OK.../etc/fstab was probably the first thing I did in the deep end, once I'd started trying Linux; I wanted to set up my Windows partitions for access from Linux, mainly so I could get at my mp3 collection:-) I had a copy of Linux for Dummies, an AMD K6/2 400 on a Pentium 90's old motherboard, Red Hat 7.0, and an experimental attitude.
First of all, 'dmesg' is a command which shows you any messages from the kernel - all that stuff that scrolls past on startup about detecting and configuring devices. When you connect a USB storage device, a message gets thrown up saying that something just got detected on a USB port, that it's been set up as a storage device, and that it's been set up with the device identifier/dev/sda1 (or whatever it might be).
The/dev directory contains a huge number of files, each of which represents a device of some kind; for instance,/dev/hda is your main hard disk, while/dev/random is a virtual device that spews random gibberish if you try to read it. Hence all the joke commands you'll see about using the 'dd' command and copying/dev/random to/dev/hda - which would quickly trash the hard disk:-)
So you've seen the message from 'dmesg' saying that your USB gizmo has been recognised as a disk, and assigned '/dev/sda1'. Now for/etc/fstab. This file lists a bunch of devices in/dev, and where each one should be mounted. So you might have a line saying 'mount the device/dev/cdrom using type iso9660 in the location/mnt/cdrom'. Add a line saying 'mount the device/dev/sda1 using type vfat in the location/mnt/usbthing'./etc/fstab also sets which users can access a particular device, and whether or not it's mounted automatically on startup, and things like that.
Once/etc/fstab lists your device, then you can mount it as a normal user (if you set it up that way, of course). Otherwise you need to be root all the time, which is... unhealthy for day-to-day work. Then you can create an icon on the KDE desktop, which will then mount the device when you click on it. The other desktops probably have similar functions.
That's the way I did it, anyway. I imagine the more desktop-oriented distros have helpful control panels and wizards and things which will handle all this behind-the-scenes stuff, but it's worth knowing./etc/fstab is a pretty easy to come to terms with, as config files go.
That said, I still don't know how to mount any of my USB drives
Well, I do it like this:
1: Plug in drive
2: Look at kernel messages from 'dmesg' to find that it's appeared as/dev/sda1
3: Add a suitable line to/etc/fstab
4: Add an icon to KDE desktop
After which it's just a matter of plug in, click to mount, go. I heard that FC2 will recognise the device and mount it automatically, which is nice...
Here's an experiment I think can disprove/prove the second postulate:
Measure the speed of light in two directions: parallel and perpendicular to the direction of motion of the Earth in its orbit. Compare the two to discover whether or not the Earth's velocity is added to that of light.
Quite. So if FTL and time travel were proved possible, we would have to either
a: throw out the Big Bang theory. In a Steady State universe, there is always energy available, and there would be no profit in mining the past
b: take it as evidence that no species is going to live long enough to need to mine the past
Personally, I'd take FTL as pretty strong evidence of a steady state Universe. The superintelligent aliens are illustrative, but they aren't necessary; if time travel is possible it will happen spontaneously, albeit with low probability.
Don't knock the Catholic church quite so hard... they actually do take a keen interest in this kind of thing. Things like the origin and ultimate fate of the Universe are their bread and butter, and they'd prefer to be up-to-date on the best current understanding of the workings of God's magnum opus.
I'm no physics expert, but I can't see why they wouldn't be able to use the doppler effect on the vgers just like they do with the pioneer probes.
They can - but as the parent post described, there are large uncertainties in Voyager's trajectory. The Pioneers were spun for stability, and so we know to a very high precision where they should be - and so we detect the anomaly. The Voyagers have frequently fired rockets to realign themselves, and this introduces an uncertainty far greater than the size of the Pioneer anomaly.
Bear in mind that FTL also means time travel; the two are equivalent.
Personally, I think time travel is incompatible with our current understanding of cosmology. The reasoning is like this.
1: There is a lot more future than past. It looks a lot like it'll be infinitely more, but even if the Universe is closed it's near enough critical that it won't collapse for a long, long time.
2: Result of (1): most of the lifetime of the Universe will be very, very cold. Energy will become more and more scarce as time goes by.
3: If time travel is possible, it will someday be invented by somebody, somewhere in the Universe.
4: Result of (2) and (3): we can expect that at some stage, a civilisation will exist which is suffering a critical energy shortage, but which has access to a time machine.
5: This civilisation will eventually be forced to choose between dying of the cold, or using their time machine to plunder the past for energy.
6: We get a universe in which the superbeings of the far future build timewarp mines, leaching out the hot plasma of the Big Bang to warm the frozen future.
7: The past cools and the future warms up. But since there's so much future and so little past, the whole Universe ends up at a terribly low temperature at all times.
8: The Universe is not like this: the past is definitely far hotter than the present.
The Brussels government is dominated by the Commission, consisting of people appointed by the state governments, and the Parliament, which is directly elected.
Since the state governments are elected, this isn't quite as undemocratic as it might seem. It's still not great, but nobody in power really wants Brussels to have a real democratic mandate - that would seriously undermine the states' independence, and would also lead to the few votes of places like Ireland or Greece being swamped by the huge populations of Germany or Britain.
If Brussels gets any more powerful, there really will be a need for democratic reform - an elected Commission, and maybe a directly elected President. But right now, the state governments will not allow such a rival powerbase. Real power is still in Paris, Berlin and London, and they're not going to let go easily...
The voters, unfortunately, will support absolutely anything that's going to be used against terrorists and/or paedophiles. They are not concerned about the small detail that it'll be used against everyone else too...
Re:Is Lego back on firm financial ground?
on
.Net On Lego Mindstorm
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There's a Lego store recently opened in Birmingham which has some truly amazing stuff. Yes, there's a lot of that awful Bionicle stuff and suchlike with special pieces and so on, but there's SO MUCH COOL STUFF!
I only just got out of there yesterday without buying a giant orange robot looking just like EVA-00, with instructions for four or five alternates. They've got a pick-and-mix section at the back where you can take a big tub - like the ones you get drinks in at the cinema - and fill it with your choice of pieces. Classic models - like the pirate ships your parents would never buy but you can now afford yourself! muhahaha!
Um, sorry, got a bit carried away... but I think Lego are getting the idea lately, and realise what their market really is.
Oh yes. Find whoever's got the biggest TV and spend the whole day with cans, crisps, pizza, and the finest weed in the Southfarthing... it'll be a good one. Trouble is, we'll all be thoroughly mashed by Helm's Deep;-)
Actually, Japan has quite an impressive military. They restrict military spending to a really small percentage of the national budget, but because they're so rich that small percentage gives them a total defence expenditure about equal to that of the UK.
Given the number of wars Britain manages to fight on that budget, I can't help but wonder what the pacifist Japanese are spending it all on. Giant robots might not be so implausible...
I estimate that anything that gets modded up to +3 within the first hour of an article will inevitably become a +5. Anything modded down to +1 will inevitably become a -1.
Substitute +2 and 0 for low karma posters, obviously...
Looking back on my posts, I have shedloads of +5s and occasional -1s in a long list of +2s... but very few +3s. Moderation is a runaway process, in which the difference between +5 and -1 is a single modpoint.
I don't think Slashdot is really all that US-centric in politics, the graphics notwithstanding. We get a lot of YRO stories about Blunkett's latest schemes to install a totalitarian state in Airstrip One, and quite a few about Australia's bloody awful proposed trading agreement with the US, which seems to be the international version of 'pick up the soap'. We also had a whole lot of coverage of the abominable EUCD.
It's really just that the US is owned by corporate interests to a greater extent than most of the rest of the allegedly free world, and so leads the way in innovative new ways to be evil.
No... you can't do that. You've already distributed your modified code when you sold the mp3 player; you have to provide the source to all the people to whom you distribute the modified code, i.e. everyone who's bought that mp3 player.
You can charge what you like for that mp3 player, though. And you don't have to make the code available to the world at large - just to the people who've bought the mp3 player. Of course, then they can distribute the code freely to the world if they like.
"Sir, we've detected mass spam coming from your connection. Please clean up your computer. You have one week."
A week's too long to let someone get away with spamming. Pull the plug immediately; redirect all Web connections from that machine to a server offering downloads of cleanup tools, send absolutely everything else to/dev/null. They'll either fix it - great - or go to another ISP, in which case they're no longer your problem.
I can take free GPL code, make a change and then resell it for $500,000?
Yes. But you're required to include the source code, and your customer may then redistribute it at whatever price they see fit. You'll only get that $500,000 once, and that only if your one change is good enough to justify your price.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, 'dmesg' is a command which shows you any messages from the kernel - all that stuff that scrolls past on startup about detecting and configuring devices. When you connect a USB storage device, a message gets thrown up saying that something just got detected on a USB port, that it's been set up as a storage device, and that it's been set up with the device identifier /dev/sda1 (or whatever it might be).
The /dev directory contains a huge number of files, each of which represents a device of some kind; for instance, /dev/hda is your main hard disk, while /dev/random is a virtual device that spews random gibberish if you try to read it. Hence all the joke commands you'll see about using the 'dd' command and copying /dev/random to /dev/hda - which would quickly trash the hard disk :-)
So you've seen the message from 'dmesg' saying that your USB gizmo has been recognised as a disk, and assigned '/dev/sda1'. Now for /etc/fstab. This file lists a bunch of devices in /dev, and where each one should be mounted. So you might have a line saying 'mount the device /dev/cdrom using type iso9660 in the location /mnt/cdrom'. Add a line saying 'mount the device /dev/sda1 using type vfat in the location /mnt/usbthing'. /etc/fstab also sets which users can access a particular device, and whether or not it's mounted automatically on startup, and things like that.
Once /etc/fstab lists your device, then you can mount it as a normal user (if you set it up that way, of course). Otherwise you need to be root all the time, which is... unhealthy for day-to-day work. Then you can create an icon on the KDE desktop, which will then mount the device when you click on it. The other desktops probably have similar functions.
That's the way I did it, anyway. I imagine the more desktop-oriented distros have helpful control panels and wizards and things which will handle all this behind-the-scenes stuff, but it's worth knowing. /etc/fstab is a pretty easy to come to terms with, as config files go.
Well, I do it like this:
1: Plug in drive /dev/sda1
/etc/fstab
2: Look at kernel messages from 'dmesg' to find that it's appeared as
3: Add a suitable line to
4: Add an icon to KDE desktop
After which it's just a matter of plug in, click to mount, go. I heard that FC2 will recognise the device and mount it automatically, which is nice...
299,792.458 km/s, if you please. It's not often in physics we get to be really exact, so we might as well take the chance when we get it!
Measure the speed of light in two directions: parallel and perpendicular to the direction of motion of the Earth in its orbit. Compare the two to discover whether or not the Earth's velocity is added to that of light.
And guess what? It's been done.
a: throw out the Big Bang theory. In a Steady State universe, there is always energy available, and there would be no profit in mining the past
b: take it as evidence that no species is going to live long enough to need to mine the past
Personally, I'd take FTL as pretty strong evidence of a steady state Universe. The superintelligent aliens are illustrative, but they aren't necessary; if time travel is possible it will happen spontaneously, albeit with low probability.
Link: the Vatican Observatory. Really.
Neptune orbits at 4,504,000,000 km, so Qo'nos must be 8,647,680,000,000 km away. That's... 0.91 lightyears. Damn.
So it looks like they actually did the sums for Neptune, but skipped it for Qo'nos. Weird!
They can - but as the parent post described, there are large uncertainties in Voyager's trajectory. The Pioneers were spun for stability, and so we know to a very high precision where they should be - and so we detect the anomaly. The Voyagers have frequently fired rockets to realign themselves, and this introduces an uncertainty far greater than the size of the Pioneer anomaly.
Personally, I think time travel is incompatible with our current understanding of cosmology. The reasoning is like this.
1: There is a lot more future than past. It looks a lot like it'll be infinitely more, but even if the Universe is closed it's near enough critical that it won't collapse for a long, long time.
2: Result of (1): most of the lifetime of the Universe will be very, very cold. Energy will become more and more scarce as time goes by.
3: If time travel is possible, it will someday be invented by somebody, somewhere in the Universe.
4: Result of (2) and (3): we can expect that at some stage, a civilisation will exist which is suffering a critical energy shortage, but which has access to a time machine.
5: This civilisation will eventually be forced to choose between dying of the cold, or using their time machine to plunder the past for energy.
6: We get a universe in which the superbeings of the far future build timewarp mines, leaching out the hot plasma of the Big Bang to warm the frozen future.
7: The past cools and the future warms up. But since there's so much future and so little past, the whole Universe ends up at a terribly low temperature at all times.
8: The Universe is not like this: the past is definitely far hotter than the present.
Hence 9: nobody in the future has a time machine.
Consequently, FTL travel is forever impossible.
Evangelion... where we measure in seconds per frame.
Just how long was that bloody shot of EVA-01 and Kaworu?
Pioneer can now go into hyperspace without fear of being eaten by HIDEOUS HYPER MUTANT MONSTERS!
At which point I realised that Known Space had truly jumped the shark...
Fortunately, trade war is something the EU is pretty good at. Europe won over steel, but I think the USA won the one about bananas...
Since the state governments are elected, this isn't quite as undemocratic as it might seem. It's still not great, but nobody in power really wants Brussels to have a real democratic mandate - that would seriously undermine the states' independence, and would also lead to the few votes of places like Ireland or Greece being swamped by the huge populations of Germany or Britain.
If Brussels gets any more powerful, there really will be a need for democratic reform - an elected Commission, and maybe a directly elected President. But right now, the state governments will not allow such a rival powerbase. Real power is still in Paris, Berlin and London, and they're not going to let go easily...
The voters, unfortunately, will support absolutely anything that's going to be used against terrorists and/or paedophiles. They are not concerned about the small detail that it'll be used against everyone else too...
I only just got out of there yesterday without buying a giant orange robot looking just like EVA-00, with instructions for four or five alternates. They've got a pick-and-mix section at the back where you can take a big tub - like the ones you get drinks in at the cinema - and fill it with your choice of pieces. Classic models - like the pirate ships your parents would never buy but you can now afford yourself! muhahaha!
Um, sorry, got a bit carried away... but I think Lego are getting the idea lately, and realise what their market really is.
Oh yes. Find whoever's got the biggest TV and spend the whole day with cans, crisps, pizza, and the finest weed in the Southfarthing... it'll be a good one. Trouble is, we'll all be thoroughly mashed by Helm's Deep ;-)
Given the number of wars Britain manages to fight on that budget, I can't help but wonder what the pacifist Japanese are spending it all on. Giant robots might not be so implausible...
Substitute +2 and 0 for low karma posters, obviously...
Looking back on my posts, I have shedloads of +5s and occasional -1s in a long list of +2s... but very few +3s. Moderation is a runaway process, in which the difference between +5 and -1 is a single modpoint.
That's interesting. The list of things I'd die for is infinitely shorter than the list of things I'd kill for.
I can't find who the quote was originally, but the object of war is not to die for your country, it's to make the other poor bastard die for his.
Well, that's just it. PHBs who love the slogan 'work to the job, not the clock' never seem happy when people bugger off at 2pm on a quiet day.
It's really just that the US is owned by corporate interests to a greater extent than most of the rest of the allegedly free world, and so leads the way in innovative new ways to be evil.
You can charge what you like for that mp3 player, though. And you don't have to make the code available to the world at large - just to the people who've bought the mp3 player. Of course, then they can distribute the code freely to the world if they like.
A week's too long to let someone get away with spamming. Pull the plug immediately; redirect all Web connections from that machine to a server offering downloads of cleanup tools, send absolutely everything else to /dev/null. They'll either fix it - great - or go to another ISP, in which case they're no longer your problem.
That has to be the geekiest comic I've ever read ;-)
Yes. But you're required to include the source code, and your customer may then redistribute it at whatever price they see fit. You'll only get that $500,000 once, and that only if your one change is good enough to justify your price.