store and elsewhere; almost everyone reads their nearest big-city paper instead, which is usually more of a regional or national paper in which local issues aren't the most important, and so local candidates not backed by a major party are given little or no shrift. And nobody really stumps, since they can get more coverage by buying airtime and ads, and doing the occasional speech instead of hurriedly going around the election district trying to explain your beliefs to everyone in person. TV is just so much more effective, and so much more expensive...
The result is entrenched parties which will always be in power thanks to their artificial advantages. Would the Founders believe that two parties with great prominence at a pearticular time should be able to pass legislation to make getting elected harder for everyone else and easier for them? No. To make it worse, as Noam Chomsky points out throughout his writings and videos (though I don't take him seriously on many other things), the Big Two really aren't at all far apart in philosophy. They're both for Big Government and extreme federalism, just to different ends and in different areas. They seem different to the average person, because each party is for or against certain things like abortion--but at the core, they both agree on the same sort of system, the same sort of political philosophy; they only disagree on details, not on major structures. The result is that voters usually get to choose between two sides of the same coin. Where's the party that, for example, wants to reduce federal government to only those things explicitly authorized and reasonably implied by the constitution? Plenty of people want that--yet the artificial obstacles prevent such people from banding together and having any reasonable chance of fielding candidates.
As for the judicial branch, I think it went awry when it started interpreting the Constitution instead of just reading it as literally as possible. Today there is no dispute about whether we should interpret the Constitution or not--there are just "strict constructionists" who try to interpret it narrowly and "loose constructionists" who try to interpret it broadly. Why not just read the damn thing instead? If the Constition says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."--that's pretty self-explanatory. Congress shouldn't pass any laws regarding religions or churches whatsoever; it can pass no laws which restrict speech or writing; it can pass no law to prevent people from peacefully assembling. What's there to interpret? The Court should just decide what laws do and do not violate this; no interpretation is necessary. Interpretations are used for justifications of decisions, but unfortunately under our system they then become precedent and have the force of law themselves. So, don't interpret at all. Explain why a law violates or does not violate, but don't add or remove meanings by making grand pronouncements about what you think the Constitution means. It's written in plain language after all, and for good reason.
An example of what goes wrong when the judiciary interprets instead of simply reading the Constitution word for word is the mess about what the 2nd Amendment "means," hinging around interpretation of the word "militia". "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Why does this need interpretation? Militia had a very simple meaning at the time--any able-bodied man over the age of majority and under a certain age, who was therefore eligible to serve in a military capacity. But that doesn't matter anyway, because just reading the sentence, any English major can tell you that that sentence is equivalent in meaning to this one, which is easier for modern readers to parse since they no longer teach us so well about subordinate clauses and such: "Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Again, unless you are a moron you understand this sentence. It needs no interpretation. It is entirely self-evident. If you believe in gun control, fine--pass a Constitutional amendment to add restrictions; just don't try to read things you want to see into words which are so simple and straightforward. I should add that we can keep convicted felons from owning firearms, though, because felons do not have and never had full rights unless they are restored by legislative action, which is why we can keep them from voting, owning firearms, etc.
This is the cause of much of our legal cruft--people want to interpret the Constitution and the laws to suit their own desires, even when it obviously contradicts them. What they should do is campaign for those changes, not try to twist the Constitution and laws through interpretation to fit those changes. It demeans and diminishes the letter and spirit of those documents, and makes it progressively easier for everyone else to twist and tweak them to fit into their own ideologies and wishes--especially since we have a system of precedent. The Founders wrote the Constitution in very simple language--excruciatingly simple for the day, when flowery embellishments were the norm. It's simple to understand. People need to stop trying to make it conform to their own beliefs. Campaign to change it if you don't agree with it--just don't reduce it to meaninglessness because you want to interpret it to allow your opinions rather than what it clearly says.
Because of this judicial love of interpreting things to avoid the obvious, we've lost the last bastion of our rights. For example, the legislation passed recently to allow law enforcement agencies to read anyone's Net traffic headers without a warrant is blatantly contrary to the Fourth Amendment's admonishment that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." You have to have a particular reason to look at anything which would otherwise be private, and you have to have a warrant which specifies exactly what you can look at. Pretty simple. But the Court can and will interpret these words however it wants, instead of just reading them literally and if need be asking the simple question WWTJD--What Would Thomas Jefferson Do? After all, he wrote those words. If they seem at all ambiguous--which they don't really--simply honestly thinking about what Jefferson and others directly involved meant by them is the only valid method of clarification. They were amazing people, a generation of thinkers and doers who threw off the bonds of subjugation and created a new and thriving, trend-setting nation. They wrote the Constitution as plainly and unambiguously as they could, to avoid the need for interpreting it.
And the Bill of Rights was an afterthought which many of them thought was unnecessary since such rights were so obvious at the time. It was a time when people and state governments were put ahead of the federal government. It was a time when national government was expected to conduct foreign policy, regulate interstate commerce and interstate disputes, and to otherwise leave us all alone. It was a time when the Ninth and Tenth Amendments still meant something: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." We had the full rights and protections of the Common Law. The federal government was there to assist the people and the states, not to extend its regulations into every facet of our lives.
Now our rights are not so obvious--at least to those full of interpretations and agendas, and to the majority of people who just don't know our proud history and heritage. Anyone who's read the writings of Jefferson and Madison, and Washington's journal, Franklin's papers, etc., knows that they would be appalled at our current system. Again, they were brilliant men, and created a system which still functions better than could be expected even after 200 years of cruft weigh it down and pervert it. There is no single government in the world which has operated for so long without very fundamental changes to its structure. (Before someone mentions England, it changed fundamentally at the beginning of the 20th century, when the House of Lords was finally rendered impotent.)
What I'd like to see is a return to this core. The Constitution should be enforced, not interpreted. The federal government should leave domestic law enforcement (except where it crosses state or national boundaries) and any other function not dealing with what the Constitution explicitly delagates to them, except for a few useful things not enumerated like printing the national currency, to the states. Most of our tax money could be spent at the state level, instead of having a national government dominated by pork barrel politics which loses big chunks of our money while filtering it back down to the states. Why not just have that money go directly to the states through state taxes? Why not have the federal government leave us alone, and just worry about protecting the people and their rights, as the Constitution charges it? Our federal tax dollars should be spent on defense and national infrastructure, not on foreign aid to bolster corporate sales penetration into foreign markets and on tax breaks to whatever interests got the President elected. Big political parties should be given no preferential treatment over small ones--they all need to jump through the same hoops to get on the ballot. Basically, I'd like to see a return to the federal government we had in 1805, with changes, additions, and subtractions only where obviously needed thanks to the changes that have taken place in the intervening years. It would be a small, lean, efficient government. It wouldn't need to hide things from the people. It wouldn't need to promote corporate interests. You wouldn't need to be in the pocket of a big corporate interest just to viably enter it.
But this will never, ever happen without outright revolution. Politicians would never willingly give up their corporate perks. Politicians are not visionary enough to look to the Constitution rather than their petty opinions. Politicians don't want to give up the powers they have which are not enumerated by the Constitution, since most things would become the province of state governments again rather than the national government--for example, abortion would be up to the States to decide individually, since the Constitution does not give the federal government the authority to regulate such things except where they become interstate issues. Unless a state violates a Constitutional right of its people, or an issue involves national defense or foreign policy, the federal government would largely let the state governments and the people who elect them decide what to do.
What I see is a large bureaucratic government that has taken the place of the nimble and responsive government we once had. What I see is a government which seeks to monitor its people, without reason, without probable cause, without warrant. What I see is a government which killed Randy Weaver's family because he advocated gun ownership rights and was therefore branded suspect--and which does similar things all the time albeit with much less publicity. What I see is a government which wants to keep everything about itself secret, even to the point of not letting the public know if toxic nuclear waste is being stored near them. What I see is a government which is owned by corporations, and more directly beholden to them and their money than to the people themselves.
I've gone on and on far too long; everyone gets the point. But right now, I don't see the cruft being removed without a real Jeffersonian revolution. It's time to collect all the information and all the arms while it's still legal to do so, because at some point both may be outlawed just when they're most necessary. I love my country, and I love its history. But I want a real government of the people, by the people, for the people, to take the place once more of our current government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. I want accountability where there is none. And I know I'm not alone.
I've had debates with a few politicians about different issues. The first thing you must remember is don't play dirty if at all possible. It discredits you in thier eyes.
And here's a few things I see about this situation, in no particular order...
1: All of you are extremists whining about a "seemingly small" issue.
2: He probably has little to do with technology.. He just has to please his friends
3: One of his biggest contributors is Microsoft.
4: He's a republican, so he's supposed to "ally" with the corps.
Those may seem simplistic, but there are hints in those statements. Since he's a republican, he's going to be a bit sensitive about his campaign funding from MS. It won't sound simple on your end, but don't mention this point. Another thing is you should explain the major licenses (GPL, BSD) along with public domain. Try to give the pros and cons of each so that you don't sound like neo-hippies. Personally, I'd try arguing for public domain or BSD license. Both are "free" for everybody. One just makes the developers have a "namestamp" of deriving.
The reason you explain the ideas behind all these "tech issues" is probably he doesn't understand much of anything past what he's being paid to say. Overall, try to be couretious, and answer his questions the best you can. Try to best him on his own terms. After all, if you can inject a "public domain" thought into his thought processes, it might change him enough.
Perhaps the argument might go along with these lines..
you--"Yes sir, the companies do make the software, but we pay the taxes that pay for the software"
Him--"But this GPL says that my representative citizens and companies cant sell it and make money on it" (totally false, but that's the way they'll see it--dont fall for the trap)
you--"You are right, sir. In certain projects the GPL does work best, but we totally agree with you that we should NOT lock out any tax paying individual , wether that be a corporation or a citizen going into the software consulting business. That's why we look at the BSD license or Public Domain. Both do not have corporate lockout "
Him--"You do have a point there. You pay taxes, I pay taxes, and corporations pay taxes. It seems you want equality.".....
And one last note, go in acting as professionals (if you are, sorry about talking down to you). Suits, ties, no facial hair (ala RMS). Remember, First impressions DO count.
Well, of COURSE they did! Just like how Al Gore invented and made the Internet.
---Disclaimer, I work for VeriSign.
God help us all...
---This is a personal opinion, not company policy.
Company Policy: Screw customers and probably emplyees too, eh?
---The details of the disaster recovery scheme are of course confidential.
Declare bancrupcy? Sure as hell recovers money for the stockholders...
---However I can tell people that we did think about these issues during the design.
Ahhhhhhhhhhh!! I thought Al Gore designed the internet. Now it's you fucks. Sure.
---We have always known that people might think the DNS was a single physical point of failure for the internet.
Backhoeing a few sonet cables is much easier failure than your Piece of Shit DNS servers.
---That is why we designed it so that it is not.
There you go again saying you "designed a method of redundant fail points".
---There are multiple locations. The 'A root' is NOT a single machine. There are actually multiple instances of the A root with multiple levels of hotswap capability.
Nawwww. I thought it was a P2 beowulf clusterfuck.
---Incidentally it is no accident that the VeriSign root servers stayed up.
And it's no accident that WE don't use Verisign. Sooo, how many reboot monkies do you have?
---They were designed to handle loads way beyond normal load. The ATLAS cluster is reported to handle 6 billion transactions a day with a capacity very substantially in excess of that.
Who gives a fuck about transaction speeds? You flood a data line, you fuck the connection. Doesnt matter if it's a 10 transaction/sec chip or 10 qudra-gagilla-motherfucka-zillion.
---Even if all the A roots were physically destroyed the roots can be reconstructed at other locations. Basically all that is needed is a site with a very fast internet connection.
Y'ur a fookin gein-ass. All ya'll need for that dere rooterrewter server is hot bandwidth. Yessiree!
---In the case of a major terrorist attack AOL or UUNet or even an ARPAnet node could be comandered.
Gotta mention those terrorists, eh? I'd fear your PRIOR angry customers waving thier torches and pick-axes outside your office.
---The root could even be moved out of the country entirely, British Telecom is a VeriSign affiliate,
And what Brit likes BT? heh heh heh
---there are also several other affiliates with nuclear hardened bunkers.
And your PR firm has nuclear hardended heads.
---Most Americans have only been thinking about terrorism since 9-11. VeriSign security was largely designed by people who thought about terrorism professionaly,
Who gives a rats ass about your "terrorism I think's" shit. We have a website for that kind of thinking (kuro5hin.org)
---unless of course they were in charge of securing nuclear warheads.
And they cant talk. Your point?
---All a terrorist could do is to kill a lot of people,
Or he MIGHT take our uptime from 99.999999999 to 99.999998
---there is absolutely no single point of failure.
Knock off GPS. Kills sync network connections over a WAN in a few days due to time loss.
---Even if the entire constellation is destroyed it would result in an outage of no more than a day given the resources that would become available in the aftermath.
SO you mean only a nuke will do it, and your considering about fucking DNS servers?!
Feh. You ARE stupid.
The houses sound sweet and all, but this stuff'll be obsoleted in a few years anyways. How about some easily upgradeable houses, like conduit wiring or upgradable wall-stereos?
We all know there is "book warez" out there, along with hacked versions or ebook readers. Still, instead of filling the greedy with money, we ought to look at a richer source of information: Gutenberg Library.
.lockout formats. They use text with a copyright warning at the beginning. The are truley free. The library may be quite old though...
;-)
They don't use
Still I've got this idea talking about this. Gutenberg has "how many documents?"... Add the amount of space (uncompressed) to a database like MySql along with a web interface. Also have some way of grepping text inside all those files. Slap it al together using Linux, and you now have a "Library Server". That one server could be put under a desk or wherever and have web interfaces to it. Even the medium-small librarys could legitly quadruple thier colllections fo books, wether it be dead tree or electronic.
Thinking of that, I just might do that..... I bet the library would pay a bif for the setup like that. Get a decent machine like a 1.4 Athlon with 1 gig of ram. Depending on the load, you might be able to store everything Gzipped.
Just a thought from a crazy
----The Debian Project announced the release of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 "Woody"
.deb packages and also provides an easy way to update packages for security or other reasons. The alien
on July 19, 2002. Woody is the first version of Debian to feature cryptographic
software. OpenSSH and GNU Privacy Guard are included by default, and strong
encryption is present in web browsers, web servers, databases, and so on. The
Debian Project's Social Contract
Any user of a Linux system isn't going to wait for a distro to "feature" a certain program to get it. Pointless
----ensures that Debian GNU/Linux will always be free. Debian has traditionally
been given some room on inovation due to the way it is developed by a team of
volunteer developers. But in order to compete with other distributions changes
need to be made.
Compete?!? Who says Debian is trying to Compete? (other than these fucks)
----Debian is available free over the Internet. You can download it from any
of Debian's mirrors. The Debian project does not manufacture CDs but you can purchase CDs from a number of CD vendors. Debian recommends first time installers purchase CDs and most vendors offer Debian for around $5 plus shipping, although downloading via the Internet allows you to only install those packages you really need and want.
I didn't know you could download the cd images off the net. All ther is at the debain site is a DOWNLOAD lonk, then proceeding that, asking if you'd like to download ISO's. (sarcasm)
----dpkg provides the lowest level of package management. apt-get is
an excellent utility for downloading and installing
command is available to install Red Hat, Stampede and Slackware packages.
I thought that Slackware WAS a debian without real package management. Great for servers though.
----The software included with the Disc 1 installation is very slim. (Trim about downloading lots off the net)
Try NOT downloading the Net install ISO, you dumbass. I guess he found that download page.
-----The Debian installation is a bit rough around the edges.
My ISO's didn't have edges.
----The install program is text-based which most other distributions have passed by. In a nutshell, the program is just unintelligent.
And so are you. Your point?
----There are no automatic detection routines for your hardware,
I'll give you that one.
----no automatic disk partitioning.
Absolutely not. I'm glad having to set it up myself.
----It took us several attempts to get everything installed and working correctly. Control is definitely given to the user, allowing you to change kernel module options and driver installations and the install program is very stable.
I've NEVER had the debian installer crash. RedHat and Mandrake installer is really bad about that. Actually, I like the SuSE console installer. Pretty clean interface. The debian dselect interface is disgusting.
----After the first reboot, the system walks you through setting up a root password and any user accounts you would like it create. apt-get is then configured, asking where you would like to retrieve your packages from: CD, HTTP, FTP. We downloaded our packages via FTP ensuring we had the most recent.
You bitch and moan about long download times, but insist to use net install. Get your story straight.
----Tasksel allows you to choose a predefined configuration based on what you will use your system for, from X Window workstation to Web Server. dselect offers the ability to add additional packages that aren't included in the tasksel profile. But dselect is horrible. Navigating it's 80's era interface is difficult for the average user if not impossible.
Do you mean the luser who downst know why his monitor isnt showing Windows, and you tell him to turn the power on "average user"? Or the "Average user" who cant install Windows, or the "Average user" who puts a disk to the side of his metal computer case using a harddrive magnet? Ahhhhh, that "average user". Speak for yourself.
----The X configuration isn't any better. We found no autodetection for your video chipset, forcing us to find the driver that worked for ours. We didn't receive any option to login using a graphical login, forced to login at a text console to type startx.
I didn't know that running xfree86setup was soooo time consuming. Oh, wait... You're an "average user".
----At the end of the installation, we found the whole proceedure to be far behind the competition.
I see no competition for debain. They're not compeating.REdHat is, but debian isnt.
----When using X, the default windows manager is TDM. We grabbed KDE 2.2 using apt-get. After restarting the X server we found ourselves with the full KDE desktop. The menu could have been better organized. Under several categories we found ourselves having to go 2 or 3 menus deep to get to the program we wanted.
My God! The travesty! Oh wait. How many menus deep is solitare? Sure doesnt stop my fellow students playing it in class.
----The first time we started KDE we found that our sound didn't work. Now having on of those wonderful on-board cards we didn't spend much time troubleshooting
it, but we do know it works with most other distributions that provide some
form of autodetection.
Figure it out, or start modprobing sound drivers in and wait to hear sound. Or if you want KDE 3.whatever, all you need is 1 lib package from unstable(libc6 I believe) to run it. Your choice wether you want to run unstable.....
----Debian runs smoothly and fairly efficiently on our test machine. "Woody"
is the first version of Debian to include a journaling filesystem, either ext3
or ReiserFS.
_-=YAWN=-_ It had BETTER run smooth. It's in stable, after all.
Oh well, I must have confused the USB floppy with the standard internal "floppy".
;-)
Still, thanks for clearing it up
WHat's the deal with that window manager? It does look nice and all but does it randomly scribble out regions of your desktop like that.....
-----I'm using fvwm, because I actually want multiple things on the screen at once (since I want to watch for changes in one window while doing things in another window, or type notes on the things I'm reading in a different window; having overlapping windows is nice for this). I don't actually use the virtual desktops much (unless I find I want to do something totally different for a while, with an entirely separate set of windows). Fvwm, at least, can be controlled with keys and key combinations not normally used by other programs (rather than "^O"). I use mostly left-windows, shift-left-windows, alt-left-alt, alt-right-alt, shift-left-shift, and shift-right-shift; this leaves free every non-modifier key with every combination of modifiers on the traditional PC keyboard. This makes "left-windows 1" the X equivalent of "^A ^A". Fvwm is also good for mapping random keys and key combinations to scripts; I have the Pause/Break key start, pause, or resume the CD player.
.
Ummm, yeah. I'm waiting for a comboH^H^H^H^H^keyboard command that I can enter up-down-up-down-left-right-left-right-a-b-select
Can some keyboard manufacturer put Select on a keyboard? TNX
I know that macs havent had floppys on standard systems, but some of us want floppy support. When we went to the Mac builder on the site, we added a floppy drive. The cost went up 100$ .
Does Apple still do that, or have they even quit building computers (special orders) with floppys altogether?
Is Apple still demanding:
1: Apple ONLY ram?
2: 100$ for floppy drive?
What I'd like to see is a state here in the US to fully denounce DMCA act and put a bill in with the state congress nullifying the DMCA. If the state was a less tech oriented state (my state, Indiana), they'd have an overflow of 'Interesting' jobs not able anywhere else.
;-(
:-P
Course, the main problem with Indiana is the Inventory Tax racket. That alone is kicking shitloads of jobs out
Enough with my state and my hairbrained idea.
And I almost forgot, I read the Patchlog too
That's my point. We give cycles to them for free, because we think it's a noble thing to do. I was totallly sure they wern't going to find ET or whatever, but I'd have liked to know what they did with all the terabytes of data.
;-|
Perhaps a 4 page findings report (like slashdot articles: first in, last out). That would have been nice... But oh well.
It's not like I'm losing anything here.
Try reading this Kuro5hin story and posted commenst about that exact thing:
2 69
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/7/11/62356/9
If you don't, a computer sucks at Go because of the exponentially larger solution sets involved.
When has Seti@home actually provided any useful knowledge about interstellar ANYTHING? They just chew bandwidth and cycles for what purpose? Using FFT's to find seemingly coherant signals buried in electomagnetic background.
This project does seem quite interesting, in that it's trying to determine signals of life, but hasn't provided a thing (unless I'm wrong).
Why not let them die?
Try reading "We the Living" by Ayn Rand. Her perspective puts China in the same light.