Your guess is not right. Windows 98, 95 and older MS operating systems removed the existing bootloader, and this procedure would work. But Windows 2000 and XP assumes you might be moving from a previous Windows version, and leaves the MBR intact to allow dual-boot with two different Windows versions.
Nowadays is much tougher to get a dual boot system with Linux and Windows, and, if something goes wrong and you have no clue to solve the problem, you might loose your data.
In my opinion, if someone wants to dual-boot, the first thing he should do is install Linux, before moving any data to the computer. And, when upgrading a distro, should not touch the MBR, and use a rescue disk to correct the configuration files on Grub if that is necessary.
Re:It's worse than that
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
No, no, no and no!
Oil companies are not building refinaries because, to refine, you need crude oil. On the oil business, you only build a refinary if you have an assurance of 20 years of crude oil supply. And most of the crude is on the hand of the Opec countries, that are organized on a cartel to rise prices by restricting supply!
Are these companies stupid? No. In fact, Exxon, Texaco, Chevron and Mobil had large oil fields, on Saudi Arabia, but they were nationalized, and are now property of the saudi monarchy (fees were paid, of course). BP had a worse fate: their oil fields in Iran were nationalized almost without reparation, as part of the 1979 revolution.
Oil companies need a balance between oil reserves, crude production and refining plants, and now they are low on oil reserves and producion. The mergers between oil companies, generating monsters like Exxon/Mobil and Chevron/Texaco, had their main reason on this "quest for balance".
And tougher enviromental laws on the US made many refinaries close. For me, it is not a very bad deal for american citizens: let the refinaries polute Mexico, India and other countries, and transport the gasoline and diesel.
In the end, the oil age will end not because of shortage of crude oil, but because of enviromental restrictions and political instability in producing countries.
You are right when you say that petroleum is not going to end for 40 years or more - some say it might last for at least 100 years. But oil reserves in the United States, Europe, Mexico and Canada might end in 10 or 15 years.
Most of the world oil reserves are in countries with a high degree of political instability: Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia. As the US government tries to insulate itself from this political instability, it makes things worse. The Iraq fiasco is a living proof of this.
In the short time, we can expect more wars for oil, as the US reserves gets smaller and more "pacifications" occurs in OPEC countries. That's why we need other sources of energy, not because the world oil is going to end.
Kernel patches generally won't cause software incompatibility. These "fractures" are generally caused by system libraries, most notably the glibc. New versions of the GCC can also be a major source of headaches.
I am not sure, but I have heard that the game Vampire the Masquerade used Java, combined with a graphic engine coded in C. Therefore, they could get the speed of C code and ease of coding of Java.
Quanta is a good software, bu not for the graphic designer that works with Dreamweaver and doesn't understand a thing about HTML, CSS or DHTML. There's a new software called Nvu, a fork from Mozilla Composer, which is trying to be a clone of Dreamweaver and is on the public beta stage.
Microsoft is under an agreement with the DoJ to end the anti-trust lawsuit, which is going to delay the release of Longhorn until 2007. It is like being on parole for abuse of economic power.
And SCO has told publibly that they have IP rights that were infringed in Linux, but almost anyone (except Microsoft and Sun) paid atention. It is a monopolistic action because Microsoft wins even if SCO goes under, as the lawsuit puts Linux companies under suspicion.
I don't think an anonymous e-mail is a reason for a new anti-trust case, but enough for new investigations by the DoJ. What does John Kerry thinks of anti-trust investigations against american corporations on times of economic downturns?
When George W Bush came on to stage, Microsoft, which had been already found guilty, got a pretty good setlement. If he wins the re-election, any other anti-trust case will be against competition and in favor of business consolidation.
This article makes this confusion, and completely misses the point. When someone is too dumb to see the difference between free as in libre and free as in gratis, I point to the article writen by Brian Behlendorf for the book "Open Sources". You can read it here.
If you are lazy to read it, that is the summary: immagine you have a small company and have a client that wants some kind of software. Your options are:
1. Develop everything in-house, keep the source code and try to resell the software to other clients.
2. Leverage on an open source software, make some modifications and charge for it. The client will propably have the right to keep the source code of the software (if you have used software licensed under the GPL), but you have spent less time and money getting the job done.
Of course there are lot of possiblities between these two possibilites, so go read the article if you want to learn about it!
In this text RMS explains why he opposes the advertising clause on the old BSD license, similar to the problem created by the new X11 license. I think the distributions don't want to open a precedent, or soon they would have to advertise for each free software they distribute. I quote from the RMS text:
Initially the obnoxious BSD advertising clause was used only in the Berkeley Software Distribution. That did not cause any particular problem, because including one sentence in an ad is not a great practical difficulty.
If other developers who used BSD-like licenses had copied the BSD advertising clause verbatim--including the sentence that refers to the University of California--then they would not have made the problem any bigger.
But, as you might expect, other developers did not copy the clause verbatim. They changed it, replacing ``University of California'' with their own institution or their own names. The result is a plethora of licenses, requiring a plethora of different sentences.
When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad.
This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, but it is actual fact. NetBSD comes with a long list of different sentences, required by the various licenses for parts of the system. In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences. I would not be surprised if the list has grown by now.
This idea has already been implemented. If you go to the Lindows website you will find that you can buy a computer without a hard disk and that uses a Linux-based live CD. Have you ever heard of someone using it at home? Me neither.
This concept is interesting, but I think it works better on Kiosks and some corporate enviroments, to replace thin clients.
The article is laughable. He complains that HP costumers will have problems because the "protected AAC" format of the Itunes Music store is "incompatible" with WMA or MP3, the formats "widely adopted on the PC world". Not supporting WMA would make the HP Ipod an "island of incompatibility" for HP costumers.
Give me a break. You could throw WMA and every other format on a portable player and this "incompatibility problem" would not go away. The problem is DRM, for Christ sake! This incompatibility will not go away, it was created intentionally! It is like the "incompatibility" between DVD players.
Thurrott might champion WMA or any other "standard" Microsoft develops, but it does not take away the PITA that DRM is for costumers. I have bought some protected songs online and, after a problem that made me reinstall Windows, I simply cannot listen to songs I legally bought. After that, I have simply given up buying songs online and went back to P2P services that offers me 320 kbps unrestricted MP3s.
These laws should be changed, our legal system is a mess and first instance judges have too much power. This judge has acted as a foreign relations ministry, and may jeopardize jobs of several brazilians - I live in Rio de Janeiro, and we need these tourists money. The fingerprinting should be decided only by the federal government - I am sure many people think that Lula is responsible for this. There will be a court fight, as the mayor of Rio de Janeiro has started a new lawsuit.
This law doesn't force Brazil to treat foreing visitors as were are treated by them - it allows the government to do so.
I don't have the money to travel abroad, but, if I had, I would refuse to go the United States, as they are not treating brazilians with respect. If I were american, I would have the same thoughts about Brazil.
I am Brazilian, and all I can say is that I feel embarrassed by this. The fingerprinting on American airports is an overreaction and a sign of paranoia, but at least there is some justification - less than 3 years ago hundreds of lives were lost in an act of terrorism. The Brazilian fingerprinting of American citizens is simply a payback, and completely childish.
To make mater worse, it was decided by a judge from a small state. The government, and not the courts, should decide on matters of international relations, and so I think this absurd will not go on for a long time. Even so, the Brazilian authorities are working very hard to look stupid, surpassing the American government.
HP has a Tablet PC that uses Transmeta Crusoe 5800. I have used it for some minutes, and looked like a "normal" tablet with an Intel processor. But I agree with you that these Crusoe babies are rare.
There is another project that is trying to build an open source BeOS-like operating system, that uses the Linux kernel. It is called BlueEyedOS, and their website is here.
Discussions on Slashdot are good, but sometimes sterile. Do you think the Linux kernel would be a better kernel for OpenBeOS? Cool! Go help the BlueEyedOS guys. Of course, that would involve a lot of donated work to a software that may never see the day of light, but, if you enjoy coding, go for that.
I think Red Hat has a great bang for the buck with their academic edition. For US$ 25 you can get a good Linux-based operating system, without any rough edges but that still gives you acess to the source. You qualify if you are a a full time or part time student on a higher education institution, or if you are a teacher. I think an MBA will also get you qualified.
Mandrake is a fine distro, but every time I tried I found some little problems, submited a bug report and hopped on the next version these problems would be solved. They were, but new problems appeared. But, if you don't want to pay US$ 25 for a single system and want a vibrant community that will help you, Mandrake is the way to go. Red Hat is loosing momentum on the free software community, and Mandrake is atracting a lot of refugees.
I agree that the UN runnning the Internet is not a good thing, but I don't know how much power they can have on the internet. Most of the infrastructure is on private hands, at the United States, and they can't do anything about it. They can create problems to connect the american networks to those on other countries, but I bet nobody wants to disconnect from the United States and from the rest of the world.
If you want a Linux-based operating system that does not change every month, pick Debian stable. It has not changed for ages, and doesn't break. If you want stability but also want software that is up to date, pick Red Hat Advanced Server or Enterprise. Both are free as in speach, but only Debian is free as in beer.
I am not a Sun suporter, but apparently Solaris 10 should have this kind of implementation, according to this article. It will have "military grade" security as default, and the root user will be eliminated in favor of "specific roles" (I don't know what this means, the article is very thin). Something to keep an eye on.
The grandparent post makes an interesting point, but he confuses something that is clarified by the parent post.
You could have selective breeding of tropical fish for generations, and would not get the healthy glow of the transgenic zebra fishes. They received a gene of another specie, an anemona, something that would never happen on a natural enviroment.
To produce transgenic animals and vegetables, you use diferent techniques than selective breeding, altough the results are similar. As this post has pointed out, it is an engeneering field that is still giving its small baby steps.
I think the future of genetic engeneering is bright and experiments like these must be encouraged, but societies also have to be carefull and allow the introduction of GMOs only after their safety is proved.
I know I am opening a can of worms, but I have heard that the problem with Debian is that is sooooo cross-platform that the testing takes longer. I runs on Intel, Power PC, Sparc, Alpha and a lot of strange processors I have never heard. On top of that, it runs not only the Linux kernel, but also on the Hurd and BSD kernels. If it was Intel only, or at least was reduced to two or three platforms, the testing might be faster. After all, if a bug appears only when Linux runs a strange processor and not or "normal" computers, I wonder if it is really a bug and if that should slow down the development of something that, like Debian, will have 90% of its users using a particular platform.
Slackware supporters say their distribution is not behind Debian on estability-wise, but, as they focus on Intel, they can reduce the development time. And, let's face it: with free software, no matter how long you wait for the operating system to debug, the developers of the original free software used on it will always discover new bugs, and Debian stable will have to be patched.
I guess Mandrake is a case of bad luck, and transmits it to their users.
I know that bitching about free software will not get me good karma points, but Mandrake 9.1 made me loose a good night of sleep yesterday. I have already installed it on one computer and was using it under Vmware, and thought it was a dream distro. As Red Hat has put their new versions on a very short life cicle, I am looking for alternatives and Mandrake seemed perfect.
I am not the only computer user at home, so I can't nix Windows. I installed Mandrake 9.1 on my brand new computer, and Lilo corrupted the MBR so bad that it didn't even load - it just showed a sequence of 9s. I had to boot from a floppy and do a fdisk/mbr to restore the MBR, what put me back on a Windows-only enviroment. I have installed several times Red Hat and Conectiva, and this sort of thing had never happened to me. I am going to submit a bug to Mandrake and go back to Red Hat 8.
These kind of catastrophic bugs, that make your computer unbootable or damage a hardware piece, can drive newbies away from Linux entirely.
Have you beeen hiding on a cave? Sun is flirting with AMD, and looks like they have serious plans to port Solaris on 64 bits to AMD-64. Check out this story. It looks like the open letter from that Merryl Linch analyst is working. I also think that Sun should focus on software and complete solutions, and stop messing with processors too much.
That is exactly what a person who is trying to get a Cisco certification past the basic CCNA has to do. You have to build a network of computers on a predetermined time, walk out of the room while the examinators damage your network, come back, identify the problems and find a solution for them. Like an airplane pilot license.
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Nowadays is much tougher to get a dual boot system with Linux and Windows, and, if something goes wrong and you have no clue to solve the problem, you might loose your data.
In my opinion, if someone wants to dual-boot, the first thing he should do is install Linux, before moving any data to the computer. And, when upgrading a distro, should not touch the MBR, and use a rescue disk to correct the configuration files on Grub if that is necessary.
Oil companies are not building refinaries because, to refine, you need crude oil. On the oil business, you only build a refinary if you have an assurance of 20 years of crude oil supply. And most of the crude is on the hand of the Opec countries, that are organized on a cartel to rise prices by restricting supply!
Are these companies stupid? No. In fact, Exxon, Texaco, Chevron and Mobil had large oil fields, on Saudi Arabia, but they were nationalized, and are now property of the saudi monarchy (fees were paid, of course). BP had a worse fate: their oil fields in Iran were nationalized almost without reparation, as part of the 1979 revolution.
Oil companies need a balance between oil reserves, crude production and refining plants, and now they are low on oil reserves and producion. The mergers between oil companies, generating monsters like Exxon/Mobil and Chevron/Texaco, had their main reason on this "quest for balance".
And tougher enviromental laws on the US made many refinaries close. For me, it is not a very bad deal for american citizens: let the refinaries polute Mexico, India and other countries, and transport the gasoline and diesel.
In the end, the oil age will end not because of shortage of crude oil, but because of enviromental restrictions and political instability in producing countries.
Most of the world oil reserves are in countries with a high degree of political instability: Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia. As the US government tries to insulate itself from this political instability, it makes things worse. The Iraq fiasco is a living proof of this.
In the short time, we can expect more wars for oil, as the US reserves gets smaller and more "pacifications" occurs in OPEC countries. That's why we need other sources of energy, not because the world oil is going to end.
Kernel patches generally won't cause software incompatibility. These "fractures" are generally caused by system libraries, most notably the glibc. New versions of the GCC can also be a major source of headaches.
I am not sure, but I have heard that the game Vampire the Masquerade used Java, combined with a graphic engine coded in C. Therefore, they could get the speed of C code and ease of coding of Java.
Quanta is a good software, bu not for the graphic designer that works with Dreamweaver and doesn't understand a thing about HTML, CSS or DHTML. There's a new software called Nvu, a fork from Mozilla Composer, which is trying to be a clone of Dreamweaver and is on the public beta stage.
And SCO has told publibly that they have IP rights that were infringed in Linux, but almost anyone (except Microsoft and Sun) paid atention. It is a monopolistic action because Microsoft wins even if SCO goes under, as the lawsuit puts Linux companies under suspicion.
When George W Bush came on to stage, Microsoft, which had been already found guilty, got a pretty good setlement. If he wins the re-election, any other anti-trust case will be against competition and in favor of business consolidation.
If you are lazy to read it, that is the summary: immagine you have a small company and have a client that wants some kind of software. Your options are:
1. Develop everything in-house, keep the source code and try to resell the software to other clients.
2. Leverage on an open source software, make some modifications and charge for it. The client will propably have the right to keep the source code of the software (if you have used software licensed under the GPL), but you have spent less time and money getting the job done.
Of course there are lot of possiblities between these two possibilites, so go read the article if you want to learn about it!
Initially the obnoxious BSD advertising clause was used only in the Berkeley Software Distribution. That did not cause any particular problem, because including one sentence in an ad is not a great practical difficulty.
If other developers who used BSD-like licenses had copied the BSD advertising clause verbatim--including the sentence that refers to the University of California--then they would not have made the problem any bigger.
But, as you might expect, other developers did not copy the clause verbatim. They changed it, replacing ``University of California'' with their own institution or their own names. The result is a plethora of licenses, requiring a plethora of different sentences.
When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad.
This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, but it is actual fact. NetBSD comes with a long list of different sentences, required by the various licenses for parts of the system. In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences. I would not be surprised if the list has grown by now.
This concept is interesting, but I think it works better on Kiosks and some corporate enviroments, to replace thin clients.
Give me a break. You could throw WMA and every other format on a portable player and this "incompatibility problem" would not go away. The problem is DRM, for Christ sake! This incompatibility will not go away, it was created intentionally! It is like the "incompatibility" between DVD players.
Thurrott might champion WMA or any other "standard" Microsoft develops, but it does not take away the PITA that DRM is for costumers. I have bought some protected songs online and, after a problem that made me reinstall Windows, I simply cannot listen to songs I legally bought. After that, I have simply given up buying songs online and went back to P2P services that offers me 320 kbps unrestricted MP3s.
This law doesn't force Brazil to treat foreing visitors as were are treated by them - it allows the government to do so.
I don't have the money to travel abroad, but, if I had, I would refuse to go the United States, as they are not treating brazilians with respect. If I were american, I would have the same thoughts about Brazil.
To make mater worse, it was decided by a judge from a small state. The government, and not the courts, should decide on matters of international relations, and so I think this absurd will not go on for a long time. Even so, the Brazilian authorities are working very hard to look stupid, surpassing the American government.
HP has a Tablet PC that uses Transmeta Crusoe 5800. I have used it for some minutes, and looked like a "normal" tablet with an Intel processor. But I agree with you that these Crusoe babies are rare.
Discussions on Slashdot are good, but sometimes sterile. Do you think the Linux kernel would be a better kernel for OpenBeOS? Cool! Go help the BlueEyedOS guys. Of course, that would involve a lot of donated work to a software that may never see the day of light, but, if you enjoy coding, go for that.
Mandrake is a fine distro, but every time I tried I found some little problems, submited a bug report and hopped on the next version these problems would be solved. They were, but new problems appeared. But, if you don't want to pay US$ 25 for a single system and want a vibrant community that will help you, Mandrake is the way to go. Red Hat is loosing momentum on the free software community, and Mandrake is atracting a lot of refugees.
I agree that the UN runnning the Internet is not a good thing, but I don't know how much power they can have on the internet. Most of the infrastructure is on private hands, at the United States, and they can't do anything about it. They can create problems to connect the american networks to those on other countries, but I bet nobody wants to disconnect from the United States and from the rest of the world.
If you want a Linux-based operating system that does not change every month, pick Debian stable. It has not changed for ages, and doesn't break. If you want stability but also want software that is up to date, pick Red Hat Advanced Server or Enterprise. Both are free as in speach, but only Debian is free as in beer.
I am not a Sun suporter, but apparently Solaris 10 should have this kind of implementation, according to this article. It will have "military grade" security as default, and the root user will be eliminated in favor of "specific roles" (I don't know what this means, the article is very thin). Something to keep an eye on.
You could have selective breeding of tropical fish for generations, and would not get the healthy glow of the transgenic zebra fishes. They received a gene of another specie, an anemona, something that would never happen on a natural enviroment.
To produce transgenic animals and vegetables, you use diferent techniques than selective breeding, altough the results are similar. As this post has pointed out, it is an engeneering field that is still giving its small baby steps. I think the future of genetic engeneering is bright and experiments like these must be encouraged, but societies also have to be carefull and allow the introduction of GMOs only after their safety is proved.
Slackware supporters say their distribution is not behind Debian on estability-wise, but, as they focus on Intel, they can reduce the development time. And, let's face it: with free software, no matter how long you wait for the operating system to debug, the developers of the original free software used on it will always discover new bugs, and Debian stable will have to be patched.
I know that bitching about free software will not get me good karma points, but Mandrake 9.1 made me loose a good night of sleep yesterday. I have already installed it on one computer and was using it under Vmware, and thought it was a dream distro. As Red Hat has put their new versions on a very short life cicle, I am looking for alternatives and Mandrake seemed perfect.
I am not the only computer user at home, so I can't nix Windows. I installed Mandrake 9.1 on my brand new computer, and Lilo corrupted the MBR so bad that it didn't even load - it just showed a sequence of 9s. I had to boot from a floppy and do a fdisk /mbr to restore the MBR, what put me back on a Windows-only enviroment. I have installed several times Red Hat and Conectiva, and this sort of thing had never happened to me. I am going to submit a bug to Mandrake and go back to Red Hat 8.
These kind of catastrophic bugs, that make your computer unbootable or damage a hardware piece, can drive newbies away from Linux entirely.
Have you beeen hiding on a cave? Sun is flirting with AMD, and looks like they have serious plans to port Solaris on 64 bits to AMD-64. Check out this story. It looks like the open letter from that Merryl Linch analyst is working. I also think that Sun should focus on software and complete solutions, and stop messing with processors too much.
That is exactly what a person who is trying to get a Cisco certification past the basic CCNA has to do. You have to build a network of computers on a predetermined time, walk out of the room while the examinators damage your network, come back, identify the problems and find a solution for them. Like an airplane pilot license.