NF: [interviewer] When will we be able to celebrate Sarge's release?
MM: [interviewee] There's currently no date for the release. There are a number of show-stoppers related to our infrastructure which we have to sort out before we can make a release. We hope Sarge will come out near the beginning of the year.
Clever Martin! He doesn't say which year.
Sarge is great. When it becomes the new Stable, I may just switch from Testing to Stable.
NF: [interviewer] What are the most important features of the new installer?
MM: [interviewee] We heard for years that Debian is hard to install and the old installer wasn't very easy to maintain or advance, so we we decided to throw the installer away and start from scratch. The new installer is much more modular, which makes it easier to maintain and extend. From the user's point of view, the new installer is much easier to use. It asks fewer questions than the old one, does automatic hardware detection, and has several other new features, such as automatic detection of other operating system on your machine. It also supports RAID and LVM.
The point of this article was that the US government is spending a lot of money to deploy stealthy spy satellites.
[snip]
As far as terrorists go, they're not going to be shooting satellites out of orbit any time soon,...
And then we have China. China is a very aggressive enemy nation, which will go to war with us as soon as they think they're strong enough to win, or as soon as their economic situation gets so desperate that they see war as the only way to prevent revolution. They can, and will, track anything they can see, and shoot it down when convenient.
... and I doubt they'll be tracking them without help from a nation-state.
Terrorists do have help from nation-states. Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iran and North Korea are all a lot more careful now, but they're still our enemies, and they still support terrorism (though the Saudis are cracking down when the terrorists threaten the house of Saud, they aren't at all worried about attacks on U.S. as such). All of them could track visible satellites, and some could shoot them down (but probably won't).
I don't think that Germany, France or Russia would be officially interested in doing anything for terrorists, but they know where our non-stealthy satellites are, and officially or not, that information will get to anyone who thinks to ask.
While spy satellites could spot Soviet tank divisions and missile silos, they can't pinpoint terrorists in caves
They may not see the terrorists in the caves, but they can see the terrorists entering and leaving the caves, and they can see trails leading to caves, and they can find the caves themselves byt their thermal signature, and they can find smoke emanating from caves (sure sign of human occupancy).
I don't have any special knowlege of spy satellites, but I know what you can see from an airplane. I wouldn't assume that the satellites are useless.
Once you have tenure, submit your work to the best Libre journals in your field, and let the editors of the journals you're currently submitting to know that you eagerly await the day that their journals allow access without copyright restrictions, so that you can resume your relationship with them.
Until you have tenure, of course, you can't do that.
There are some journals that operate with a "volunteer" editor, but they have trouble competing with journals that have a paid full-time staff, like Nature for example.
Is Nature really a scientific journal? That's a serious question: it's not in my field, and I'm not familiar with it. As I recall, it's printed on glossy paper, and has advertisements?
Spectrum and AMSTAT are not considered serious journals in their fields, peer-reviewed or not, while AER and JASA are. The difference is that a non-Ph.D might read Spectrum or AMSTAT, but would not (probably could not) read JEL, AER or JASA. I think that Nature is in the same class as Spectrum, isn't it? It is intended for a broader audience than the few academics working in the field? It's not the primary journal of record for the discipline it covers? If so, I don't think that it's really the sort of thing this initiative is aimed at.
If you submit a manuscript to one of the established and prestigious scientific journals such as Science, Nature or PRL (at least in my field), it's not only going to be peer reviewed but it's going to be subjected to a peer-review-from-hell.
That surely sounds as if peer review is everything.
That is unlikely to happen if you submit it to a free access journal.
Remember how the peer review system works (I know you know, but this is for the folks who don't)? The reviewers are folks like you, who've submitted articles in the past. They try to do a good job of reviewing your article, to impress the editor so that he'll send their next articles to good reviewers, rather than rejecting them out of hand or sending them to that guy who sits on them for a year.
That editor and those reviewers can function the same way, regardless of the method or terms of publication. If a free journal had a stable of submitters like Science or Nature has, they'd do the same good job of peer review at the free journal.
The review system requires some work to administer (even when the reviewing itself is on a volunteer basis). People may worry that without exclusive distribution rights, publishers may not be able to raise the money to support such systems.
I don't know enough about the expenses here to say whether that's a real problem.
Roughly speaking, there are no expenses.
The editor is usually a volunteer, and the reviewers are always volunteers. The editor sends your manuscript to two or three referees, who mark it up and write him a report. He then takes their names off the reports, and forwards them to you, with his decision (usually either ``forget it'' or ``revise and resubmit'').
All this is done electronically, so costs are nil.
Reviewing is the price you pay for submitting to a journal: if you submit, you'll start getting articles to review. Doing a good job on these can only help your standing with the editor, and get you better referees and a better chance of helpful criticism on your next submission.
Aside from a secretary for the editor (not all publications have this), the only paid employees are the guys who run the printing press and the fat cats who take your checks to the bank. The authors and would-be authors do the writing, the peer review and the typesetting, and in return, the publisher takes the copyright and the profit.
Apt-get or urpmi or yum. Your distribution will use one of those, and you will have no problems. It's far easier than windows.
* Guiding the Joe user to a friendly painless installation of the OS itself
Windows installation is more painful than Debian, but that's immaterial: Joe User should never be installing an OS. Knoppix makes for a ``friendly painless installation of the OS'', but I still say that Joe User probably shouldn't be doing that.
* customizing
* configuring
If you want simple, you can't have those two. If you want to customize and configure, you have to accept some complexity. You have to be willing to make choices. One area where Linux could still improve is in having sensible defaults, so that you don't have to make those choices right at the start. Linux is much better on this than it was when I started using it, with Redhat 6.0. Again, Debian really shines here: I haven't had to do much customizing or configuring with Woody or Sarge. I suspect that the latest Redhat, et cetera, is similarly improved.
And don't come tell me it's much better than windows. I ALREADY know that.
Yes, there's always going to be room for improvement.
The real problem is the companies which are willing to pay spammers to spam. When advertising your product via spam is illegal, spam will be a thing of the past. Yes, there would be joe-jobs, but our legal system is quite capable of dealing with that sort of thing. They manage to deal with that problem for all of our other criminal laws, to give you an example.
Outlawing advertising via spam would mean that the company which wants your money, and has to be accessible to take orders, would face fines and jail time for officers if they spammed. Soon, only the outright frauds would be willing to take that kind of risk, and even the idiots would eventually stop sending money to spammers who never actually sent penis enlargement pills.
I know some really bright US-born college kids, so let's not decide that all US students are slackers.
Yep, I know some too. I had some in my classes. They weren't prepared, just like the dummies. They could keep up with most of the foreign students, but not with the bright ones, who were just as bright but better prepared.
I did have one American student who was an exception, I thought. She was well prepared, very bright and she had gone to a local school (central Indiana). Then she told me that she would miss class the next day, because she would be going through her naturalization ceremony, with her parents. We talked, and it turned out that her parents had supplemented her public school education at home.
... a PhD has almost no economic value outside of academia.
By definition, there will never be very many non-academic jobs for Ph.Ds. That sort of job is about finding new answers to old questions, and new questions that no one has asked yet. Google is one current example of a company that probably wouldn't exist without people who can do that. Those few jobs are really important for our economy, and I think that we're agreed that U.S. citizens won't get that sort of training in sufficient numbers. I'll go further and restate my case: U.S. citizens can't get that sort of training in sufficient numbers: they aren't prepared, even though some of them are bright enough.
Getting upside down on a car is bad. Upside down on a house loan is way worse, because it's so much bigger.
What you're doing is why house prices are sticky downwards: when demand falls off, folks just hang onto their houses, and it can take years for the market to clear.
Don't assume that the house prices will magically turn around: unless something happens to bring back the demand, like lots of new jobs, prices won't rise fast or soon. Lots of new jobs would solve your problem anyway, wouldn't it?
I was one of the few who noticed when "mortgage payment" became "rent" in the CPI.
I wouldn't read anything into that. I'm an economist, and the CPI is just a fixed basket of goods and services which might be purchased by a ``typical urban consumer''. It started out as a list of essentials for WWII shipyard workers, and it's updated periodically. If they changed from owning to renting, it's just a sign that the working poor don't own apartments in the big city. Nothing new there. Anyway, it wasn't any kind of warning, and there is nothing there that you could see more clearly with the aid of a tin-foil hat.
Move in with your folks, rent out the house, and suffer for a while, until you can afford that trailer. Whatever you do, don't keep going deeper into debt.
The problem with cutting out work visas is that American schools do a lousy job preparing American students for college. I'm an ex-college teacher, and I've seen it first hand.
The foreign students are a big part of any technical graduate school; foreign students are the clear majority in engineering, physics, math, and even in the non-MBA portions of business schools. For those few jobs which require the sort of knowlege you get in those schools, no work visas means almost no workers. Those few jobs are the ones which are most likely to lead to the creation of new wealth, so we don't want to see them disappear from the U.S.
Also, one of the most effective things we can do to defang aggressive nations like Mainland China (short of a nuclear first strike) is to bring their best and brightest over here, educate them at China's expense, then employ them here. It makes them and the U.S. better off, at China's expense.
For the U.S., those work visas are a mixed blessing, at worst.
It has everything to do with the fact that most people who run windows run as Admin.
Sounds reasonable. Why is it that at home, I never log in as root, but at work, on a Windows box, I often need to be Admin? Putting it another way, why is it that Windows is set up so that most of us don't have any choice about running as Admin?
"The time needed to boot desktop Linux systems is becoming an issue.
Is it really? How often do you boot? I reboot whenever there's a power failure (and thank God for ext3). None yet this winter, so I really can't recall how long the boot takes.
in case it is slashdotted here is a mirror of the chart.
Linux ===============
BSD ========
And:
Windows ===========
BSOD
Windows =========== BSOD
Windows =========== BSOD
Windows =========== BSOD
Windows =========== BSOD
Windows =========== BSOD .........
Slashdot Mirror
'05, 06, '08 ... it really doesn't matter. I'm using Sarge now, and I may just freeze on that one when it becomes stable.
Sarge is great. When it becomes the new Stable, I may just switch from Testing to Stable.
[snip]
As far as terrorists go, they're not going to be shooting satellites out of orbit any time soon, ...
And then we have China. China is a very aggressive enemy nation, which will go to war with us as soon as they think they're strong enough to win, or as soon as their economic situation gets so desperate that they see war as the only way to prevent revolution. They can, and will, track anything they can see, and shoot it down when convenient.
Terrorists do have help from nation-states. Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iran and North Korea are all a lot more careful now, but they're still our enemies, and they still support terrorism (though the Saudis are cracking down when the terrorists threaten the house of Saud, they aren't at all worried about attacks on U.S. as such). All of them could track visible satellites, and some could shoot them down (but probably won't).
I don't think that Germany, France or Russia would be officially interested in doing anything for terrorists, but they know where our non-stealthy satellites are, and officially or not, that information will get to anyone who thinks to ask.
They may not see the terrorists in the caves, but they can see the terrorists entering and leaving the caves, and they can see trails leading to caves, and they can find the caves themselves byt their thermal signature, and they can find smoke emanating from caves (sure sign of human occupancy).
I don't have any special knowlege of spy satellites, but I know what you can see from an airplane. I wouldn't assume that the satellites are useless.
Once you have tenure, submit your work to the best Libre journals in your field, and let the editors of the journals you're currently submitting to know that you eagerly await the day that their journals allow access without copyright restrictions, so that you can resume your relationship with them.
Until you have tenure, of course, you can't do that.
Is Nature really a scientific journal? That's a serious question: it's not in my field, and I'm not familiar with it. As I recall, it's printed on glossy paper, and has advertisements?
I'm familiar with journals like Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) and American Economic Review (AER), which do have some paid staff, paid for through the American Economics Association dues and subscriptions. I'm also familiar with journals like the IEEE Spectrum and the American Statistics Association American Statistician (AMSTAT), which are glossy magazine with ads, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), which has few or no ads.
Spectrum and AMSTAT are not considered serious journals in their fields, peer-reviewed or not, while AER and JASA are. The difference is that a non-Ph.D might read Spectrum or AMSTAT, but would not (probably could not) read JEL, AER or JASA. I think that Nature is in the same class as Spectrum, isn't it? It is intended for a broader audience than the few academics working in the field? It's not the primary journal of record for the discipline it covers? If so, I don't think that it's really the sort of thing this initiative is aimed at.
That surely sounds as if peer review is everything.
That is unlikely to happen if you submit it to a free access journal.
Remember how the peer review system works (I know you know, but this is for the folks who don't)? The reviewers are folks like you, who've submitted articles in the past. They try to do a good job of reviewing your article, to impress the editor so that he'll send their next articles to good reviewers, rather than rejecting them out of hand or sending them to that guy who sits on them for a year.
That editor and those reviewers can function the same way, regardless of the method or terms of publication. If a free journal had a stable of submitters like Science or Nature has, they'd do the same good job of peer review at the free journal.
I don't know enough about the expenses here to say whether that's a real problem.
Roughly speaking, there are no expenses.
The editor is usually a volunteer, and the reviewers are always volunteers. The editor sends your manuscript to two or three referees, who mark it up and write him a report. He then takes their names off the reports, and forwards them to you, with his decision (usually either ``forget it'' or ``revise and resubmit''). All this is done electronically, so costs are nil.
Reviewing is the price you pay for submitting to a journal: if you submit, you'll start getting articles to review. Doing a good job on these can only help your standing with the editor, and get you better referees and a better chance of helpful criticism on your next submission.
Aside from a secretary for the editor (not all publications have this), the only paid employees are the guys who run the printing press and the fat cats who take your checks to the bank. The authors and would-be authors do the writing, the peer review and the typesetting, and in return, the publisher takes the copyright and the profit.
* Installing apps
Apt-get or urpmi or yum. Your distribution will use one of those, and you will have no problems. It's far easier than windows.
* Guiding the Joe user to a friendly painless installation of the OS itself
Windows installation is more painful than Debian, but that's immaterial: Joe User should never be installing an OS. Knoppix makes for a ``friendly painless installation of the OS'', but I still say that Joe User probably shouldn't be doing that.
* customizing
* configuring
If you want simple, you can't have those two. If you want to customize and configure, you have to accept some complexity. You have to be willing to make choices. One area where Linux could still improve is in having sensible defaults, so that you don't have to make those choices right at the start. Linux is much better on this than it was when I started using it, with Redhat 6.0. Again, Debian really shines here: I haven't had to do much customizing or configuring with Woody or Sarge. I suspect that the latest Redhat, et cetera, is similarly improved.
And don't come tell me it's much better than windows. I ALREADY know that.
Yes, there's always going to be room for improvement.
Would it matter if they were?
The real problem is the companies which are willing to pay spammers to spam. When advertising your product via spam is illegal, spam will be a thing of the past. Yes, there would be joe-jobs, but our legal system is quite capable of dealing with that sort of thing. They manage to deal with that problem for all of our other criminal laws, to give you an example.
Outlawing advertising via spam would mean that the company which wants your money, and has to be accessible to take orders, would face fines and jail time for officers if they spammed. Soon, only the outright frauds would be willing to take that kind of risk, and even the idiots would eventually stop sending money to spammers who never actually sent penis enlargement pills.
Yep, I know some too. I had some in my classes. They weren't prepared, just like the dummies. They could keep up with most of the foreign students, but not with the bright ones, who were just as bright but better prepared.
I did have one American student who was an exception, I thought. She was well prepared, very bright and she had gone to a local school (central Indiana). Then she told me that she would miss class the next day, because she would be going through her naturalization ceremony, with her parents. We talked, and it turned out that her parents had supplemented her public school education at home.
By definition, there will never be very many non-academic jobs for Ph.Ds. That sort of job is about finding new answers to old questions, and new questions that no one has asked yet. Google is one current example of a company that probably wouldn't exist without people who can do that. Those few jobs are really important for our economy, and I think that we're agreed that U.S. citizens won't get that sort of training in sufficient numbers. I'll go further and restate my case: U.S. citizens can't get that sort of training in sufficient numbers: they aren't prepared, even though some of them are bright enough.
What you're doing is why house prices are sticky downwards: when demand falls off, folks just hang onto their houses, and it can take years for the market to clear.
Don't assume that the house prices will magically turn around: unless something happens to bring back the demand, like lots of new jobs, prices won't rise fast or soon. Lots of new jobs would solve your problem anyway, wouldn't it?
I was one of the few who noticed when "mortgage payment" became "rent" in the CPI.
I wouldn't read anything into that. I'm an economist, and the CPI is just a fixed basket of goods and services which might be purchased by a ``typical urban consumer''. It started out as a list of essentials for WWII shipyard workers, and it's updated periodically. If they changed from owning to renting, it's just a sign that the working poor don't own apartments in the big city. Nothing new there. Anyway, it wasn't any kind of warning, and there is nothing there that you could see more clearly with the aid of a tin-foil hat.
Move in with your folks, rent out the house, and suffer for a while, until you can afford that trailer. Whatever you do, don't keep going deeper into debt.
Sell your house, put a trailer on your parents' farm, and you'll be back on your feet in no time. I'm doing something like that right now.
The foreign students are a big part of any technical graduate school; foreign students are the clear majority in engineering, physics, math, and even in the non-MBA portions of business schools. For those few jobs which require the sort of knowlege you get in those schools, no work visas means almost no workers. Those few jobs are the ones which are most likely to lead to the creation of new wealth, so we don't want to see them disappear from the U.S.
Also, one of the most effective things we can do to defang aggressive nations like Mainland China (short of a nuclear first strike) is to bring their best and brightest over here, educate them at China's expense, then employ them here. It makes them and the U.S. better off, at China's expense.
For the U.S., those work visas are a mixed blessing, at worst.
Download free trial
Purchase ?
Doesn't sound any different than Winzip to me.
I'm usually not in the admin group, but periodically, I need to be put there to make things work. That shouldn't be necessary.
``Unsolicited bulk email'' seems like a pretty good definition to me, but I guess that's not quite good enough for the brainiacs at FTC.
Sounds reasonable. Why is it that at home, I never log in as root, but at work, on a Windows box, I often need to be Admin? Putting it another way, why is it that Windows is set up so that most of us don't have any choice about running as Admin?
MS charges a fee for a necessary tool: "Charging for this? What a ripoff!"
How about:
MS includes a necessary tool free, using the profits from their OS monopoly to destroy a competitor: ``Unfair bundling!''
MS charges a fee for a tool which is only necessary because of their mal- or non-feasance: ``Charging for this? What a ripoff!''
No inconsistancy here.
How about the AA cell? Would that be useful?
I'm trying to think of places where I have seen an ethernet jack but no wall power. Hmmm .... zero. Never seen such a place.
Now I'm trying to think how many times I've wanted to shave in a room which contained an ethernet jack. Hmmmm .... zero.
So, come on, somebody, tell me why you would buy a power-over-ethernet razor. I'm stumped.
Is it really? How often do you boot? I reboot whenever there's a power failure (and thank God for ext3). None yet this winter, so I really can't recall how long the boot takes.
Linux ===============
BSD ========
And:
Windows ===========
.........
BSOD
Windows ===========
BSOD
Windows ===========
BSOD
Windows ===========
BSOD
Windows ===========
BSOD
Windows ===========
BSOD
And it will overheat, and the case will crack. And people will buy it anyway, just for the looks.
Functional sculpture, at least until the case cracks disrupt the circuts.