I just popped it open, noticed the "monitor input & output" context item, wondered what it would show me, so I turned it on for firefox. I got a a bunch of blue accented u characters slowly appearing, one red 8, more blue u's. As I wondered what this might mean, my desktop completely locked up. Problem?
I managed to get control back by going to console (ctrl-alt-f1), logging in and killing firefox, then ctrl-alt-f7 back to desktop. But I think it'll be a while before I try "monitoring input & output" again now. Sounded fun in theory though.
Doing a bit of research on your post. Greenpeace's archived website makes no such admission. I did find some people on the net claiming what you claim above, but when I read further to find the basis for the claim I find none.
For one shameful example is this gizmodo article which ranks highly on google. It's Fox News-like way they use the headline of an admission. The arcile is long, and Greenpeace sounds quite reasonable in it. At they very end of the article the gizmodo author bolds a bit of Greenpeace's words as the basis for the "admission" in the title. But it it no such thing. It's a pathetic stretching of context worthy of Fox news. (But perhaps you are a fan of Fox news?)
The gizmodo article makes reference to another article where an "bromine industry group" dismisses googles claims. This is like the tobacco industry dismissing claims of tabacco's harmful elements. It's like oil companies denying global warming. (But perhaps you deny that too?)
Do you have any other references for this claim? You might want to look into them a little deeper.
Funny, I just got back from the first day of PgCon 2009 (in Ottawa). One of the presentations I went to today was regarding OpenStreetMap's switch from MySql to PostgreSQL last month. I think theywould beg to differ about feature completeness.
It was kind of sad looking at their schema: one could really sense the limitations of mysql they had to design around. Ouch.
Apparently in the end it was lack of MyISAM transactions causing constant problems with their volume of updates combined with InnoDB's lack of text search (can't have your cake and eat it too, apparently) that pushed them over the edge.
On my dual-boot T61 wifi is *infinitely* faster in Kubuntu than in windows xp... because at some point for absolutely no reason I've been able to figure out (and I've tried) the Windows wifi drivers suddnely quit being able to connect to my access point many months ago... while Linux's drivers in Kubuntu continue to work just fine.
My OLPC... ah, i mean my daughter's OLPC has amazingly survived a year of broken toys. She is now 3.5 years old and her brother is 1.5. Granted they are not allowed to play with it unsupervised, but i can tell you that even supervised they'd given a good effort at twisting the LCD off, and tearing the "ears" away, and the thing has been dropped to the floor a fair number of times. (I also often just toss it in my bike pannier, with no other case or padding, and take it on my commute to work.... shhhh, don't tell the kids!)
I did have the problem with the alt-key sticking that some people have had, but following instructions found on the internet i fixed it with some electrical tape.
As an actual computer it's got pros and cons. But the durability pro has definitely proved itself around here.
Silva is an interesting document oriented CMS which used to boast round-trip MS Word integration via it's Docma Server product.
I haven't looked at Silva in a long time, but this reminded me of it. It appears they no longer support Docma server for some reason, but are focusing on integration with OpenOffice instead. Interesting. Looks like Silva has matured a lot over the years, though largely unnoticed.
Microsoft is smart! This would have made for an awesomely hilarious, and pointed, April 1 post (right up there with the "evil bit"). But those clever Microsofties have taken preemptively taken action for once and made anyone using this Joke 4 months later look rather silly, I'd say... they are learning...
A few weeks ago i purchased a T61. The Canadian Lenovo website is horrible. There are very few options available (compared to the US site). Still I managed to find a sneaky little link off to the side which contained a very unorganized list of a bunch of T61 package permutations, and found one that suited me closely enough. There were two listings with identical options (not placed side-by-side) I found for this. One with Vista and one with XP. I seem to recall the XP variation cost $30 more. I took it (albeit bitterly), despite that.
A few days later the Canadian Lenovo site changed, and that link was gone. Worried in case my order may be affected I called the number they provide. After getting forwarded to 3 different numbers (the last one of which didn't work at all), no one could find any trace of my order on their system. I tried emailing the.ca customer service email address and got no response for days.
This was *extremely* frustrating. Finally many days later I got an email response confirming my order... and informing me that I'd selected a non-standard configuration so it would take 3-4 weeks to build. Frustrating. Very frustrating. I'm extremely tempted to cancel my order. I want to cancel, very much! But I also want the laptop... sigh. (And i don't want to think of the stress that'd be involved phoning them again to try to cancel the thing.)
I think a plausible explanation is that most people already know the "party line" on vaccinations. Their doctors have told them what the government recommends and/or requires. Pamphlets lay around various locations where new parents tend to frequent. Some people though are looking for alternatives for various reasons and go searching... thus it would make sense that they would be more interested in watching the "alternative" videos, and happy to see them. The question still remains regarding the medical validity of particular videos, of course; but i think it highly likely that the majority of those viewing them are the relatively few people already skeptical for various reasons. I don't think there is any evidence that the majority of people are even aware there is any significant controversy regarding immunization.
That being said, it's interesting that this study was done in relation to a particularly intense hot-button medical issue within certain subcultures; which again makes it a lot less surprising that "alternative" views resort to and are sought in non-traditional media outlets.
Next they might try doing a study on 9/11 videos on youtube. Do you think there's any possibility that most of them are not explaining the government approved "truth" also? Think of the "public service" issues this raises! Shall we be concerned?
Re:Echoes of the past
on
The Birth of vi
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Many of the elements that made vi usable at 300 baud are what continue to make vi such an incredibly fast and productive to use today, on fast net connections and locally. Once you've gotten over the initial learning curve of course. (But if you use Emacs then editor learning curves are likely the least of your problems.)
I have sometimes mused about what a Quaker video game might be like. Specifically, how could one modify the Quake engine to make a Quaker video game... then insanity ensues.
It's extremely hard to describe what Quakers ("The Religious Society of Friends") are. They have deep roots in Christianity, but they reject the concept of any centralized creeds or doctrine or ceremony. The effect of this is that they are extremely diverse, and hard to define.
I sometimes attend the Friends meeting in my area, though I'm not a member. They are the oddest most eclectic group of people I've ever encountered in one place. There are Christians. There are Athiests. There are agnostics. There are hippy-ish love-and-peace types. There is even a Buddhist attender. They are bound together basically by respect for the quaker "peace testimony" (though one is not required to be a pacifist to be a Quaker, most consider it an ideal), and a belief that humans have within them an "inner light". Different people interpret what this "inner light" is and what it means in different ways, and for the most part everyone tries to respect everyone else's perspective.
There are quaker meetings ranging from the Evangelical all the way to the Unitarian. Most fall some place in between.
Quaker's tend to be fairly oriented towards social activism (especially in the area of anti-war and anti-poverty movements). Tom Fox (peace worker held hostage and murdered in Iraq) was a Quaker, for example.
Many quaker meetings consist of nothing more than sitting silently and meditating/praying/thinking together with the group (and occasionally anyone who feels so moved getting up and saying a few words). It's a simple yet powerful thing.
One of the main problem with translating these "spiritual" elements of life into a video game is that the "economics" of it is entirely different. Video games are individualistic to the extreme: you as the player are pretty much the only thing in the virtual universe that matters. You want bigger guns to do more damage, and stronger armour to take less damage, and all other resources are towards progressing those ends. Or some analog of those things. This just gets goofy when the analog is "more spirit" and "more conversions": in the end it's still all about you the player getting your team into heaven. The only games that come close to side stepping this issue are games with imersive story lines that give the player the sense of belonging to a world in which one begins to feel that the self is a part of a greater whole. You still have the weapons/armour/skill economy, but at least it feels like it has more significance than taking down a boss (though taking down a boss can be pretty satisfying in its own way at times too!). I think of games like some in the Ultima series, and perhaps even the original Deus Ex. Hmm, this later game I could actually imagine being played entirely without killing and still be "fun", and have a decent story to get involved with... interesting.
I had heard of Gaia, and was going to try it on my laptop (Gentoo)... but forgot about it. Then I saw it come into the FreeBSD ports tree at an opportune moment and so I built it on my FreeBSD desktop system. When i ran it I at first couldn't figure out if it was doing anything. All I had was a map of the world which I could grab and move... I was about to give up (without reading any docs of course!) when i accidentally hit my scroll wheel.... ZOOOOM.
I have google earth installed on a windows box and play with it from time to time. But (granted that box is older and more limited than the FreeBSD box -- though it does have a much better video card in it) it runs pretty distressing slow... chews up the system resources. Gaia on my freebsd box was *fast*. Amazingly fast. And therefore fun! Sure I didn't have any UI to speak of, could not look up addresses or landmarks... but i was soon zooming in to any place i was interested in and finding my own way around, and having more fun doing it in the fast minimal interface than I ever had in google earth.
Also it was so nice to see in native 64 freebsd bits... i don't think I'll ever see Google's offerings come to my platform of choice... ever (except of course in the annoying form of Linux emulation). )-:
Alas, the very next day I see the news about the take down....
I'll second this endorsement. Actually, I don't like the way the yahoo toolkit is structured. I find it very awkward to dynamically generate widgets for my applications using it. So i went in search of alternatives. Tried a few kits... the ones i tried looked very promising with features, but every one failed pretty miserably for cross browser work, and did not degrade very gracefully. I went back to yahoo fairly quickly. Awkward, somewhat limited in its current widget set, but totally very solid code. The developers seem quite responsive on their mailing list as well. Cross-browser stability is very important to me. If it is to you, take a serious look a the yahoo kit. (It's BSD licensed... as free as free can be.)
Try googling carbon-neutral gore, and hang your carbon filled head in shame. The man is more consistant and does more to act on his convictions than probably anyone here. (Of course if you still are buying the "invented the internet" misquote there's not much chance you're looking for real information.)
One thing I'm curious about though. What do you people who spout this non-sense think Gore's motivation is? Trying to drum up business for his fat-cat environmentalist friends that he's in the pocket of? Surreptitiously trying to destroy the United States, covert operative for The Terrorists that he is? Ah no, i remember now. Sorry, I'd forgotten the 2000 election smear campaign. He's just simply a raving lunatic (raving in a wooden, personality-less sort of way, that is, of course).
Sigh. Go see the movie. At least you'll have some idea what you're talking about then. (Of course it will do no good to mention that scientists, all except the one prominently being funded by the oil companies, seem to think the movie was pretty much, with just a few quibbles, completely accurate.)
Well, sorry to have bothered you. I'll let you get back to your stem-cell research now.
Just when I was starting not to despise (some aspects of) Yahoo so much again at long last, this. No matter how far fetched, just it having been said, makes me feel... nervous.
The description of the requirements and problem is, as others have mentioned, rather vague. However, the nature of the documents requires a non-technical interface (possibly even still round-tripping using MSWord) you might want to check out Silva. It's a web based CMS which is designed originally for collaborative document writing.
Silva supports some interesting features such as (off the top of my head):
Document versioning
Role based permissions and workflow
Possibility of round-trip editing with word (via an add on product)
Documents stored in XML format
Easy to use web based WYSIWYG editor support suitable for non-techies
Publish in multiple formats
It's quite a sweet product which is fairly mature.
On another topic, unfortunately its probably not possible to sue publications, like the linked one, that routinely print the following phrase (as they do in the linked story): "were not immediately reachable for comment" (emphasis, mine).
Every story that prints that should be forced to replace it with: "You should know, by the way, that I am an ass sucking reporter who couldn't manage to communicate to principle sources for my story, though I may have put in minimal effort to do so (and I reserve the right to define minimal), and I work for an ass sucking publication who's editors don't give a sucked rat's ass, so we're publishing this possibly substanceless collection of blurbs but feel the need to add this line so it sounds like the principle subjects of the story suck even more ass than we do; except worded this way it's clear we suck even more ass than they do, oops (did I use a semicolon? sorry)." Or, just leave the useless and idiotic line out.
I'm not an expert on the subject, but the parent post rather obviously isn't either, so I might as well answer some of the FUD there.
The reasons for the relatively rapid 5.x -> 6.x thing is well documented many places on the net. And the reason can be boiled down to what the parent said: 5.x had some performance problems, the jump to 6.x was intended to make clearer that a lot of those problems have been cleared up, even though 6.x is not really a huge change structurally from 5.x which preceded it.
A lot of this (and the ULE business) has to do with FreeBSD 5+ focus on SMP. DragonFly thinks it's being done in the wrong way. Fair enough. FreeBSD developers seem to think rather that it's too early to judge, as the work is not done. In 5.x the work was less done that some people thought, and this lead to many unfortunate things.
In 6.x its still not done, but it's a lot more done... performance is back, due to more key areas being freed from the "giant" kernel lock. Some interesting benchmarks were presented in the "ports monitoring" presentation by Mark Linimon at BSDCan. It seemed to show 6.1 approaching 4.x, after the performance dip of 5.x. But for SMP boxes 6.1 shines.
That being said, i have both 4.x and 5.x and 6.x boxes in production in different situations. I've had no stability problems with 5.x (except some ACPI issues on some boards), but I'd like to get them to 6.x if possible as soon as I can.
To abbreviate, as I am out of time: linux now more stable? Surely you jest. Perhaps it *can* be as stable, but I'm posting this message from my linux box (laptop) which has been tweaked and prodded, patched, and coaxed for years now and it's by far the least stable system I have. It's pretty stable at the moment. I have the magic combo of kernel patches it seems. But half the kernel revisions I install break something or other. Granted, it is a laptop, but still...
Anyhow, have fun on whatever O/S you prefer these days. If it works for you, that's great.
Saw Poul-Henning this weekend at BSDCan. Seemed just a friendly and approachable as he did when I was there two years ago. Besides the core development stuff he has some really interesting side projects as well which he gave presentations on: NanoBSD (a way to build and package BSD for use primarily on read-only embedded systems with flash config), and Varnish (a from-scratch new concept on for a high performance http cache focusing on CMS performance).
Great stuff.
Last weekend I was at an old family friend's, whom I hadn't seen in a dozen years. I had some old photos on my laptop. He asked if i could print one. He happened to have a new canon all-in-one printer, but no functioning computer (his computer was disconnected and sitting in a corner because, he said, there were so many "viruses" on it he just gave up). So, thinking the easiest solution would be to boot windows on my laptop and install the printer drivers and print the picture for him, i proceeded. This is a 2 year old high end dell laptop, the windows partition running WinXP Home SP2. An hour later, and many blue screens, I finally gave up. I told him I'd mail him the picture.
Windows may bluescreen a lot less than it used to, but anyone who hasn't seen a bluescreen in a while simply must not actually do much with their computer, and not play with much different hardware. Bluescreen-of-death is alive and well and as infuriating and heart-breaking and as evil as ever for some of us.
On the other hand I had no internet connection out there in the country, and couldn't do any web searches to see if CUPS supported the printer... but by that time i was so frustrated I didn't want to touch the windows-tainted device any longer.
Some may say it's Canon's fault. But... blue screen of death on a printer driver?!!
You might also want to give Krita another look. It's getting quite good, and is receiving a lot of love.
At this point I think the main reason GIMP is still the gorilla of open source graphics apps, is simply because of the first mover principle. It was capable of good stuff (horrendously bad gtk interface not-withstanding) before any other similar apps were available. And now we are only slowly recovering from that (unfortunately GIMP doesn't seem to be recovering along with us though). This is something that happens a lot in software... not just open source. Look at windows...
So Max Payne didn't delve into how people manage (or fail to manage) grief?
Max Payne delved deep into cliche. Deep, deep, deep, deep, deep into cliche. So deep, I actually started to seriously admire it after i became too numb to cringe any longer.
(Deux Ex, an exceptional game in so many ways, was an anomaly which I am told the publishers largely "corrected" in the sequel... I never bothered with the sequel myself, for fear of becoming totally disillusioned with it. I have to cling to the rare video game experience with at least a modicum of thoughtfulness.)
Sounds, once again, a lot like FreeBSD's jail support (which has existed for many years now, and is very stable).
In what ways is OpenVZ different? I also wonder what their "commercial offering" adds... but i'm too lazy to look.
I run FreeBSD jails on my box for testing purposes. It's extremely easy to setup and administer, especially with many helper scripts available these days.
I am loving the simplicity of ezjail. The coolest thing about it (besides the utter simplicity), is that it creates a "base jail" containing an entire FreeBSD install. From there it uses tricks with nullfs to mount parts of that base iinto jail 'instances'... this means each new jail takes only 2 megs of additional space, and about 1 second to create. It also adds security in that the base system remains absolutely read-only, while still permitting customisation and additional software to be installed in the jail.
I need a new virtual server to test my software:
ezjail-admin create new-jail-name 192.168.5.123
Then run the ezjail startup script. And SSH in to my new virtual server. (Note: i set up the default server template to enable SSH and a few default logins... very easy to do. One does not need to use SSH; one can get into the jail environment a few different ways.)
Slashdot Mirror
Someday, when my literary genius is finally recognized, they'll auction off my OpenOffice 3.2 Milestone 6. Fans will cherish my toolbar.
I just popped it open, noticed the "monitor input & output" context item, wondered what it would show me, so I turned it on for firefox. I got a a bunch of blue accented u characters slowly appearing, one red 8, more blue u's. As I wondered what this might mean, my desktop completely locked up. Problem? I managed to get control back by going to console (ctrl-alt-f1), logging in and killing firefox, then ctrl-alt-f7 back to desktop. But I think it'll be a while before I try "monitoring input & output" again now. Sounded fun in theory though.
For one shameful example is this gizmodo article which ranks highly on google. It's Fox News-like way they use the headline of an admission. The arcile is long, and Greenpeace sounds quite reasonable in it. At they very end of the article the gizmodo author bolds a bit of Greenpeace's words as the basis for the "admission" in the title. But it it no such thing. It's a pathetic stretching of context worthy of Fox news. (But perhaps you are a fan of Fox news?)
At any rate, Greenpeace took the time to rebut the criticisms on several official lengthy pages.
The gizmodo article makes reference to another article where an "bromine industry group" dismisses googles claims. This is like the tobacco industry dismissing claims of tabacco's harmful elements. It's like oil companies denying global warming. (But perhaps you deny that too?)
Do you have any other references for this claim? You might want to look into them a little deeper.
Funny, I just got back from the first day of PgCon 2009 (in Ottawa). One of the presentations I went to today was regarding OpenStreetMap's switch from MySql to PostgreSQL last month. I think theywould beg to differ about feature completeness. It was kind of sad looking at their schema: one could really sense the limitations of mysql they had to design around. Ouch. Apparently in the end it was lack of MyISAM transactions causing constant problems with their volume of updates combined with InnoDB's lack of text search (can't have your cake and eat it too, apparently) that pushed them over the edge.
On my dual-boot T61 wifi is *infinitely* faster in Kubuntu than in windows xp... because at some point for absolutely no reason I've been able to figure out (and I've tried) the Windows wifi drivers suddnely quit being able to connect to my access point many months ago... while Linux's drivers in Kubuntu continue to work just fine.
My OLPC... ah, i mean my daughter's OLPC has amazingly survived a year of broken toys. She is now 3.5 years old and her brother is 1.5. Granted they are not allowed to play with it unsupervised, but i can tell you that even supervised they'd given a good effort at twisting the LCD off, and tearing the "ears" away, and the thing has been dropped to the floor a fair number of times. (I also often just toss it in my bike pannier, with no other case or padding, and take it on my commute to work.... shhhh, don't tell the kids!) I did have the problem with the alt-key sticking that some people have had, but following instructions found on the internet i fixed it with some electrical tape. As an actual computer it's got pros and cons. But the durability pro has definitely proved itself around here.
Silva is an interesting document oriented CMS which used to boast round-trip MS Word integration via it's Docma Server product. I haven't looked at Silva in a long time, but this reminded me of it. It appears they no longer support Docma server for some reason, but are focusing on integration with OpenOffice instead. Interesting. Looks like Silva has matured a lot over the years, though largely unnoticed.
Microsoft is smart! This would have made for an awesomely hilarious, and pointed, April 1 post (right up there with the "evil bit"). But those clever Microsofties have taken preemptively taken action for once and made anyone using this Joke 4 months later look rather silly, I'd say... they are learning...
A few weeks ago i purchased a T61. The Canadian Lenovo website is horrible. There are very few options available (compared to the US site). Still I managed to find a sneaky little link off to the side which contained a very unorganized list of a bunch of T61 package permutations, and found one that suited me closely enough. There were two listings with identical options (not placed side-by-side) I found for this. One with Vista and one with XP. I seem to recall the XP variation cost $30 more. I took it (albeit bitterly), despite that.
.ca customer service email address and got no response for days.
A few days later the Canadian Lenovo site changed, and that link was gone. Worried in case my order may be affected I called the number they provide. After getting forwarded to 3 different numbers (the last one of which didn't work at all), no one could find any trace of my order on their system. I tried emailing the
This was *extremely* frustrating. Finally many days later I got an email response confirming my order... and informing me that I'd selected a non-standard configuration so it would take 3-4 weeks to build. Frustrating. Very frustrating. I'm extremely tempted to cancel my order. I want to cancel, very much! But I also want the laptop... sigh. (And i don't want to think of the stress that'd be involved phoning them again to try to cancel the thing.)
I think a plausible explanation is that most people already know the "party line" on vaccinations. Their doctors have told them what the government recommends and/or requires. Pamphlets lay around various locations where new parents tend to frequent. Some people though are looking for alternatives for various reasons and go searching... thus it would make sense that they would be more interested in watching the "alternative" videos, and happy to see them. The question still remains regarding the medical validity of particular videos, of course; but i think it highly likely that the majority of those viewing them are the relatively few people already skeptical for various reasons. I don't think there is any evidence that the majority of people are even aware there is any significant controversy regarding immunization.
That being said, it's interesting that this study was done in relation to a particularly intense hot-button medical issue within certain subcultures; which again makes it a lot less surprising that "alternative" views resort to and are sought in non-traditional media outlets.
Next they might try doing a study on 9/11 videos on youtube. Do you think there's any possibility that most of them are not explaining the government approved "truth" also? Think of the "public service" issues this raises! Shall we be concerned?
Many of the elements that made vi usable at 300 baud are what continue to make vi such an incredibly fast and productive to use today, on fast net connections and locally. Once you've gotten over the initial learning curve of course. (But if you use Emacs then editor learning curves are likely the least of your problems.)
I have sometimes mused about what a Quaker video game might be like. Specifically, how could one modify the Quake engine to make a Quaker video game... then insanity ensues.
It's extremely hard to describe what Quakers ("The Religious Society of Friends") are. They have deep roots in Christianity, but they reject the concept of any centralized creeds or doctrine or ceremony. The effect of this is that they are extremely diverse, and hard to define.
I sometimes attend the Friends meeting in my area, though I'm not a member. They are the oddest most eclectic group of people I've ever encountered in one place. There are Christians. There are Athiests. There are agnostics. There are hippy-ish love-and-peace types. There is even a Buddhist attender. They are bound together basically by respect for the quaker "peace testimony" (though one is not required to be a pacifist to be a Quaker, most consider it an ideal), and a belief that humans have within them an "inner light". Different people interpret what this "inner light" is and what it means in different ways, and for the most part everyone tries to respect everyone else's perspective.
There are quaker meetings ranging from the Evangelical all the way to the Unitarian. Most fall some place in between.
Quaker's tend to be fairly oriented towards social activism (especially in the area of anti-war and anti-poverty movements). Tom Fox (peace worker held hostage and murdered in Iraq) was a Quaker, for example.
Many quaker meetings consist of nothing more than sitting silently and meditating/praying/thinking together with the group (and occasionally anyone who feels so moved getting up and saying a few words). It's a simple yet powerful thing.
One of the main problem with translating these "spiritual" elements of life into a video game is that the "economics" of it is entirely different. Video games are individualistic to the extreme: you as the player are pretty much the only thing in the virtual universe that matters. You want bigger guns to do more damage, and stronger armour to take less damage, and all other resources are towards progressing those ends. Or some analog of those things. This just gets goofy when the analog is "more spirit" and "more conversions": in the end it's still all about you the player getting your team into heaven. The only games that come close to side stepping this issue are games with imersive story lines that give the player the sense of belonging to a world in which one begins to feel that the self is a part of a greater whole. You still have the weapons/armour/skill economy, but at least it feels like it has more significance than taking down a boss (though taking down a boss can be pretty satisfying in its own way at times too!). I think of games like some in the Ultima series, and perhaps even the original Deus Ex. Hmm, this later game I could actually imagine being played entirely without killing and still be "fun", and have a decent story to get involved with... interesting.
I had heard of Gaia, and was going to try it on my laptop (Gentoo) ... but forgot about it. Then I saw it come into the FreeBSD ports tree at an opportune moment and so I built it on my FreeBSD desktop system. When i ran it I at first couldn't figure out if it was doing anything. All I had was a map of the world which I could grab and move... I was about to give up (without reading any docs of course!) when i accidentally hit my scroll wheel.... ZOOOOM.
... ever (except of course in the annoying form of Linux emulation). )-:
I have google earth installed on a windows box and play with it from time to time. But (granted that box is older and more limited than the FreeBSD box -- though it does have a much better video card in it) it runs pretty distressing slow... chews up the system resources. Gaia on my freebsd box was *fast*. Amazingly fast. And therefore fun! Sure I didn't have any UI to speak of, could not look up addresses or landmarks... but i was soon zooming in to any place i was interested in and finding my own way around, and having more fun doing it in the fast minimal interface than I ever had in google earth.
Also it was so nice to see in native 64 freebsd bits... i don't think I'll ever see Google's offerings come to my platform of choice
Alas, the very next day I see the news about the take down....
Sigh.
I'll second this endorsement. Actually, I don't like the way the yahoo toolkit is structured. I find it very awkward to dynamically generate widgets for my applications using it. So i went in search of alternatives. Tried a few kits... the ones i tried looked very promising with features, but every one failed pretty miserably for cross browser work, and did not degrade very gracefully. I went back to yahoo fairly quickly. Awkward, somewhat limited in its current widget set, but totally very solid code. The developers seem quite responsive on their mailing list as well. Cross-browser stability is very important to me. If it is to you, take a serious look a the yahoo kit. (It's BSD licensed... as free as free can be.)
Try googling carbon-neutral gore, and hang your carbon filled head in shame. The man is more consistant and does more to act on his convictions than probably anyone here. (Of course if you still are buying the "invented the internet" misquote there's not much chance you're looking for real information.)
One thing I'm curious about though. What do you people who spout this non-sense think Gore's motivation is? Trying to drum up business for his fat-cat environmentalist friends that he's in the pocket of? Surreptitiously trying to destroy the United States, covert operative for The Terrorists that he is? Ah no, i remember now. Sorry, I'd forgotten the 2000 election smear campaign. He's just simply a raving lunatic (raving in a wooden, personality-less sort of way, that is, of course).
Sigh. Go see the movie. At least you'll have some idea what you're talking about then. (Of course it will do no good to mention that scientists, all except the one prominently being funded by the oil companies, seem to think the movie was pretty much, with just a few quibbles, completely accurate.)
Well, sorry to have bothered you. I'll let you get back to your stem-cell research now.
Once again the US government is caught up in a SWIFTboating scheme...
Just when I was starting not to despise (some aspects of) Yahoo so much again at long last, this. No matter how far fetched, just it having been said, makes me feel... nervous.
Silva supports some interesting features such as (off the top of my head):
It's quite a sweet product which is fairly mature.
On another topic, unfortunately its probably not possible to sue publications, like the linked one, that routinely print the following phrase (as they do in the linked story): "were not immediately reachable for comment" (emphasis, mine).
Every story that prints that should be forced to replace it with: "You should know, by the way, that I am an ass sucking reporter who couldn't manage to communicate to principle sources for my story, though I may have put in minimal effort to do so (and I reserve the right to define minimal), and I work for an ass sucking publication who's editors don't give a sucked rat's ass, so we're publishing this possibly substanceless collection of blurbs but feel the need to add this line so it sounds like the principle subjects of the story suck even more ass than we do; except worded this way it's clear we suck even more ass than they do, oops (did I use a semicolon? sorry)." Or, just leave the useless and idiotic line out.
I'm not an expert on the subject, but the parent post rather obviously isn't either, so I might as well answer some of the FUD there.
The reasons for the relatively rapid 5.x -> 6.x thing is well documented many places on the net. And the reason can be boiled down to what the parent said: 5.x had some performance problems, the jump to 6.x was intended to make clearer that a lot of those problems have been cleared up, even though 6.x is not really a huge change structurally from 5.x which preceded it.
A lot of this (and the ULE business) has to do with FreeBSD 5+ focus on SMP. DragonFly thinks it's being done in the wrong way. Fair enough. FreeBSD developers seem to think rather that it's too early to judge, as the work is not done. In 5.x the work was less done that some people thought, and this lead to many unfortunate things.
In 6.x its still not done, but it's a lot more done... performance is back, due to more key areas being freed from the "giant" kernel lock. Some interesting benchmarks were presented in the "ports monitoring" presentation by Mark Linimon at BSDCan. It seemed to show 6.1 approaching 4.x, after the performance dip of 5.x. But for SMP boxes 6.1 shines.
That being said, i have both 4.x and 5.x and 6.x boxes in production in different situations. I've had no stability problems with 5.x (except some ACPI issues on some boards), but I'd like to get them to 6.x if possible as soon as I can.
To abbreviate, as I am out of time: linux now more stable? Surely you jest. Perhaps it *can* be as stable, but I'm posting this message from my linux box (laptop) which has been tweaked and prodded, patched, and coaxed for years now and it's by far the least stable system I have. It's pretty stable at the moment. I have the magic combo of kernel patches it seems. But half the kernel revisions I install break something or other. Granted, it is a laptop, but still...
Anyhow, have fun on whatever O/S you prefer these days. If it works for you, that's great.
Saw Poul-Henning this weekend at BSDCan. Seemed just a friendly and approachable as he did when I was there two years ago. Besides the core development stuff he has some really interesting side projects as well which he gave presentations on: NanoBSD (a way to build and package BSD for use primarily on read-only embedded systems with flash config), and Varnish (a from-scratch new concept on for a high performance http cache focusing on CMS performance). Great stuff.
Last weekend I was at an old family friend's, whom I hadn't seen in a dozen years. I had some old photos on my laptop. He asked if i could print one. He happened to have a new canon all-in-one printer, but no functioning computer (his computer was disconnected and sitting in a corner because, he said, there were so many "viruses" on it he just gave up). So, thinking the easiest solution would be to boot windows on my laptop and install the printer drivers and print the picture for him, i proceeded. This is a 2 year old high end dell laptop, the windows partition running WinXP Home SP2. An hour later, and many blue screens, I finally gave up. I told him I'd mail him the picture.
Windows may bluescreen a lot less than it used to, but anyone who hasn't seen a bluescreen in a while simply must not actually do much with their computer, and not play with much different hardware. Bluescreen-of-death is alive and well and as infuriating and heart-breaking and as evil as ever for some of us.
On the other hand I had no internet connection out there in the country, and couldn't do any web searches to see if CUPS supported the printer... but by that time i was so frustrated I didn't want to touch the windows-tainted device any longer.
Some may say it's Canon's fault. But... blue screen of death on a printer driver?!!
At this point I think the main reason GIMP is still the gorilla of open source graphics apps, is simply because of the first mover principle. It was capable of good stuff (horrendously bad gtk interface not-withstanding) before any other similar apps were available. And now we are only slowly recovering from that (unfortunately GIMP doesn't seem to be recovering along with us though). This is something that happens a lot in software... not just open source. Look at windows...
(Deux Ex, an exceptional game in so many ways, was an anomaly which I am told the publishers largely "corrected" in the sequel... I never bothered with the sequel myself, for fear of becoming totally disillusioned with it. I have to cling to the rare video game experience with at least a modicum of thoughtfulness.)
In what ways is OpenVZ different? I also wonder what their "commercial offering" adds... but i'm too lazy to look.
I run FreeBSD jails on my box for testing purposes. It's extremely easy to setup and administer, especially with many helper scripts available these days.
I am loving the simplicity of ezjail. The coolest thing about it (besides the utter simplicity), is that it creates a "base jail" containing an entire FreeBSD install. From there it uses tricks with nullfs to mount parts of that base iinto jail 'instances'... this means each new jail takes only 2 megs of additional space, and about 1 second to create. It also adds security in that the base system remains absolutely read-only, while still permitting customisation and additional software to be installed in the jail.
I need a new virtual server to test my software:
Then run the ezjail startup script. And SSH in to my new virtual server. (Note: i set up the default server template to enable SSH and a few default logins... very easy to do. One does not need to use SSH; one can get into the jail environment a few different ways.)