> it is more about who the target of "free" is. The BSD-style folks focus on programmers; > the GPL-style folks future end-users.
This makes no sense. Users who aren't programmers have no use for source code, except possibly to scroll it by very fast in a command prompt window while trying to convince their clueless friends that they're uberhackers taking down the CIA or something like in the movies. To get any real tangible benefit out of the source code, you have to be able to make meaningful changes to it.
Freedom for the user means writing the software in a way that empowers the user. In practical terms that means two things: first, making the application configurable, and second, placing the user's desires ahead of other considerations. For example, a web browser that provides freedom to the user will allow pop-up windows to be disabled in general (possibly even by default), and enabled on a per-site basis, at the user's whim. Idiot web developers complain about this, because it takes freedoms they formerly enjoyed and puts them in the hands of the user where they belong.
Providing source code only provides freedom to people who know how to use source code. Generally speaking we call such people programmers. In principle nearly anyone can take advantage of those freedoms, theoretically, but in practice it is programmers who directly benefit.
Yes, yes, end users can benefit if the programmers add useful features. But that's a benefit provided by the programmers who add the features, only very indirectly the result of the license; indeed, it's only the result of the license in any way at all if the programmer would otherwise not have made the contribution -- there _are_ programmers who are unwilling to contribute to projects that do not use their favorite license, but they are very much in the minority. And yes, a business has the option to hire a programmer to implement their changes, but the choice of license, BSD versus GPL versus MIT versus whatever, is not the determining factor there, either.
Eh. Real men release their work into the public domain:-)
So arm the women with pepper spray, then. (Yes, I know a subsistance-level village can't afford that, but now that the story has achieved international press, so it would be a relatively simple thing to get a few donations.) Or other non-lethal weapons. (The bolus is pretty low-tech and fairly effective...) Or send a small number of big scary men with them as "enforcers". Or a couple of dogs. Or skunks, or badgers, or whatever. Or design more clever traps. Or a more defensible perimeter.
Ultimately, the monkeys don't have what it takes to maintain a protracted battle of wits with a group of determined humans.
For every service that runs on any of the systems you administer, you graph its availabile (and, if applicable, unavailable) time as a pie chart. If you want bar charts, measure the number of seconds of continuous availability since the last service interruption on a logarithmic scale -- for each service. That is, after all, the primary job of a *nix admin: to make sure everything continues to run smoothly.
Note that availability can be different from uptime. If the network cable is unplugged, the system is unavailable even if it continues running. Conversely, if you use redundancy and failover and so forth (which I'd think you would in a Fortune 500 environment) you can shut down a server for upgrades without having any detrimental effect on uptime.
Come to think of it, that also works for graphing the availability of system administrators. Any time at least one of you is on the clock counts as available time for the system administrators' service, but if you all leave at once for any reason, that's unavailable time.
A variety. Without question my favorite is BWV 1080 (and my favorite movement from it is contrapunctus ii). I also like BWV 1043, certain of the cantatas, most of the inventions, several movements from the Brandenberg concertos, a number of the pieces from The Well-Tempered Clavier,... there are so many to pick from.
I guess my _least_ favorite Bach pieces as a group would be the organ works. As keyboard instruments go, I like the harpsichord better. Of course, I still like Bach's organ works better than practically anything from the Classical era.
Besides Bach, I also really like the music of Domenico Scarlatti, and I can listen to quite a bit of Antonio Vivaldi without getting tired of it...
> So you probably grok why I've always insisted that punk rock is the modern Beethoven.
Sure. They both use new-fangled (for the time) instruments to make the music unnecessarily loud in a misanthropic attempt to make the listeners deaf, presumably hoping that perhaps then they won't notice the lack of any significant counterpoint.
Classical and Rock are virtually identical, really, except that electric guitars and electronic keyboards and such didn't exist in the late eighteenth century due to technological limitations, so they had to make do with what they had, notably the pianoforte (the major selling point of which, over the more traditional/establishment harpsichord, was that the harder you pounded on it the louder the notes came out, a dubious improvement if ever there was one).
> On a CD, the peak level is pre-defined & not changeable - anything that rises above this is set > to the maximum; an effect known as clipping.
In other words, there's an enforced maximum volume, and anything louder gets chopped off. Good. I don't really want the peaks to get arbitrarily loud. My ears don't like that. Honestly I'd be happier if the peaks were not much louder than the quiet parts.
> What the CD companies have been doing is raising the midline intensity.
So turn down the volume knob.
> Since the sound of a voice in comparison to a cymbal crash hasn't changed, they either have > to muffle the cymbal for the crash or let it clipp. Both generate distortion in the music. > Classical music is actually one of the places where this type of effect is absolutely unacceptable,
As you might have noticed from my previous post, I'm not exactly a big fan of Classical music. The whole idea of using volume and/or dynamic range as a key part of the musical expression is one that I find uninteresting and undesirable, and a really poor substitute for good compositional technique (especially counterpoint, which unfortunately seems to have been mostly forgotten or ignored after about 1750 or so).
> the 1812 overature would be a mockery of itself if the cannon shots were barely louder > than the brass section.
I tend to prefer my music without extreme percussion. This may sound weird to you, but I don't *like* being suddenly deafened. Frankly I can't really imagine why anyone else would like that, either. The popping baloons in the 1712 Overture push the limit of my tolerance for sudden bursts of loudness; they're only funny the first time you hear the piece, and after that they're annoying. The cannons in the 1812, likewise, are only novel the first time you ever hear the piece, and after that they just make the whole thing more unpleasant to listen to. I understand why they were used, but that doesn't make the music any less unenjoyable.
Actually, in terms of instruments, I kind of like harpsichord, or a fixed number of stringed instruments; but the most important feature of music, to my way of thinking, is not the instruments so much as the way the different voices move against one another. Playing stupid games with the loudness, moving it up and down all the tiem, just detracts from the listener's ability to hear the interaction between the voices (assuming there _is_ any interaction between the voices, which, granted, with a lot of today's music there isn't much).
Seriously, I don't see the problem. Decreased dynamic range is good, as far as I'm concerned. It means you set the volume where you want it and it *stays* there. Most of the music I listen to has a fairly narrow dynamic range. Most Bach pieces, for instance, have pretty much a steady volume for the entire piece. You don't find yourself straining to hear and cranking the volume up to 11 one minute just to convince yourself the speakers are still attached and then covering your ears and dragging the slider back down to 2 the next moment to avoid angering the neighbors across the street, like you do with Beethoven and his ilk.
Unless you are truly omniscient (simultanously aware of everything everywhere all the time), which most of us aren't, you can never know for sure when any given kind of animal is extinct. You can know when it was last verified and/or last reported that something was *not* extinct, but when you say that you think something is extinct, you're always speaking from a lack of knowledge, saying, in effect, "We are not _aware_ of any of these still being alive."
With large surface-dwelling megafauna (e.g., wooly rhinos), it is generally reasonable to assume (in the modern era, with most of the world explored and cheap communication fairly ubiquitous) that if you can go a few decades without verifying a living specimen, they're probably extinct -- although there a slim chance you've missed them somehow. With smaller things and water-dwelling things (_especially_ anything that lives in the deep ocean), it's harder to know.
On the one hand, dolphins are fairly large, and thus easy to spot compared to smaller fish, and a river is not so hard to check as the ocean. Nonetheless, one survey could still miss them easily enough, especially if there aren't very many.
Then too, with things that live in rivers, there's the question of whether they can enter and leave the river at various times (dwelling ad interim in lakes and/or the ocean). We know there are fishes that do this, most famously salmon, so it's a question worth asking.
The genetic diversity in a population decreases over time, unless the population interbreeds with another, genetically different population. Even then, if you consider all the interbreeding populations together as one, the genetic diversity of the whole population decreases over time.
The larger the population, the slower the decrease and, conversely, the smaller the population the faster the decrease. (In extreme cases this is called "inbreeding", but the effect in larger populations, albeit less pronounced, is still present.) Hence, the genetic diversity in Europe is relatively poor (or at any rate was until quite recently when a lot of immigrants started showing up), because the total size of the population, not to mention the population density, was smaller than other parts of the world.
The genetic diversity in certain island nations (notably in eastern Polynesia) is even worse, because of their isolation (hence, little infusions of different DNA from other populations) and small population.
In the modern era, with long-distance travel becomming relatively cheap and easy and common, the amount of exchange of genetic material between different parts of the world is significantly higher than in the past. Also the size of the population is getting quite large these days. Consequently, the rate of decay in our genetic diversity is slowing to a crawl. In areas like Europe, I expect the genetic diversity will significantly increase, due to infusions of foreign genetic material from other continents.
> I'll agree with just about anything that helps "the third guy" in elections. I'm tired of throwing my vote away!
I can understand this sentiment, and a lot of people share it. But it is intructive to work out just exactly what kind of "just about anything" it would take to make that work, and what the consequences would be. I'm fairly displeased myself with some of the stuff the party I've been voting for has been doing, but upon careful consideration it really is better than certain alternatives...
> Unfortunately, it's hard for me to believe that a third party will ever have > a legitimate chance at winning the presidency...
It can happen occasionally, when the major parties break apart due to significant political turmoil, but the situation never lasts for very many elections. Fundamentally these shake-ups always lead back to two viable major parties, one conservative and one liberal, and it doesn't take very long to happen. A third party is not viable[1] in this country over the long term. Our history, short as it is, bears this out very strongly. We have yet to have three or more parties all remain as serious contenders for the presidency for as many as two presidential elections in a row. One election is the record so far. One. There are reasons for this.
Abraham Lincoln, for instance, was essentially a third-party candidate, but the only reason he was able to be elected was because the other party had *also* split, at the same time. Furthermore, the split in the party (and also the other split in the other party) could not and did not last. By the time the very next presidential election rolled around, the old Whig party was a has-been and the new Republican party had inherited virtually all of its voters. By the same token, the split in the Democratic party was also not long-term viable, and by the time reconstruction was complete you once again had two parties: one conservative and one liberal.
The reasons why we always have two parties, one conservative and one liberal, are worth studying if you have any interest at all in sociology. The long and short of it is, our population is divided approximately that way. There are some moderates in the middle, and they swing back and forth, but there fundamentally aren't *enough* of them to keep a third party viable. And there are a few extremists off both ends of the chart, but not enough to keep a third-party viable.
If one of the two major parties gets too out of touch with its voters, then a split happens, but it always gets resolved quickly: either the split-off party has too little popular support to be viable and rapidly becomes irrelevant (this is what usually happens, H. Ross Perot being a recent example), or else, if the split-off party is significantly more in-touch with the parent party's voting public, the new party basically takes over and the old one rapidly dies off and becomes irrelevant (which is what happened with the Whig/Republican split). Either way, we're soon back to two parties: one conservative, and the other liberal.
This is, incidentally, why the civil war happened: the population is politically divided right down the middle, urban versus rural, liberal versus conservative. A civil war was pretty much inevitable even before the Revolution, and if there's something surprising about it it's that it took as long as it did to occur. If there's a second surprising thing, it's that we haven't had any more civil wars since.
I actually credit the much-maligned electoral college system with holding us together, because the electoral college gives extra power to the moderates, since they hold the deciding "swing" votes. Because of this the candidates from both parties temper their positions to avoid upsetting the moderates too much. This is why there's so much campaigning in the swing states. It's also why our voter turnout is relatively low, compared to countries with multiple viable parties. And it's why so many people feel that their party doesn't really
I actually used to use their desktop release at one time. That was a few distros ago for me (before Mandrake, which was before I started messing around with Gentoo, which I used until sometime after Ubuntu came out...), but RedHat 6 was pretty decent at the time. However, I thought they discontinued that product line a couple of years back to focus on the Enterprise product line (RHEL).
Are they just changing their minds about that, or is there some totally new angle here?
> GP means that since you have a high user id, you must be too young to associate the phrase with > MIT instead of UHF. Theory is, an older person would have heard the MIT quote first; a younger > person would have heard the UHF quote first.
I have no idea where I first heard the idiom, but in the absense of information to the contrary I would have guessed it was older than either reference. Fire hoses that carry water a lot faster than you can drink have been around since the late nineteenth century at least. (No, I wasn't there. But back in my day we used to have these things called "books"...)
> at work we are mandated to use IE6, they activelly scan and kill other browsers
Wait, your computer use is monitored so closely that you can't keep a locally-installed copy of Firefox in your home directory, but they don't mind that you waste time at work fiddling around with beta features of slashdot?
> FAT has the disadvantage of having maximum file size limit of only 4GiB. For me this is showstopper.
[Looks up what GiB stands for. Oh, same as GB, fine.]
I don't have any files that are quite that large, individually. But supposing I did, what cross-OS filesystem would you propose I use to store them, so that I can access them with equal ease from any major operating system? (Specifically, I need to be able to access them from Linux, Windows, or BSD, without a lot of hassle.)
> It's a sad but iron fact of life that market viability and not the quality of the end product defines > what lives and what ends up with the Amiga and other good ideas in the storeroom of history.
In terms of specific products, product lines, and companies, that's true.
However, it's not entirely true when it comes to ideas, capabilities, and interface design, because in the case of these things a lot (albeit not all) of the better ones get copied from product to product and from one company's product line to another. I'll give several examples:
My first example or two will come from the field of operating systems, since that seems relevant to the topic at hand. I don't know which operating system first introduced the concept of a hierarchical file system (wherein the root directory can contain directories, which can themselves contain directories, and so on -- and all of them can contain files). The reason I don't know is because that was before my time. When I picked up PC-DOS 3.3, the hierarchical filesystem was already there, and various other operating systems already had it as well. Of course the idea of an operating system that *doesn't* have this seems silly now, but indeed there were at one time systems that didn't. Once it was introduced, however, the utility was obvious, and so the feature was added to other systems. It no longer matters which OS had this feature first, or whether that OS is even one that anyone still uses, because the feature has been broadly adopted.
A more modern example, still in the realm of software, is the panel applet. I don't know whether it was in Gnome or KDE first, but they've both had panel apps since the nineties. Either one of them introduced the concept first and the other copied it, or else they both copied it from some earlier desktop environment (CDE? WindowMaker? Who knows.) In any event, the usefulness is obvious, and so the capability was added to the latest version of Windows. (It's still somewhat limited there -- among other things you can't put the things on any panel you want, just the one sidebar panel -- but it's a good start; I imagine a subsequent version will improve it somewhat, now that it's been included.) So the feature is spreading. It no longer *matters* where the feature was first developed, or whether the desktop environment it was originally developed for is even still in use. The feature is being increasingly broadly adopted.
Perhaps the best examples I can think of, however, come not from the software industry, but fast food. I don't know who introduced the first drive-through window at a fast food restaurant, but I do know that it didn't take the rest of the industry very long to catch on to the idea. Today we take for granted that virtually all fast-food restaurants have drive-through windows. I also don't know which chain introduced the packaged children's meal with toy, but once it became apparent that they would increase sales... they sure all have it now. I _do_ know who introduced the Extra Value Meal, because that one is within my memory, and I also remember how rapidly the other fast food chains started doing more-or-less the same thing. Later, the same chain that introduced the concept in the first place augmented it with the Super Size option, and the other chains soon found themselves copying that little innovation as well. I also remember which chain introduced pizza delivery: indeed, it was pretty much their whole selling point and main advertising slogan for their first year or so. I only know of one major national pizza chain now that does not deliver (or, at least, not from most of their locations), and they're the chain that made their reputation on economy and continues to hold their share of the market largely by being the least expensive. All the other big chains, a lot of the small regional chains, and even some local mom-and-pop pizza joints, do delivery.
Now, there are certainly exceptions -- ideas that were good, features that were useful, but for on
Given that Grub is Gnu-branded, and Debian installs it *by default*, I was practically certain that it was open-source already (though I don't happen to actually _know_ which license, though since it's Gnu-branded I bet I could venture a guess...) and maintained by the FSF. Now here we have Wikia acquiring Grub and releasing it under an open-source license. Must be a different Grub, but that still leaves room for lots of confusion.
What I want to know is, will Grub be released under the *same* open-source license as is used for Grub, or a different one? I could just about break out into an Abbott and Costello parody with this question...
It's true that a free press _is_ dangerous. He was right about that much. It causes all kinds of trouble.
However, a free press is nonetheless less dangerous than a government that controls the press -- as he himself proved to anyone who was paying any attention whatever.
> It sounds rather satirical itself. The mere mention of it could get you locked up.
Upon a closer reading, it's not as extreme as it sounds. If I understand correctly, they're not telling you what you can say about Parliament or what political opinions you can express. They're just controlling what you can do with real footage taken inside their actual Parliament.
It's still pretty dumb, but not as repressive as the raw headline makes it sound.
> There are only two major providers of television news in New Zealand -- one state-owned (TV1) and > another private (TV3, owned by CanWest). Neither actually invests in quality journalism any more.
Wait, did you just use the phrase "quality journalism" in the same paragraph with "television news"?
Okay, I'm not from that part of the world, so maybe in New Zealand this juxtaposition makes some kind of sense that I can't understand, but around here (Ohio), putting those two concepts together is just absurd. Actually, just using the phrase "quality journalism" is a bit on the absurd side all by itself.
I think that would be more the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Love. On the other hand, I don't think New Zealand is even in Oceania[1], much less in Airstrip One, so things may be a bit different there.
--- [1] Yes, the use of "Oceania" to refer to the Americas and the Brittish isles _is_ confusing. What we call
"Oceania" in the modern world would almost certainly be part of Eastasia in Orwell's world.
Slashdot Mirror
You might be interested in the FreeDOS project. HTH.HAND.
> it is more about who the target of "free" is. The BSD-style folks focus on programmers;
:-)
> the GPL-style folks future end-users.
This makes no sense. Users who aren't programmers have no use for source code, except possibly to scroll it by very fast in a command prompt window while trying to convince their clueless friends that they're uberhackers taking down the CIA or something like in the movies. To get any real tangible benefit out of the source code, you have to be able to make meaningful changes to it.
Freedom for the user means writing the software in a way that empowers the user. In practical terms that means two things: first, making the application configurable, and second, placing the user's desires ahead of other considerations. For example, a web browser that provides freedom to the user will allow pop-up windows to be disabled in general (possibly even by default), and enabled on a per-site basis, at the user's whim. Idiot web developers complain about this, because it takes freedoms they formerly enjoyed and puts them in the hands of the user where they belong.
Providing source code only provides freedom to people who know how to use source code. Generally speaking we call such people programmers. In principle nearly anyone can take advantage of those freedoms, theoretically, but in practice it is programmers who directly benefit.
Yes, yes, end users can benefit if the programmers add useful features. But that's a benefit provided by the programmers who add the features, only very indirectly the result of the license; indeed, it's only the result of the license in any way at all if the programmer would otherwise not have made the contribution -- there _are_ programmers who are unwilling to contribute to projects that do not use their favorite license, but they are very much in the minority. And yes, a business has the option to hire a programmer to implement their changes, but the choice of license, BSD versus GPL versus MIT versus whatever, is not the determining factor there, either.
Eh. Real men release their work into the public domain
> It's a criminal offense to harm them.
So arm the women with pepper spray, then. (Yes, I know a subsistance-level village can't afford that, but now that the story has achieved international press, so it would be a relatively simple thing to get a few donations.) Or other non-lethal weapons. (The bolus is pretty low-tech and fairly effective...) Or send a small number of big scary men with them as "enforcers". Or a couple of dogs. Or skunks, or badgers, or whatever. Or design more clever traps. Or a more defensible perimeter.
Ultimately, the monkeys don't have what it takes to maintain a protracted battle of wits with a group of determined humans.
For every service that runs on any of the systems you administer, you graph its availabile (and, if applicable, unavailable) time as a pie chart. If you want bar charts, measure the number of seconds of continuous availability since the last service interruption on a logarithmic scale -- for each service. That is, after all, the primary job of a *nix admin: to make sure everything continues to run smoothly.
Note that availability can be different from uptime. If the network cable is unplugged, the system is unavailable even if it continues running. Conversely, if you use redundancy and failover and so forth (which I'd think you would in a Fortune 500 environment) you can shut down a server for upgrades without having any detrimental effect on uptime.
Come to think of it, that also works for graphing the availability of system administrators. Any time at least one of you is on the clock counts as available time for the system administrators' service, but if you all leave at once for any reason, that's unavailable time.
> Jeez which Bach pieces are you listening to?
... there are so many to pick from.
A variety. Without question my favorite is BWV 1080 (and my favorite movement from it is contrapunctus ii). I also like BWV 1043, certain of the cantatas, most of the inventions, several movements from the Brandenberg concertos, a number of the pieces from The Well-Tempered Clavier,
I guess my _least_ favorite Bach pieces as a group would be the organ works. As keyboard instruments go, I like the harpsichord better. Of course, I still like Bach's organ works better than practically anything from the Classical era.
Besides Bach, I also really like the music of Domenico Scarlatti, and I can listen to quite a bit of Antonio Vivaldi without getting tired of it...
> So you probably grok why I've always insisted that punk rock is the modern Beethoven.
Sure. They both use new-fangled (for the time) instruments to make the music unnecessarily loud in a misanthropic attempt to make the listeners deaf, presumably hoping that perhaps then they won't notice the lack of any significant counterpoint.
Classical and Rock are virtually identical, really, except that electric guitars and electronic keyboards and such didn't exist in the late eighteenth century due to technological limitations, so they had to make do with what they had, notably the pianoforte (the major selling point of which, over the more traditional/establishment harpsichord, was that the harder you pounded on it the louder the notes came out, a dubious improvement if ever there was one).
I know what volume and dynamic range are.
> On a CD, the peak level is pre-defined & not changeable - anything that rises above this is set
> to the maximum; an effect known as clipping.
In other words, there's an enforced maximum volume, and anything louder gets chopped off. Good. I don't really want the peaks to get arbitrarily loud. My ears don't like that. Honestly I'd be happier if the peaks were not much louder than the quiet parts.
> What the CD companies have been doing is raising the midline intensity.
So turn down the volume knob.
> Since the sound of a voice in comparison to a cymbal crash hasn't changed, they either have
> to muffle the cymbal for the crash or let it clipp. Both generate distortion in the music.
> Classical music is actually one of the places where this type of effect is absolutely unacceptable,
As you might have noticed from my previous post, I'm not exactly a big fan of Classical music. The whole idea of using volume and/or dynamic range as a key part of the musical expression is one that I find uninteresting and undesirable, and a really poor substitute for good compositional technique (especially counterpoint, which unfortunately seems to have been mostly forgotten or ignored after about 1750 or so).
> the 1812 overature would be a mockery of itself if the cannon shots were barely louder
> than the brass section.
I tend to prefer my music without extreme percussion. This may sound weird to you, but I don't *like* being suddenly deafened. Frankly I can't really imagine why anyone else would like that, either. The popping baloons in the 1712 Overture push the limit of my tolerance for sudden bursts of loudness; they're only funny the first time you hear the piece, and after that they're annoying. The cannons in the 1812, likewise, are only novel the first time you ever hear the piece, and after that they just make the whole thing more unpleasant to listen to. I understand why they were used, but that doesn't make the music any less unenjoyable.
Actually, in terms of instruments, I kind of like harpsichord, or a fixed number of stringed instruments; but the most important feature of music, to my way of thinking, is not the instruments so much as the way the different voices move against one another. Playing stupid games with the loudness, moving it up and down all the tiem, just detracts from the listener's ability to hear the interaction between the voices (assuming there _is_ any interaction between the voices, which, granted, with a lot of today's music there isn't much).
Are they going to remake Take It Big?
Seriously, I don't see the problem. Decreased dynamic range is good, as far as I'm concerned. It means you set the volume where you want it and it *stays* there. Most of the music I listen to has a fairly narrow dynamic range. Most Bach pieces, for instance, have pretty much a steady volume for the entire piece. You don't find yourself straining to hear and cranking the volume up to 11 one minute just to convince yourself the speakers are still attached and then covering your ears and dragging the slider back down to 2 the next moment to avoid angering the neighbors across the street, like you do with Beethoven and his ilk.
> Wikipedia seems the best place for the author's "how to download and use offline".
No Original Research.
Unless you are truly omniscient (simultanously aware of everything everywhere all the time), which most of us aren't, you can never know for sure when any given kind of animal is extinct. You can know when it was last verified and/or last reported that something was *not* extinct, but when you say that you think something is extinct, you're always speaking from a lack of knowledge, saying, in effect, "We are not _aware_ of any of these still being alive."
With large surface-dwelling megafauna (e.g., wooly rhinos), it is generally reasonable to assume (in the modern era, with most of the world explored and cheap communication fairly ubiquitous) that if you can go a few decades without verifying a living specimen, they're probably extinct -- although there a slim chance you've missed them somehow. With smaller things and water-dwelling things (_especially_ anything that lives in the deep ocean), it's harder to know.
On the one hand, dolphins are fairly large, and thus easy to spot compared to smaller fish, and a river is not so hard to check as the ocean. Nonetheless, one survey could still miss them easily enough, especially if there aren't very many.
Then too, with things that live in rivers, there's the question of whether they can enter and leave the river at various times (dwelling ad interim in lakes and/or the ocean). We know there are fishes that do this, most famously salmon, so it's a question worth asking.
> I still don't get why people where so upset in the first place.
Oh, that's easy. People like to get upset. Any excuse will do.
The genetic diversity in a population decreases over time, unless the population interbreeds with another, genetically different population. Even then, if you consider all the interbreeding populations together as one, the genetic diversity of the whole population decreases over time.
The larger the population, the slower the decrease and, conversely, the smaller the population the faster the decrease. (In extreme cases this is called "inbreeding", but the effect in larger populations, albeit less pronounced, is still present.) Hence, the genetic diversity in Europe is relatively poor (or at any rate was until quite recently when a lot of immigrants started showing up), because the total size of the population, not to mention the population density, was smaller than other parts of the world.
The genetic diversity in certain island nations (notably in eastern Polynesia) is even worse, because of their isolation (hence, little infusions of different DNA from other populations) and small population.
In the modern era, with long-distance travel becomming relatively cheap and easy and common, the amount of exchange of genetic material between different parts of the world is significantly higher than in the past. Also the size of the population is getting quite large these days. Consequently, the rate of decay in our genetic diversity is slowing to a crawl. In areas like Europe, I expect the genetic diversity will significantly increase, due to infusions of foreign genetic material from other continents.
> I'll agree with just about anything that helps "the third guy" in elections. I'm tired of throwing my vote away!
I can understand this sentiment, and a lot of people share it. But it is intructive to work out just exactly what kind of "just about anything" it would take to make that work, and what the consequences would be. I'm fairly displeased myself with some of the stuff the party I've been voting for has been doing, but upon careful consideration it really is better than certain alternatives...
> Unfortunately, it's hard for me to believe that a third party will ever have
> a legitimate chance at winning the presidency...
It can happen occasionally, when the major parties break apart due to significant political turmoil, but the situation never lasts for very many elections. Fundamentally these shake-ups always lead back to two viable major parties, one conservative and one liberal, and it doesn't take very long to happen. A third party is not viable[1] in this country over the long term. Our history, short as it is, bears this out very strongly. We have yet to have three or more parties all remain as serious contenders for the presidency for as many as two presidential elections in a row. One election is the record so far. One. There are reasons for this.
Abraham Lincoln, for instance, was essentially a third-party candidate, but the only reason he was able to be elected was because the other party had *also* split, at the same time. Furthermore, the split in the party (and also the other split in the other party) could not and did not last. By the time the very next presidential election rolled around, the old Whig party was a has-been and the new Republican party had inherited virtually all of its voters. By the same token, the split in the Democratic party was also not long-term viable, and by the time reconstruction was complete you once again had two parties: one conservative and one liberal.
The reasons why we always have two parties, one conservative and one liberal, are worth studying if you have any interest at all in sociology. The long and short of it is, our population is divided approximately that way. There are some moderates in the middle, and they swing back and forth, but there fundamentally aren't *enough* of them to keep a third party viable. And there are a few extremists off both ends of the chart, but not enough to keep a third-party viable.
If one of the two major parties gets too out of touch with its voters, then a split happens, but it always gets resolved quickly: either the split-off party has too little popular support to be viable and rapidly becomes irrelevant (this is what usually happens, H. Ross Perot being a recent example), or else, if the split-off party is significantly more in-touch with the parent party's voting public, the new party basically takes over and the old one rapidly dies off and becomes irrelevant (which is what happened with the Whig/Republican split). Either way, we're soon back to two parties: one conservative, and the other liberal.
This is, incidentally, why the civil war happened: the population is politically divided right down the middle, urban versus rural, liberal versus conservative. A civil war was pretty much inevitable even before the Revolution, and if there's something surprising about it it's that it took as long as it did to occur. If there's a second surprising thing, it's that we haven't had any more civil wars since.
I actually credit the much-maligned electoral college system with holding us together, because the electoral college gives extra power to the moderates, since they hold the deciding "swing" votes. Because of this the candidates from both parties temper their positions to avoid upsetting the moderates too much. This is why there's so much campaigning in the swing states. It's also why our voter turnout is relatively low, compared to countries with multiple viable parties. And it's why so many people feel that their party doesn't really
I actually used to use their desktop release at one time. That was a few distros ago for me (before Mandrake, which was before I started messing around with Gentoo, which I used until sometime after Ubuntu came out...), but RedHat 6 was pretty decent at the time. However, I thought they discontinued that product line a couple of years back to focus on the Enterprise product line (RHEL).
Are they just changing their minds about that, or is there some totally new angle here?
> I think most people are just going to vote based on the subject alone. Is this good or bad?
Yes.
> GP means that since you have a high user id, you must be too young to associate the phrase with
> MIT instead of UHF. Theory is, an older person would have heard the MIT quote first; a younger
> person would have heard the UHF quote first.
I have no idea where I first heard the idiom, but in the absense of information to the contrary I would have guessed it was older than either reference. Fire hoses that carry water a lot faster than you can drink have been around since the late nineteenth century at least. (No, I wasn't there. But back in my day we used to have these things called "books"...)
> at work we are mandated to use IE6, they activelly scan and kill other browsers
Wait, your computer use is monitored so closely that you can't keep a locally-installed copy of Firefox in your home directory, but they don't mind that you waste time at work fiddling around with beta features of slashdot?
Who do you work for, Catbert?
> FAT has the disadvantage of having maximum file size limit of only 4GiB. For me this is showstopper.
[Looks up what GiB stands for. Oh, same as GB, fine.]
I don't have any files that are quite that large, individually. But supposing I did, what cross-OS filesystem would you propose I use to store them, so that I can access them with equal ease from any major operating system? (Specifically, I need to be able to access them from Linux, Windows, or BSD, without a lot of hassle.)
> It's a sad but iron fact of life that market viability and not the quality of the end product defines
> what lives and what ends up with the Amiga and other good ideas in the storeroom of history.
In terms of specific products, product lines, and companies, that's true.
However, it's not entirely true when it comes to ideas, capabilities, and interface design, because in the case of these things a lot (albeit not all) of the better ones get copied from product to product and from one company's product line to another. I'll give several examples:
My first example or two will come from the field of operating systems, since that seems relevant to the topic at hand. I don't know which operating system first introduced the concept of a hierarchical file system (wherein the root directory can contain directories, which can themselves contain directories, and so on -- and all of them can contain files). The reason I don't know is because that was before my time. When I picked up PC-DOS 3.3, the hierarchical filesystem was already there, and various other operating systems already had it as well. Of course the idea of an operating system that *doesn't* have this seems silly now, but indeed there were at one time systems that didn't. Once it was introduced, however, the utility was obvious, and so the feature was added to other systems. It no longer matters which OS had this feature first, or whether that OS is even one that anyone still uses, because the feature has been broadly adopted.
A more modern example, still in the realm of software, is the panel applet. I don't know whether it was in Gnome or KDE first, but they've both had panel apps since the nineties. Either one of them introduced the concept first and the other copied it, or else they both copied it from some earlier desktop environment (CDE? WindowMaker? Who knows.) In any event, the usefulness is obvious, and so the capability was added to the latest version of Windows. (It's still somewhat limited there -- among other things you can't put the things on any panel you want, just the one sidebar panel -- but it's a good start; I imagine a subsequent version will improve it somewhat, now that it's been included.) So the feature is spreading. It no longer *matters* where the feature was first developed, or whether the desktop environment it was originally developed for is even still in use. The feature is being increasingly broadly adopted.
Perhaps the best examples I can think of, however, come not from the software industry, but fast food. I don't know who introduced the first drive-through window at a fast food restaurant, but I do know that it didn't take the rest of the industry very long to catch on to the idea. Today we take for granted that virtually all fast-food restaurants have drive-through windows. I also don't know which chain introduced the packaged children's meal with toy, but once it became apparent that they would increase sales... they sure all have it now. I _do_ know who introduced the Extra Value Meal, because that one is within my memory, and I also remember how rapidly the other fast food chains started doing more-or-less the same thing. Later, the same chain that introduced the concept in the first place augmented it with the Super Size option, and the other chains soon found themselves copying that little innovation as well. I also remember which chain introduced pizza delivery: indeed, it was pretty much their whole selling point and main advertising slogan for their first year or so. I only know of one major national pizza chain now that does not deliver (or, at least, not from most of their locations), and they're the chain that made their reputation on economy and continues to hold their share of the market largely by being the least expensive. All the other big chains, a lot of the small regional chains, and even some local mom-and-pop pizza joints, do delivery.
Now, there are certainly exceptions -- ideas that were good, features that were useful, but for on
Given that Grub is Gnu-branded, and Debian installs it *by default*, I was practically certain that it was open-source already (though I don't happen to actually _know_ which license, though since it's Gnu-branded I bet I could venture a guess...) and maintained by the FSF. Now here we have Wikia acquiring Grub and releasing it under an open-source license. Must be a different Grub, but that still leaves room for lots of confusion.
What I want to know is, will Grub be released under the *same* open-source license as is used for Grub, or a different one? I could just about break out into an Abbott and Costello parody with this question...
It's true that a free press _is_ dangerous. He was right about that much. It causes all kinds of trouble.
However, a free press is nonetheless less dangerous than a government that controls the press -- as he himself proved to anyone who was paying any attention whatever.
> It sounds rather satirical itself. The mere mention of it could get you locked up.
Upon a closer reading, it's not as extreme as it sounds. If I understand correctly, they're not telling you what you can say about Parliament or what political opinions you can express. They're just controlling what you can do with real footage taken inside their actual Parliament.
It's still pretty dumb, but not as repressive as the raw headline makes it sound.
> There are only two major providers of television news in New Zealand -- one state-owned (TV1) and
> another private (TV3, owned by CanWest). Neither actually invests in quality journalism any more.
Wait, did you just use the phrase "quality journalism" in the same paragraph with "television news"?
Okay, I'm not from that part of the world, so maybe in New Zealand this juxtaposition makes some kind of sense that I can't understand, but around here (Ohio), putting those two concepts together is just absurd. Actually, just using the phrase "quality journalism" is a bit on the absurd side all by itself.
I think that would be more the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Love. On the other hand, I don't think New Zealand is even in Oceania[1], much less in Airstrip One, so things may be a bit different there.
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[1] Yes, the use of "Oceania" to refer to the Americas and the Brittish isles _is_ confusing. What we call
"Oceania" in the modern world would almost certainly be part of Eastasia in Orwell's world.