Not only is the expected TCO for mac osx lower than linux the hardware is easier to maintain.
I've seen this phenomena too many times. a site has a zillion pc techs and 1 mac tech. rather than conclude the obvioust that PCs need higher levels of support they usually vote to go to a single PC platform, and the poor single mac tech is outvoted.
right now slash dotters spit on DRM. But in time, perhaps 5 years, phillips and sony, and maybe microsoft too after they settle, will have all the hardware and software in place for DRM. If they sell it a fair and reasonable prices, as sony and phillips did with CDs and DVDs, then the media companies will use it.
then where will this leave the linux desktop and GNU. Certainly GNU will not be able to liscence the DRM codes. Re-inventing them will be illegal. Even downloading them will be illegal, like DeCSS.
the only solution will be for commercially liscenced media players for the linux desktop. Probably made by MS or liscened by them (assuming as suggested in the article, MS will get the PC slice and sony will take the set-top slice.)
of course MS thinks Linux and GNU with its GPL are cancer. They have never made office for Linux. Why would they make DRM code for linux avaialble. Without the ability to play media the linux desktop future is dead or atleast a niche. Even servers, which might need DRM for say banking or other confidential data, or for government docs protected by DRM, will be dead if they cant do DRM
so the way i see this playing out is microsoft fights the patent. Nothig to loose. then they pony up 200 million to buy a third of the company from phillip and Sony (that's the same amount they offered before.). It will be an offer sony/phillips cant refuse. (in the corelone sense of the term). then MS uses it to enforce its PC hegemony and in particular kill GNU and Lnuix
The guy's thesis is VERY speculative. Still it raises some interesting points.
the nerves in your ear and all the low-level neural processing of sound will fire in response to the gaps, watermarks or subliminal signals in the music stream. It is only the brain that filters these out. But is the brain unaware of the signals?
it's long been known that humans perceive sounds they dont actually hear in the sense that their brain registers it.
Ancient church organs have sub sonic and ultra-sonic pipes in them for the purpose of stimulating emotional responses in the audience. It's well known from many pyschological studies that slight , consciously imperceptible, delays introduced into telephone conversation response times causes people to think the person they are talking to is angry.As a kid I could always hear the flyback transformers in TVs and video screen. I could not tell you what the sound sounded like--it was not a high pitch. it was no pitch at all. But I could tell it was present.
The thesis that spectral drop-outs could somehow disrupt neural feedback circuits is an interesting one. Certainly most human made electronic circuits dont handle delta-function responses well: that is the phase lag in any feasible feedback circuit puts an upper limit on the fidelity of the response. Thus the idea that the neural feedback that nulls the unwanted off-pitch sympathetic vibrations in the ear following a loud signal could be disrupted if the waveform was not continous after the loud noise is a valid one. Would this lead to false retraining of the neural net and thus tinitiitus? doubtful. But interesting as an example of an unintended consequence no one thought of before.
actually they already have a new logo. its just not on the front page yet. see
http://www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm.
also if you check out the program power point slides you will see they have scrubbed the blatantly skin crawling ones. It used to show that they were going to collect data about your dogs veternary records, your mortgage payments, magazine subscriptions and known associates. Now this is gone. Also they have heftier looking compartmentalization of the records keeping shown, suggesting they are thinking of protecting you. (ha!).
finally poindexter's resume has been cleaned up.
The prices are not so good
on
Build Your Own Mac
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Logic board: $200
Sonnet CPU: $700
Video card : $220
Memory: $200
hard drive: $150
pro keyboard/optical mouse: 99
Operating system: 129
___________
Not including any shipping thats' 1730 $ for a SINGLE PROCESSOR MACHINE already without a case, power supply, cd/dvd drive, or even any cables or power cords.
Or you can get a DUAL CPU system assembled with an air port card, extra memory, and operaing system from mac mall for $1690
Just because a project has good aspirations does not make it a well run project or a good product. Folding@home good project well run. Genome@home total disaster waste of CPU cycles.
compare fink to Gnu-darwin. From the end user perspective gnu darwin stinks. They dont respond well to critisism and they have never been very compatible with OSX. THe reason I think is they never really wanted to be part of OSX they wanted to replace it with a tottally GNU system rather than embrace OSX and bring GNU to OSX. For example, install GNU darwin and it overwrites lots of the BSD bin functions like make and tar. that's pretty absurd. No warnings no documentation worth reading.
I'm glad its gone. Now everthing will port via fink which is intended as an add on to OSX that brings GNU to OSX without replacing OSX.
SO this is good news
Re:This is about 5Ghz technology
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
·
· Score: 2
Mentioning that signals drop off at r^-2 actually works against you: Wifi signals, weak to start with, will decay extremely rapidly
Well actually I was wrong to say it falls off as 1/r^2 it actually falls off as 1/r^4 for the received signal. On the otherhand the wifi transmiters are interfering directly so they fall off only as 1/r^2. And actually it is worse than that. Since the wifi transmitters are distributed they sont actually fall off at all. they have a constant power density. Or if you want to say the radar is located on the perifery of a long line of wi-fi emitters then it falls offa s 1/r. in any case its a not a negligble source of noise.
This is about 5Ghz technology
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Despite the misleading headline inserted by slashdot editors, the article refers to an"increasingly popular" wireless technology in the 5Ghz band.
The pentagon is not trying to poop on the wifi party. And they are not out to supress info transfers. They just want to make sure that a stupid irrversible giveaway of the wrong band does not take place. Apparently a lot of next generation radars need this band and depend upon a noise free environement. for example the article notes weather radar. Believe me getting a radar return of gas is very very difficult. Even high power radars are not the whole answer--the return signals are weak and fall off 1/r^2 limiting the range.
My fear is that the bush admin will give way to the coroprate interests. Microsoft is one of them mentioned in the article. these companies have dumped tons of money into campaign contributions. And the easy thing for the bush admin to do is to do nothing at all.
regardless of your misgivings about the department of defenses other activities, having good radar is a swell idea that we all can benenefit from.
presumably there might be some techno fix that could make all happy. But remember these radar systems take years to design. Its not just about making the latest up-to-date technology but also about quality assurance, standards and interoperability. So just saying they could be redesigned is not a valid response. You dont retrofit safety systems on a whim because some thinks they can make it better. Murphy's law will get you. And its often better to have standardized less than state of the art systems people know the limitiations of than a myriad of superior technologies they dont know the relaibaility of.
Want a high paying job in bioinformatics? there are several high paying postdoctoral positions ($59000 to $75000 starting salary) available at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
goto www.lanl.gov and click on the 'jobs' tab then the postdoc link.
here is one example:
Summary:Postdoctoral Positions in Protein Bioinformatics and Structural Genomics: The Bioscience Division (B-2 Group) is seeking 2-3 highly motivated researchers for immediate openings to work with our interdisciplinary team of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology. Research activities will focus on the development and application of methods in Functional and Structural Genomics, including: 1) inference of function in proteins based upon structural and sequence information; 2) prediction of protein structure, protein binding, ligands, and active sites using both ab initio approaches and experimental information; 3) identification of signatures of pathenogenosis; 4) annotation and analysis of selected genomes; and 5) creation and curation of annotated protein databases.
Required Skills:Experience in at least 2 of the following areas is required (more than two areas of experience is highly desirable):
Protein structure modeling or protein-ligand analysis or other related modeling
Background in molecular biology, or microbial pathogenesis, or related fields
Experience with the common sequence analysis tools for Blast search, sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis, etc.
Drug design, or protein design or protein structure predictions or docking
Functional annotation of putative genes based on literature analysis
Curation of biological databases and web programming
Desired Skills:Knowledge of one computer programming language (e.g., Perl, Python, FORTRAN, C++). Use of common molecular graphics tools such as Pymol, Xtal. Research in genomic sequence analysis or protein structure. Familiarity with SQL databases, unix, and XML is useful.
Education:A Ph.D completed within the last 5 years or soon to be completed is required.
Notes to Applicants:Starting salaries range from $59,300 to $67,300. For further technical information about the position and the project, contact Charlie Strauss at cems@lanl.gov (505-665-5838), or Murray Wolinsky at murray@lanl.gov (505-665-0952).
Candidates may be considered for a Director's Fellowship and outstanding candidates
may be considered for the prestigious J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard P.
Feynman or Frederick Reines Fellowships. Please see Special Postdoctoral Fellowships for further details.
I was co author on a paper that was rejected because the citations were misquoted. We were accused of not reading our own works.
Looking into it what happened was this. She had found some interesting citations at the end of a paper, looked up the articles and read them. Then when she was preparing our manuscript rather than track down the papers in a file drawer she just copied the citations as they had appeared in the original citing paper. thus she preserved the exact same typos. word for word.
I have however seen another way that typos propagate. Say I was a graduate student on a series of papers where my advisor often trotted out the same citations to make the same points about the same seminal peices of work. Other papers I write with him as co-author get the same boilerplate. Eventually I write a paper on which he is not on the author list but I put in the same boiler plate. oops. I just cited a paper I never read myself. Believe me it happens, though it is not neccessarily inaccurate.
2013: dateline kennebunkport
Jenna Bush, (R-texas) speaker of the house, was sworn in as president earlier today after the tragic death of President Jeb Bush, and vice president and consort, Kathleen Harris. The president was killed in a tagic suicide pretzel attack organized by the cuban branch of al quaida. The tragic news interrupted a beach front photo-shoot for playboy's Girl's of the Whitehouse issue.
On assuming the presidency, Jenna Bush abolished the DEA and ordered the whitehouse rose garden roto-tilled, and replanted with first class "presidential grade" Jamaican "hemp". In a slurred Inaugural speech she nominated Eileen Fleiss as Vice President, and called for Hot grits down natalie portman's pants. And obvious reward to the slash dot lobby that rigged the computerized elections for her father.
In 2013, after you install the water limiter uncapper, your maytag washing machine finks on you and collects a reward.
In 2013, the invention of the RFID cloaking devices (aluminum lines shopping bags), leads to whole sale shoplifting. An new chain of stores called "shop-naked" emerges, and becomes wildly popular not only as a place to meet members of the opposit sex, but because it is the only place that sells food in the city anymore.
in 2013, stranger-on-a-train parties become an out-of control trend, with complete strangers exchanging their Presence ID tags. Thus subverting the tracking scrutiny of big brother and his computerized corporate stooges. Faced with a loss of control over ordinary citizens, President Jenna Bush imposes mandatory ID tatooing and all babies receive an injected RFID module.
> Beacon frames are not encrypted, MAC addresses are not encrypted. Capture approx 1Gb of network traffic and you can decrypt the WEP key.
COuld someone elaborate here. Why is a WEP key more vulnerable than say an SSH key? Why is it insecure to have unencrypted Beacon frames and MAC addressses. What info is being given up by these or how can these be exploited in a way particular to wireless?
and given encrypted transmissions why is WiFi more suceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks than any SSH connection?
I hear referecnes to wireless security issues but I dont understand why wireless is insecure. Can anyone offer a primer or a few good examples?
For example, are the data links insecure--I dont think so as most are now 128bit encrypted, right?
could it be that access to the local net offering a way around the firewall? Dont some, or maybe all, wi-fi links have built in capabitlity for password protected connections. If so does this not make them as good as any firewall?
So is the whole problem just people not activating these feature? if so is this not just the same as any other unprotected wired network when people dont turn on their firewall?
As I recall way back when Apple sued Microsoft over the look and feel of its operating system, Microsoft argues that Windows was a generic term. Now they want to reverse their position. Mayb we should reveit the look and feel issue.
Besides lots of thigs run on windows besides software. Windex runs on windows, bird shit runs on windows.
The Pan-IP defense fund should incorporate themselves in a state with anti-SLAPP laws on its books. (SLAPP = Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, often used when small groups try to block Housing and Industrial Developments). A number of states now carry laws like this that help protect small groups.
Maybe you know this already but your old fink distro broke under 10.2 and unless they changed something recently you cant fix it by doing fink seldupdate. instead you have two alternatives. 1) delete all of your fink install and start from scratch. 2) follow the recipie on the fink site for getting the unstable distro from CVS. I did the latter and it worked great! A couple programs have not been fixed but nearly all of it works again. (Also oddly, the manpage command man was broken on my machine till I did that update. Other people have reported this too)
I tried the installing the gnu-darwin package on mac os X and had to remove it. The main problems with it are.
2)Unlike fink which stays out of the way of the operating system direcories like/bin and so forth. This think has all the worst chararistics of unix installs, spraying its files everywhere wiht no warning mechanisms, road maps, and no unistalls.
3) The installation interface and its dependency checking is only for the advnaced user, unless you want to just install it all. Then watch-out. Updating or selectively updating or patching is a nioghtmare in my opinion--wehn compared with FINK
I suspect this last property is the reason they are offering (forcing) people to get the whole install pre-done.
Fink is vastly superior in user experience and now in coverage of useful programs. The fink update experiece is a dream compared to Gnu-darwin. Gnu-darwin is a relic of how not to do things given the fresh start in apple unix.
On the otherhand, I'm being unfair here. Unlike FINK, Gnu-darwin has another agenda. Gnu-darwin is not trying to be compatible with the OSX way of doing things. It is not even trying to be sybmiotic as FINK is. instead GNU darwin is trying to replace OSX. And to do so it needs to put files where it thinks they belong. This does not excuse the crudeness of the delivery and update mechanisms. But if you are going to install the WHOLE distribution as you probably would od if you are using it as an OSX replacement, then it is perhaps not so bad.
Everytime I ejaculate, I shed more human cells
on
Human-Mouse Hybrids?
·
· Score: 2
Nothing sacred about human cells. an abrasion, a cut (bllod cells), or even take a showere or pick your node and you lose cells. Jesus, you cant even ejacualate without losing cells, and ALL of those cells , except maybe one lucky one, die.
I mean the whole idea of giving blood is to give cells. Either for another human to use, or to have those cells used for sume prupose--drug making--and then deliberately killed--i.e. sterilized defore being thrown away. Nothing immoral here.
It's human life that is precious, Not my little finger or some other unviable bit of flesh.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen this phenomena too many times. a site has a zillion pc techs and 1 mac tech. rather than conclude the obvioust that PCs need higher levels of support they usually vote to go to a single PC platform, and the poor single mac tech is outvoted.
then where will this leave the linux desktop and GNU. Certainly GNU will not be able to liscence the DRM codes. Re-inventing them will be illegal. Even downloading them will be illegal, like DeCSS.
the only solution will be for commercially liscenced media players for the linux desktop. Probably made by MS or liscened by them (assuming as suggested in the article, MS will get the PC slice and sony will take the set-top slice.)
of course MS thinks Linux and GNU with its GPL are cancer. They have never made office for Linux. Why would they make DRM code for linux avaialble. Without the ability to play media the linux desktop future is dead or atleast a niche. Even servers, which might need DRM for say banking or other confidential data, or for government docs protected by DRM, will be dead if they cant do DRM
so the way i see this playing out is microsoft fights the patent. Nothig to loose. then they pony up 200 million to buy a third of the company from phillip and Sony (that's the same amount they offered before.). It will be an offer sony/phillips cant refuse. (in the corelone sense of the term). then MS uses it to enforce its PC hegemony and in particular kill GNU and Lnuix
the nerves in your ear and all the low-level neural processing of sound will fire in response to the gaps, watermarks or subliminal signals in the music stream. It is only the brain that filters these out. But is the brain unaware of the signals?
it's long been known that humans perceive sounds they dont actually hear in the sense that their brain registers it. Ancient church organs have sub sonic and ultra-sonic pipes in them for the purpose of stimulating emotional responses in the audience. It's well known from many pyschological studies that slight , consciously imperceptible, delays introduced into telephone conversation response times causes people to think the person they are talking to is angry.As a kid I could always hear the flyback transformers in TVs and video screen. I could not tell you what the sound sounded like--it was not a high pitch. it was no pitch at all. But I could tell it was present.
The thesis that spectral drop-outs could somehow disrupt neural feedback circuits is an interesting one. Certainly most human made electronic circuits dont handle delta-function responses well: that is the phase lag in any feasible feedback circuit puts an upper limit on the fidelity of the response. Thus the idea that the neural feedback that nulls the unwanted off-pitch sympathetic vibrations in the ear following a loud signal could be disrupted if the waveform was not continous after the loud noise is a valid one. Would this lead to false retraining of the neural net and thus tinitiitus? doubtful. But interesting as an example of an unintended consequence no one thought of before.
also if you check out the program power point slides you will see they have scrubbed the blatantly skin crawling ones. It used to show that they were going to collect data about your dogs veternary records, your mortgage payments, magazine subscriptions and known associates. Now this is gone. Also they have heftier looking compartmentalization of the records keeping shown, suggesting they are thinking of protecting you. (ha!).
finally poindexter's resume has been cleaned up.
Logic board: $200 Sonnet CPU: $700 Video card : $220 Memory: $200 hard drive: $150 pro keyboard/optical mouse: 99 Operating system: 129 ___________ Not including any shipping thats' 1730 $ for a SINGLE PROCESSOR MACHINE already without a case, power supply, cd/dvd drive, or even any cables or power cords. Or you can get a DUAL CPU system assembled with an air port card, extra memory, and operaing system from mac mall for $1690
compare fink to Gnu-darwin. From the end user perspective gnu darwin stinks. They dont respond well to critisism and they have never been very compatible with OSX. THe reason I think is they never really wanted to be part of OSX they wanted to replace it with a tottally GNU system rather than embrace OSX and bring GNU to OSX. For example, install GNU darwin and it overwrites lots of the BSD bin functions like make and tar. that's pretty absurd. No warnings no documentation worth reading.
I'm glad its gone. Now everthing will port via fink which is intended as an add on to OSX that brings GNU to OSX without replacing OSX.
SO this is good news
Well actually I was wrong to say it falls off as 1/r^2 it actually falls off as 1/r^4 for the received signal. On the otherhand the wifi transmiters are interfering directly so they fall off only as 1/r^2. And actually it is worse than that. Since the wifi transmitters are distributed they sont actually fall off at all. they have a constant power density. Or if you want to say the radar is located on the perifery of a long line of wi-fi emitters then it falls offa s 1/r. in any case its a not a negligble source of noise.
that all just mod the parent up
The pentagon is not trying to poop on the wifi party. And they are not out to supress info transfers. They just want to make sure that a stupid irrversible giveaway of the wrong band does not take place. Apparently a lot of next generation radars need this band and depend upon a noise free environement. for example the article notes weather radar. Believe me getting a radar return of gas is very very difficult. Even high power radars are not the whole answer--the return signals are weak and fall off 1/r^2 limiting the range.
My fear is that the bush admin will give way to the coroprate interests. Microsoft is one of them mentioned in the article. these companies have dumped tons of money into campaign contributions. And the easy thing for the bush admin to do is to do nothing at all.
regardless of your misgivings about the department of defenses other activities, having good radar is a swell idea that we all can benenefit from.
presumably there might be some techno fix that could make all happy. But remember these radar systems take years to design. Its not just about making the latest up-to-date technology but also about quality assurance, standards and interoperability. So just saying they could be redesigned is not a valid response. You dont retrofit safety systems on a whim because some thinks they can make it better. Murphy's law will get you. And its often better to have standardized less than state of the art systems people know the limitiations of than a myriad of superior technologies they dont know the relaibaility of.
Good thing I turn my cds in to MP3s. I assume this removes the threat entirely.
I am Jack's Sheepish agreement with you.
sorry I tried not saying it, but I couldn't do it
goto www.lanl.gov and click on the 'jobs' tab then the postdoc link.
here is one example:
Summary: Postdoctoral Positions in Protein Bioinformatics and Structural Genomics: The Bioscience Division (B-2 Group) is seeking 2-3 highly motivated researchers for immediate openings to work with our interdisciplinary team of Bioinformatics and Structural Biology. Research activities will focus on the development and application of methods in Functional and Structural Genomics, including: 1) inference of function in proteins based upon structural and sequence information; 2) prediction of protein structure, protein binding, ligands, and active sites using both ab initio approaches and experimental information; 3) identification of signatures of pathenogenosis; 4) annotation and analysis of selected genomes; and 5) creation and curation of annotated protein databases.
Required Skills:Experience in at least 2 of the following areas is required (more than two areas of experience is highly desirable):
- Protein structure modeling or protein-ligand analysis or other related modeling
- Background in molecular biology, or microbial pathogenesis, or related fields
- Experience with the common sequence analysis tools for Blast search, sequence alignment, phylogenetic analysis, etc.
- Drug design, or protein design or protein structure predictions or docking
- Functional annotation of putative genes based on literature analysis
- Curation of biological databases and web programming
Desired Skills:Knowledge of one computer programming language (e.g., Perl, Python, FORTRAN, C++). Use of common molecular graphics tools such as Pymol, Xtal. Research in genomic sequence analysis or protein structure. Familiarity with SQL databases, unix, and XML is useful. Education:A Ph.D completed within the last 5 years or soon to be completed is required. Notes to Applicants:Starting salaries range from $59,300 to $67,300. For further technical information about the position and the project, contact Charlie Strauss at cems@lanl.gov (505-665-5838), or Murray Wolinsky at murray@lanl.gov (505-665-0952).Candidates may be considered for a Director's Fellowship and outstanding candidates may be considered for the prestigious J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard P. Feynman or Frederick Reines Fellowships. Please see Special Postdoctoral Fellowships for further details.
For general information refer to the Postdoctoral Program page.
Looking into it what happened was this. She had found some interesting citations at the end of a paper, looked up the articles and read them. Then when she was preparing our manuscript rather than track down the papers in a file drawer she just copied the citations as they had appeared in the original citing paper. thus she preserved the exact same typos. word for word.
I have however seen another way that typos propagate. Say I was a graduate student on a series of papers where my advisor often trotted out the same citations to make the same points about the same seminal peices of work. Other papers I write with him as co-author get the same boilerplate. Eventually I write a paper on which he is not on the author list but I put in the same boiler plate. oops. I just cited a paper I never read myself. Believe me it happens, though it is not neccessarily inaccurate.
Jenna Bush, (R-texas) speaker of the house, was sworn in as president earlier today after the tragic death of President Jeb Bush, and vice president and consort, Kathleen Harris. The president was killed in a tagic suicide pretzel attack organized by the cuban branch of al quaida. The tragic news interrupted a beach front photo-shoot for playboy's Girl's of the Whitehouse issue.
On assuming the presidency, Jenna Bush abolished the DEA and ordered the whitehouse rose garden roto-tilled, and replanted with first class "presidential grade" Jamaican "hemp". In a slurred Inaugural speech she nominated Eileen Fleiss as Vice President, and called for Hot grits down natalie portman's pants. And obvious reward to the slash dot lobby that rigged the computerized elections for her father.
A new web site for the elderly nerds "slash-dotter" reaches 100 million site visits per day, mostly from embedded network enabled Depends.
In 2013, after you install the water limiter uncapper, your maytag washing machine finks on you and collects a reward.
In 2013, the invention of the RFID cloaking devices (aluminum lines shopping bags), leads to whole sale shoplifting. An new chain of stores called "shop-naked" emerges, and becomes wildly popular not only as a place to meet members of the opposit sex, but because it is the only place that sells food in the city anymore.
in 2013, stranger-on-a-train parties become an out-of control trend, with complete strangers exchanging their Presence ID tags. Thus subverting the tracking scrutiny of big brother and his computerized corporate stooges. Faced with a loss of control over ordinary citizens, President Jenna Bush imposes mandatory ID tatooing and all babies receive an injected RFID module.
COuld someone elaborate here. Why is a WEP key more vulnerable than say an SSH key? Why is it insecure to have unencrypted Beacon frames and MAC addressses. What info is being given up by these or how can these be exploited in a way particular to wireless?
and given encrypted transmissions why is WiFi more suceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks than any SSH connection?
For example, are the data links insecure--I dont think so as most are now 128bit encrypted, right?
could it be that access to the local net offering a way around the firewall? Dont some, or maybe all, wi-fi links have built in capabitlity for password protected connections. If so does this not make them as good as any firewall?
So is the whole problem just people not activating these feature? if so is this not just the same as any other unprotected wired network when people dont turn on their firewall?
Besides lots of thigs run on windows besides software. Windex runs on windows, bird shit runs on windows.
The Pan-IP defense fund should incorporate themselves in a state with anti-SLAPP laws on its books. (SLAPP = Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, often used when small groups try to block Housing and Industrial Developments). A number of states now carry laws like this that help protect small groups.
Maybe you know this already but your old fink distro broke under 10.2 and unless they changed something recently you cant fix it by doing fink seldupdate. instead you have two alternatives. 1) delete all of your fink install and start from scratch. 2) follow the recipie on the fink site for getting the unstable distro from CVS. I did the latter and it worked great! A couple programs have not been fixed but nearly all of it works again. (Also oddly, the manpage command man was broken on my machine till I did that update. Other people have reported this too)
2)Unlike fink which stays out of the way of the operating system direcories like /bin and so forth. This think has all the worst chararistics of unix installs, spraying its files everywhere wiht no warning mechanisms, road maps, and no unistalls.
3) The installation interface and its dependency checking is only for the advnaced user, unless you want to just install it all. Then watch-out. Updating or selectively updating or patching is a nioghtmare in my opinion--wehn compared with FINK
I suspect this last property is the reason they are offering (forcing) people to get the whole install pre-done.
Fink is vastly superior in user experience and now in coverage of useful programs. The fink update experiece is a dream compared to Gnu-darwin. Gnu-darwin is a relic of how not to do things given the fresh start in apple unix.
On the otherhand, I'm being unfair here. Unlike FINK, Gnu-darwin has another agenda. Gnu-darwin is not trying to be compatible with the OSX way of doing things. It is not even trying to be sybmiotic as FINK is. instead GNU darwin is trying to replace OSX. And to do so it needs to put files where it thinks they belong. This does not excuse the crudeness of the delivery and update mechanisms. But if you are going to install the WHOLE distribution as you probably would od if you are using it as an OSX replacement, then it is perhaps not so bad.
I mean the whole idea of giving blood is to give cells. Either for another human to use, or to have those cells used for sume prupose--drug making--and then deliberately killed--i.e. sterilized defore being thrown away. Nothing immoral here.
It's human life that is precious, Not my little finger or some other unviable bit of flesh.
Okay if LCD is out, I could attach an external CRT display. Again what would the best glasses for a mac osX system be? Any experinece with pymol?