The basic actions involved in surgery are extremely precise
- but the same could be said of programming. Knowing which
actions to perform and being able to cope when things go
wrong would seem to be areas where there is much more room for lateral
thinking.
It's also worth noting that many of the examples cited here
are of things where there is a lot of external stimulus.
Programming differs from these things in that it is to a very
great extent stimulated internally - there's no class of kids or
immediate problem to respond to and things generally are
not at all time critical ("do it now").
The big problem people have to address with optical logic is heat dissapation. The trouble with most of the schemes people have come up with thus far is getting rid of the heat the devices produce.
There's problems doing that with C++ - the standard is still fairly new and so there's a fair chance that any given compiler will have problems in at least some areas.
Then why do the separate countries of the UK field separate football (soccer) teams, but a united Olympic team? Can't they work it out between themselves?
They can work it out - for most things there are separate sporting bodies for Scotland and presumably Wales. The problem is that the IOC (the people in charge of the Olympics) will only allow entities that are internationally recognised countries (I forget what the exact criteria used are) to enter. Since there's one UK government the various
As I understand it, they are separate countries.... and in fact Wales and Scotland both voted overwhelmingly for devolution.
Kind of. It's rather complicated, but approximately:
The whole of the UK has one government, which chooses to devolve some of its power to other bodies. That's what the Scottish and Welsh parliaments are.
England and Wales are one country for most purposes (eg, legal system) because way back in the middle ages England conquered Wales.
Scotland was never conquered by England but the Scottish king inherited the English throne after the death of Elizabeth I. For a while the countries were run independantly, but in the 18th (?) century it was decided that the Scottish and English parlaments should merge. However, nothing else was changed so Scotland still has a separate legal system, separate education system and so on. It's just that they're all made by the same body as makes the English laws.
I don't really see the distinction between a handle and a nickname. In fact, my handle (broonie) was what people called me long before I ever used a computer. As far as I'm concerned it is a name.
Telecos don't make money from software. Bandwidth and other hardware things perhaps, but not really software.
Re:Additional Background and Perspectives
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
·
· Score: 2
Finally, what happens if other competitors start advertising bogus routes to competing web pages or services?
IMHO above.net needs to be bitch slapped, hard.
Sure, but above.net aren't doing that. What's happening is (approximately) that ORBS' upstream provider is telling the world that it can route to its networks (including ORBS) through above.net. Since above.net blackholes ORBS (as is their right - they're under no obligation to carry traffic they don't want and haven't agreed to carry) anyone trying to use these routes has problems. The fix is for ORBS' upstream to stop advertising above.net as a route to ORBS.
You can get perfectly good VoIP performance with current IPv4 systems. What's not so easy is getting good latency and jitter out of the internet. On a private network it's much easier to manage these things. IPv6 doesn't really buy you that much.
As far as things like mobile phones go, they don't give such good performance as PSTN. On a scale from 0 to 5 with 4 being about PSTN quality they tend to come in a bit under 4. Besides, one of the more important applications for VoIP is sharing bandwidth between (and integrating) data and voice networks. Mobile phones don't address the issue there, they merely change the transport for the voice network.
The problem with the GPL isn't at the source level, it's in the binary. There's no concern about distributing a GPLed QT-using application in source form, but when you compile that application and try distribute the binary then that binary (which is derived from both the GPLed components and QT) you find that you can't distribute the binary and satisfy the GPL.
Dynamic linking makes this a bit unclear (to say the least), but that's the gist of the problem.
Not much, really. I guess the main thing that would be annoying us is that Corel haven't really given that much back to Debian, even though they talked about doing so early on. It's also a bit annoying that you can't upgrade cleanly from Corel to Debian. Sometimes people get annoied when Corel don't credit Debian.
I don't think there's anything really major, and certainly nothing insurmountable.
I'd say the admin load was pretty much the other way around - news servers have got to be the easiest things out there to admin (providing you don't try to handle all the binaries or anything silly like that). It's extremely hard to make a running news server fall over completely (particularly now you get things like CNFS). Something like/. would seem to require more work on the part of the admins.
If you're thinking of moderated groups, then you're right although for that very reason I'm not always sure I approve of moderated groups. For client-side moderation (ie, killfiles & so on), Gnus' adaptive scoring solves most of the problems for me and there's always NoCeM and GroupLens if you want global moderation (I don't really).
What's on Usenet varies - there are some dead groups and spam-filled groups like the one you describe, but there are also an awful lot of active and vibrant groups out there. Writing off the entirety of Usenet based on one group is foolish. For whatever reasons some groups are still-born or die off or just have a kind of people you don't get on well with (in the case of distributed computing, you'll probably find that historically a lot of that discussion has gone over mailing lists).
Your news provider can also make a difference - even a small effort to clean spam from the feed can make a big difference - although the main thing is usually the presence of a set of active regulars.
As someone has already said, Usenet is all about community. Being able to clickey-click to someone's home page is nothing - what makes the community is the regulars, the newbies, the in-jokes, the recurring threads, the shared histories and so on. You can put a brief bio on your user page, but compared to actually talking to people that gives away relatively little.
If all you're seeing is what you desciribe then I'd suggest trying some of the more social groups - fan groups tend to that, for example. There's a lot of rubbish and quite a bit of hostility in places, but then there's an awful lot of different kinds of people out there and you can probably find groups for all of them on Usenet.
As far as HTML goes, the main reason it's frowned upon is that it generally adds only minimal value to a posting and presents a great many opportunities to make a posting difficult or impossible to read. Pretty much all the useful things can be represented in plain text anyway. The fact that it's also incompatible with most of the existing clients is just the nail in the coffin.
Debian currently comes on 4CDs (2 binary, 2 source), although if you add in non-US and non-free (neither of which are part of the official distribution) you get an extra CD. Given the rate at which the number of packages increases I can see there being more CDs than this next time around.
I'm not surprised SuSE comes on more disks - it includes a large selection of non-free software (some of which is quite large), which Debian obviously won't include. That's possibly worth a CD by itself, and then there's KDE and all the other QT stuff which isn't included yet.
I suspect that when people say "Debian includes more stuff" they're either doing a comparison on the number of packages or looking at some particular set of obscure software that isn't included by other distributions (what other distribution has not one, but two INTERCAL compilers?).
Use doesn't have much effect on the resolution of analogue prints - you tend to get scratching and missed frames after a while (although usually only at the start and end of the reels, and then normally only at the start of the first reel), but the images themselves tend to be fine.
The grain you saw were almost certainly down to projection - either the projector wasn't as good (likely) or the projectionist was doing something silly. It could have been a bad transfer to 16mm, but I'd be surprised if they'd put that film onto 16mm.
Viewing a film and viewing a billboard are very different things - people view film with much greater attention and for longer periods. Remember that with film people do actually manage to notice the difference between standard 35mm prints and 70mm prints.
It's not just compression that creates problems. Current video projection technology has some pretty serious problems - it's expensive, unreliable and has problems with image quality and reproducing some colours.
Film stock may be expensive, but the equipment required to show it is excptionally reliable and fault-tolerant. You can get results from thirty year old projectors that currently avalible video systems can't compare with. It will certainly be possible for digital technology to replace analogue (it's already doing that on TV), but I wouldn't hold your breath.
Most of the packages have very little to do with holding up the release - generally, a package can always be dropped if nobody feels like fixing it.
What holds up releases are those really important things that we can't release without - anything else can just be dropped from the distribution if nobody wants to fix it. Being an all-voulenteer project, we can't really compel people to work on these things. Currently, it's the boot floppies but they seem to be coming together.
It could, but OTOH unreleased ports don't slow released ones much (so if everything is really bad then the port just won't be released) and generally Unix applications are pretty portable. Most porting work is pretty automatic - it's only a small set of problem packages that cause much hassle.
2.) The FreeBSD Ports Collection is truly incredible; there little or no need or desire for a Debian package system.
That cuts both ways:-) .
4.) The licensing issues are difficult, if not impossible to resolve.
What licensing issues? Debian already includes plenty of BSD licensed software, so if there are any problems then we should have encountered them by now.
6.) Finally, from quickly scanning the Debian mailing lists, it seems as if most of the Debian developers have no respect for FreeBSD. One called it "dying software" and others claimed it offered no advantages over Linux. While everyone is entitled to an opinion, however ill-informed and erroneous, I wonder how dedicated Debian could be to an operating system it does not like and does not respect; after all, part of the allure of working on open source software is being able to code for your own pleasure rather than someone else's.
Debian is a very diverse organization - there's no uniform stance on licensing issues and so on beyond what's in the DFSG and social contract. While there are people who have said nasty things about FreeBSD, there are also people who have said nice things about it who have just as much say in Debian. You're probably much better off thinking of Debian as being a group of individuals under a common flag than as a monolithic corporate entity.
One presumes that the people who started this discussion by saying they'd like to work on a FreeBSD version of Debian care enough to work on it. Since that's all that it really takes to get something done in Debian - someone willing to actually do the work - I can't see much practical problem.
Debian and the FSF irritate me with their holier-than-art-thou pronouncements on freedom.
Again, you'll probably find there are plenty of Debian developers who share your views on licensing issues but for whatever reason choose to work on Debian.
The current plan seems to be to use FreeBSD's libc, not glibc, and to rebuild all the packages to run natively (rather than re-use Linux binaries via the emulation layer).
As for FreeBSD being an OS not just a kernel, well, you're right. But there is a kernel in there too.
You don't need to install the whole of the updated distribution - just the bits where you need the new versions. So long as the dependancies are satisifed, your system will work fine with packages from a mix of releases installed.
Which is not to say that it wouldn't be nice to get things out faster, just that it's not as bad a problem as it might be.
Slashdot Mirror
The basic actions involved in surgery are extremely precise - but the same could be said of programming. Knowing which actions to perform and being able to cope when things go wrong would seem to be areas where there is much more room for lateral thinking.
It's also worth noting that many of the examples cited here are of things where there is a lot of external stimulus. Programming differs from these things in that it is to a very great extent stimulated internally - there's no class of kids or immediate problem to respond to and things generally are not at all time critical ("do it now").
The big problem people have to address with optical logic is heat dissapation. The trouble with most of the schemes people have come up with thus far is getting rid of the heat the devices produce.
There's problems doing that with C++ - the standard is still fairly new and so there's a fair chance that any given compiler will have problems in at least some areas.
- The whole of the UK has one government, which chooses to devolve some of its power to other bodies. That's what the Scottish and Welsh parliaments are.
- England and Wales are one country for most purposes (eg, legal system) because way back in the middle ages England conquered Wales.
- Scotland was never conquered by England but the Scottish king inherited the English throne after the death of Elizabeth I. For a while the countries were run independantly, but in the 18th (?) century it was decided that the Scottish and English parlaments should merge. However, nothing else was changed so Scotland still has a separate legal system, separate education system and so on. It's just that they're all made by the same body as makes the English laws.
Like I say, approximately.I don't really see the distinction between a handle and a nickname. In fact, my handle (broonie) was what people called me long before I ever used a computer. As far as I'm concerned it is a name.
Telecos don't make money from software. Bandwidth and other hardware things perhaps, but not really software.
Sure, but above.net aren't doing that. What's happening is (approximately) that ORBS' upstream provider is telling the world that it can route to its networks (including ORBS) through above.net. Since above.net blackholes ORBS (as is their right - they're under no obligation to carry traffic they don't want and haven't agreed to carry) anyone trying to use these routes has problems. The fix is for ORBS' upstream to stop advertising above.net as a route to ORBS.
You can get perfectly good VoIP performance with current IPv4 systems. What's not so easy is getting good latency and jitter out of the internet. On a private network it's much easier to manage these things. IPv6 doesn't really buy you that much.
As far as things like mobile phones go, they don't give such good performance as PSTN. On a scale from 0 to 5 with 4 being about PSTN quality they tend to come in a bit under 4. Besides, one of the more important applications for VoIP is sharing bandwidth between (and integrating) data and voice networks. Mobile phones don't address the issue there, they merely change the transport for the voice network.
The problem with the GPL isn't at the source level, it's in the binary. There's no concern about distributing a GPLed QT-using application in source form, but when you compile that application and try distribute the binary then that binary (which is derived from both the GPLed components and QT) you find that you can't distribute the binary and satisfy the GPL.
Dynamic linking makes this a bit unclear (to say the least), but that's the gist of the problem.
Not much, really. I guess the main thing that would be annoying us is that Corel haven't really given that much back to Debian, even though they talked about doing so early on. It's also a bit annoying that you can't upgrade cleanly from Corel to Debian. Sometimes people get annoied when Corel don't credit Debian.
I don't think there's anything really major, and certainly nothing insurmountable.
I'd say the admin load was pretty much the other way around - news servers have got to be the easiest things out there to admin (providing you don't try to handle all the binaries or anything silly like that). It's extremely hard to make a running news server fall over completely (particularly now you get things like CNFS). Something like /. would seem to require more work on the part of the admins.
If you're thinking of moderated groups, then you're right although for that very reason I'm not always sure I approve of moderated groups. For client-side moderation (ie, killfiles & so on), Gnus' adaptive scoring solves most of the problems for me and there's always NoCeM and GroupLens if you want global moderation (I don't really).
What's on Usenet varies - there are some dead groups and spam-filled groups like the one you describe, but there are also an awful lot of active and vibrant groups out there. Writing off the entirety of Usenet based on one group is foolish. For whatever reasons some groups are still-born or die off or just have a kind of people you don't get on well with (in the case of distributed computing, you'll probably find that historically a lot of that discussion has gone over mailing lists).
Your news provider can also make a difference - even a small effort to clean spam from the feed can make a big difference - although the main thing is usually the presence of a set of active regulars.
As someone has already said, Usenet is all about community. Being able to clickey-click to someone's home page is nothing - what makes the community is the regulars, the newbies, the in-jokes, the recurring threads, the shared histories and so on. You can put a brief bio on your user page, but compared to actually talking to people that gives away relatively little.
If all you're seeing is what you desciribe then I'd suggest trying some of the more social groups - fan groups tend to that, for example. There's a lot of rubbish and quite a bit of hostility in places, but then there's an awful lot of different kinds of people out there and you can probably find groups for all of them on Usenet.
As far as HTML goes, the main reason it's frowned upon is that it generally adds only minimal value to a posting and presents a great many opportunities to make a posting difficult or impossible to read. Pretty much all the useful things can be represented in plain text anyway. The fact that it's also incompatible with most of the existing clients is just the nail in the coffin.
Since we don't actually sell our own CDs, there's no real point in us producing the CD images ourselves.
Debian currently comes on 4CDs (2 binary, 2 source), although if you add in non-US and non-free (neither of which are part of the official distribution) you get an extra CD. Given the rate at which the number of packages increases I can see there being more CDs than this next time around.
I'm not surprised SuSE comes on more disks - it includes a large selection of non-free software (some of which is quite large), which Debian obviously won't include. That's possibly worth a CD by itself, and then there's KDE and all the other QT stuff which isn't included yet.
I suspect that when people say "Debian includes more stuff" they're either doing a comparison on the number of packages or looking at some particular set of obscure software that isn't included by other distributions (what other distribution has not one, but two INTERCAL compilers?).
Use doesn't have much effect on the resolution of analogue prints - you tend to get scratching and missed frames after a while (although usually only at the start and end of the reels, and then normally only at the start of the first reel), but the images themselves tend to be fine.
The grain you saw were almost certainly down to projection - either the projector wasn't as good (likely) or the projectionist was doing something silly. It could have been a bad transfer to 16mm, but I'd be surprised if they'd put that film onto 16mm.
Viewing a film and viewing a billboard are very different things - people view film with much greater attention and for longer periods. Remember that with film people do actually manage to notice the difference between standard 35mm prints and 70mm prints.
It's not just compression that creates problems. Current video projection technology has some pretty serious problems - it's expensive, unreliable and has problems with image quality and reproducing some colours.
Film stock may be expensive, but the equipment required to show it is excptionally reliable and fault-tolerant. You can get results from thirty year old projectors that currently avalible video systems can't compare with. It will certainly be possible for digital technology to replace analogue (it's already doing that on TV), but I wouldn't hold your breath.
Most of the packages have very little to do with holding up the release - generally, a package can always be dropped if nobody feels like fixing it.
What holds up releases are those really important things that we can't release without - anything else can just be dropped from the distribution if nobody wants to fix it. Being an all-voulenteer project, we can't really compel people to work on these things. Currently, it's the boot floppies but they seem to be coming together.
It could, but OTOH unreleased ports don't slow released ones much (so if everything is really bad then the port just won't be released) and generally Unix applications are pretty portable. Most porting work is pretty automatic - it's only a small set of problem packages that cause much hassle.
Potato is going to be based on 2.0 kernels? What makes you say that?
Debian is a very diverse organization - there's no uniform stance on licensing issues and so on beyond what's in the DFSG and social contract. While there are people who have said nasty things about FreeBSD, there are also people who have said nice things about it who have just as much say in Debian. You're probably much better off thinking of Debian as being a group of individuals under a common flag than as a monolithic corporate entity.
One presumes that the people who started this discussion by saying they'd like to work on a FreeBSD version of Debian care enough to work on it. Since that's all that it really takes to get something done in Debian - someone willing to actually do the work - I can't see much practical problem.
Again, you'll probably find there are plenty of Debian developers who share your views on licensing issues but for whatever reason choose to work on Debian.
The current plan seems to be to use FreeBSD's libc, not glibc, and to rebuild all the packages to run natively (rather than re-use Linux binaries via the emulation layer).
As for FreeBSD being an OS not just a kernel, well, you're right. But there is a kernel in there too.
You don't need to install the whole of the updated distribution - just the bits where you need the new versions. So long as the dependancies are satisifed, your system will work fine with packages from a mix of releases installed.
Which is not to say that it wouldn't be nice to get things out faster, just that it's not as bad a problem as it might be.