The difference between Canada and the US is that up north we have very few elections and very few elected officials. On the Federal level, I vote once, for my MP (members of parlement) and on the provincial level, its the same. And the prime minister (who holds executive power) is choosen by the assembly (ie he is the leader of the party with the most seats)... And then we vote for mayors and city council members and that's it! And more than that, all of those elections dont happen at the same time.. they are all separate... And they dont happen on fixed dates..
So why wouldnt our system work in the US? I've seen american ballots where people are are to answer dozens of questions.. To vote at the same time for the president, senator, congressman, governor, mayor, a few judges, prosecutors, etc, etc.. And not counting referendums... No one can keep up with so many races and carefully look at the candidates to pick the best one. America needs less votes for more democracy. Ohh and the ballots in there.. Its pretty easy to count when there is only one question to be counted for the whole evening... even the whole year.... When so many questions have to be counted, its a whole different matter...
So let me recapitulate.. the solution is to less elected officials and separate various levels of elections.. One question at a time!
The US has the most liberal speech laws in the world and the rest of the world can not allow that.
This is not ture at all.. you should travel a little.. What if you try to show something as dangerous as a picture of a woman's chest in the US.. or even worst.. an actually woman's chest!! You might get thrown in jail... Hey kids might be hurt by female anatomy! The US has just different rules than the others... Some are afraid of Coca-Cola&friends taking over the world, other are afraid of being hurt by seing breasts, frankly it just a matter of finding who is more ridiculous!
might not be the autralians who have lost their continent..might be north america.. if the USA is the permanent chairman, then north america become a set for just canada ? (and maybe mexico?).. So I guess the 5 are americas, europe, africa, asia and autralia&islands
Where I work, we are developping a clustering system using single system images.. Where all the OS is stored on a server and is NFS mounted by each node. Our current tests show that we can easily run 100 nodes on 100mbit ethernet from a single server... And the coolest thing is that the nodes mount the / of the server, so for "small clusters" (under 100 nodes), we have to do a software upgrade only once and all nodes and the server are upgraded... Btw, this whole thing can be done using an almost unmodified Gentoo Linux distribution.
I'm hoping to convince my boss to let us publish detailed docs.. he thinks that if we do everyone will be able to use it and he will loose sales (we are in the hardware business..). Details at our homepage and about an older version (but with more details) at the place where we used to work.
Dell Canada is very bad.. or you could say very good at that game.. So I bought a computer last summer... and first I had to find the rebate form. I didnt find it on the website, so I called the Dell person and she filled it on the phone for me.. So I though, ohh great service! (I was wrong).. But I ended up finding it on the website (by accident) a few days later, and it said I had to include all kinds of papers with it. So I wasnt really sure that the dude on the phone did it right, so I printed the form, filled it, signed it and mailed it.
One would expect that this would have been enough. But ohh no.. About two months later (they said to wait 6-8 weeks...), I still had no news, so I went to the dell website which sends me to "www.rebatestatus.com".. Which is a 3rd party company that does just that, handling rebate forms. I didnt find my application on their website, so I called this company. The person there said they did not find my form, but that I could refax it to them for quicker processing.. 2 weeks instead of 6. So I faxed. A few months later I called backs was again told that after X weeks, it was not longer that 3rd party, but Dell that handled the stuff. So I called dell and the guy there said he'd fill a "template" and that they'd call me back within a week with more info. Clearly two weeks later, nothing.. So I called Dell again and they next dude filled another template. They did that thing about three times. And then the next time I called, the story had changed, I was to call another number, where I had to enter my name and postal code (on the phone) and clearly the system there didnt find me, but I could leave my number and someone would call back.. But clearly no one called back.. Or they only called when I wasnt there and did not leave a on my voicemail. I called this number about 3-4 times and never got anything from them... So I decided to call back the main custumer support, and like at the 10th call they girl said.. ohh you are too late for this other service, you are actually too late, but you might want to fax your form to the Dell Canada Rebate Center (probably a secretary in a micro-office).. so I faxed it there.. and about 7 months after buying my computer Dell finally mailed me the check...
I would fully understand someone who is not a student and dooes not have the kind of free time that I have would have been left with 0$... This HORRIBLE process must same Dell thousands if not millions of dollars... in unpaid rebates....
I have a Laserjet II and there is a little sticker at the back that says it was built in november 1992. I bought it used, but I know that before I got it, it was heavily used in a office.. on the secratarie's desk. Sure, its not color.. and its not very fast.. But it prints very very well, and the ink is very cheap.. So I highly recommend old laser printers... old HPs.. (Laserjet 2-3-4) or old "professional grade" laser printers. some of them are very big.. but they are very solid.. and you can get cheap ink
Re:My main reason for keeping 2.2 around...
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Kernel 2.2 - It Lives!
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· Score: 3, Informative
I use 2.4.20 on debian stable on a SparcClassic and s SparcStation 5 and it works very well. I never had any problem with it.. And with the speed of the disk on that thing, I really need ext3, because when my roomate pulls the plug I can't really wait 3 hours before my firewall is back up.. SparcClassics make really nice firewall especially if you find a scsi-1 hardware that's not too noisy..
I think the opposite, I played B&W for quite a while and the gestures were just a pain in the ***. If they could have had keyboard shortcuts instead.. it would have been much easier.
I'm sorry to disapoint you.. but I have no problem agreing with you that the clock speed is not all... But its still important... On our CFD (Computation Flow Dynamics) the kind of thing that SGI super-computers are made to handle.. Our el-cheapo AMD Athlon based cluster kicks the ass of pretty much every SGI in the data-center where it is.. and I think it even kicks the ass of the NEC... So yes, I'm sorry but 3Ghz is more than 4 times 0.7ghz and it does heck a difference.. And if you look at operation per dollar, there is not even a comparison... And I wont tell you how much their OS sucks.. the latest Irix versions feels like linux for 8 years ago (I mean the userspace stuff, I dont know much about their kernel...)..
I worked all summer in an all-SGI shop.. And I call tell you how far behind they are. The place where I work is specialized in HPC, so when they started in 1992, SGI was probably a pretty good choice, but now for workstation, I wouldnt say its overkill, I would actually say that its underkill. We made a benchmark comparing an SGI Origin and a linux Ahtlon cluster, the athlon needed only two nodes to beat the origin and with all 16 nodes where about 10 times faster... SGIs are just overpriced, for 99.999% (that's 5 nines) PCs can do the job and even do it better and especially do it much cheaper. So their workstation market is being destroyed from under them.
On the other end, their HPC (super-computers) is being attacked from above. On that sector, price is not really a problem, its just pure performance. And there too they are being beaten, SGI just does not have the research power that NEC or IBM can have. So they are starting to be pretty much behind, so they become not only more expensive (which does not really matter), but more importantly much slower...
Also on the workstation market, their desktop SUCKS, its just a pain to use. They are still stuck in the pre-win95 era... It might have been good compared to win3.1 or twm, but it just is not in the same world as GNOME, KDE, WinXP or MacOSX.
Also, their other strengh where there graphics board, they invented modern 3D hardware. And for a long time the roadmap for the PC 3d hardware was simple, they just had to do what SGI already had, but we have now passed a point where the PC hardware has actually more features then the SGI stuff. The only difference now between the pro and game markets are the amount of ram/cache and those "pro" cards exist on PCs. They do cost $ 2000-3000, but they are nowhere near the cost of the SGI workstation that includes them...
SGI has no future. They have been losing money for years. I have been thinking for quite a while that they where a good target for an acquisition, but now that MSFT has bought much of their patents. It might be cheaper to wait for them to go bankrupt and to pick up the pieces. They where in a fast playing game and they have gotten slow.....
For almost a year, I have boycotted going to the movies and I dont really seem to be worst off. There are lots of movies on TV (except that an MPAA company might own your cable system / tv networks...)... And well, Books are still fun.. And most movies suck anyways...
The page claims that the new NVidia drivers support power management, as in suspend/resume on laptops.. That doesnt seem to be the case.. Have I missed something?
Yes I admit it, I still use pine even if its not free software. Why? Its to my knownledge the only email client that supports remote imap properly. By that I mean one that doesnt try to re-download the whole list of all messages in the folder like mutt (Very usefull with huge folders). Evolution would probably do the job as it keeps a local copy. But it was way to unstable the last time I tried it. And I need something that I can use over the network.
Any mutt user can tell me if mutt now supports imap properly? And don't tell me gnus is the solution, even if I'm starting to consider it...
I think I read in somewhere that SATA could do command queueing. Does that mean that it will allow the driver to re-order them like SCSI drives? That was, I think, one of the main advantage of SCSI over IDE/ATA drives.. That they could re-order the commands and send answers in a different order to maximize performance.
is that debian is NOT a desktop distribution. Even if the debian people would like to think that it is. The default configuration of "desktop software" is soo bad its just unusable.. Even Gentoo, which is even more hardcore than debian seems to be have a nicer default desktop setup.. And I never had on Gentoo the kind of problem that I have with debian...
But, I use debian on ALL of my servers. Debian on the server just rocks. Especially being able to upgrade it without ever going to the console.. Why do you have to reboot a RedHat system to upgrade it?? I never understood that.. Upgrading debian is a breeze...
Reading how people think that the debian installer is the worst. Those people clearly have not installed OpenBSD... But hey, for them its a security feature, only an expert can install it!
If two chess players play perfectly, then the game will always result in a tie. That's one of the big problems with chess as a man-vs-machine benchmark... If both become too good, they will tie all the time.. We might have to move to another game that might be much harder from a computational point of view. (I've been told that the Japanese (or is it Chinese) game of Go is one such game)...
I'd like to point out that the mozilla 1.1 ebuild in gentoo actually includes enigmail... But yes I know that it is still masked for some reason that's outside of my understanding.
I've been around for quite a while and to me Mandrake is still RedHat+KDE.. Or as I like to call it "unethical RedHat". And everytime I see something about them I have that prejudice. Even tho I've seen their recent distribution and they seemed quite good as a desktop distribution...
Actually redhat does.. the "kudzu" that mandrake is using actually comes from RedHat...
Re:There is nothing wrong with RPMs. Only packager
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 2
Another important problem is that last time I checked Deb could not be signed, while all RedHat RPMS at least are PGP signed. The last time I heard about that on debian, they couldnt agree on a way to make signing meaningful... RH signs all its packages with one key, but that would be hard for deb...
It should be noted that the files are NOT released in a open format, but in Liquid Audio.. For which, to my knownledge, there is no Linux player. So its still a Windows-only format..
MandrakeSoft, which more and more appears to be now #2 in term of installed user base, is the biggest defender of Free Software after Debian.
May I say bulls**t... I'd like to remind you of how Mandrake came to be.. They where RedHat+KDE ans why didnt RH already integrate KDE? Because it was based on non-free software.
There are in my opinion only two major distribution that are true defenders of Free Software, RedHat and Debian. (Well, there's also Gentoo, but its in a class of its own).
Mandrake is just like TurboLinux, Suse and Caldera... They are doing nothing innovative, they are just trying to survive because they didnt move fast enough out of the "sell boxes" market.. Which was also rh's market a few years back (but they moved to offer much more because its a fairly limited market.
In my opinion, Red Hat is lucky because they can stay open and make real business, MandrakeSoft is *extremely* innovative in inventing a real business model for Free Software while being a fervent defender of its rules.
RedHat is not lucky, they are very very good. They have gone from one profitable business model to another when the market changed. They have been very well managed since the beginning and that's the reason they are #1. As for Mandrake, they tried to follow in RedHat footsteps, but following is never a good idea... So at least after a few years, out of desesparation they tried that Club thing.. Its corporate charity, its not a business model!
Caldera and TurboLinux are already almost dead... And Suse, if they dont play well, they will follow. Here at work, we had a bunch of Suse fans who just said "Suse 8.0 sucks, its the worst linux distro that I have seen in years"...
Now for innovation, see Gentoo and Debian For good business, see Redhat The rest is crap
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between Canada and the US is that up north we have very few elections and very few elected officials. On the Federal level, I vote once, for my MP (members of parlement) and on the provincial level, its the same. And the prime minister (who holds executive power) is choosen by the assembly (ie he is the leader of the party with the most seats)... And then we vote for mayors and city council members and that's it! And more than that, all of those elections dont happen at the same time.. they are all separate... And they dont happen on fixed dates..
So why wouldnt our system work in the US? I've seen american ballots where people are are to answer dozens of questions.. To vote at the same time for the president, senator, congressman, governor, mayor, a few judges, prosecutors, etc, etc.. And not counting referendums... No one can keep up with so many races and carefully look at the candidates to pick the best one. America needs less votes for more democracy. Ohh and the ballots in there.. Its pretty easy to count when there is only one question to be counted for the whole evening... even the whole year.... When so many questions have to be counted, its a whole different matter...
So let me recapitulate.. the solution is to less elected officials and separate various levels of elections.. One question at a time!
The US has the most liberal speech laws in the world and the rest of the world can not allow that.
This is not ture at all.. you should travel a little.. What if you try to show something as dangerous as a picture of a woman's chest in the US.. or even worst.. an actually woman's chest!! You might get thrown in jail... Hey kids might be hurt by female anatomy! The US has just different rules than the others... Some are afraid of Coca-Cola&friends taking over the world, other are afraid of being hurt by seing breasts, frankly it just a matter of finding who is more ridiculous!
might not be the autralians who have lost their continent..might be north america.. if the USA is the permanent chairman, then north america become a set for just canada ? (and maybe mexico?).. So I guess the 5 are americas, europe, africa, asia and autralia&islands
Nobody runs rsync as a publicly accessible service anymore.
You should notice that the Gentoo Portage tree is distributed through rsync to all users.
Where I work, we are developping a clustering system using single system images.. Where all the OS is stored on a server and is NFS mounted by each node. Our current tests show that we can easily run 100 nodes on 100mbit ethernet from a single server... And the coolest thing is that the nodes mount the / of the server, so for "small clusters" (under 100 nodes), we have to do a software upgrade only once and all nodes and the server are upgraded... Btw, this whole thing can be done using an almost unmodified Gentoo Linux distribution.
I'm hoping to convince my boss to let us publish detailed docs.. he thinks that if we do everyone will be able to use it and he will loose sales (we are in the hardware business..). Details at our homepage and about an older version (but with more details) at the place where we used to work.
Dell Canada is very bad.. or you could say very good at that game.. So I bought a computer last summer... and first I had to find the rebate form. I didnt find it on the website, so I called the Dell person and she filled it on the phone for me.. So I though, ohh great service! (I was wrong).. But I ended up finding it on the website (by accident) a few days later, and it said I had to include all kinds of papers with it. So I wasnt really sure that the dude on the phone did it right, so I printed the form, filled it, signed it and mailed it.
One would expect that this would have been enough. But ohh no.. About two months later (they said to wait 6-8 weeks...), I still had no news, so I went to the dell website which sends me to "www.rebatestatus.com".. Which is a 3rd party company that does just that, handling rebate forms. I didnt find my application on their website, so I called this company. The person there said they did not find my form, but that I could refax it to them for quicker processing.. 2 weeks instead of 6. So I faxed. A few months later I called backs was again told that after X weeks, it was not longer that 3rd party, but Dell that handled the stuff. So I called dell and the guy there said he'd fill a "template" and that they'd call me back within a week with more info. Clearly two weeks later, nothing.. So I called Dell again and they next dude filled another template. They did that thing about three times. And then the next time I called, the story had changed, I was to call another number, where I had to enter my name and postal code (on the phone) and clearly the system there didnt find me, but I could leave my number and someone would call back.. But clearly no one called back.. Or they only called when I wasnt there and did not leave a on my voicemail. I called this number about 3-4 times and never got anything from them... So I decided to call back the main custumer support, and like at the 10th call they girl said.. ohh you are too late for this other service, you are actually too late, but you might want to fax your form to the Dell Canada Rebate Center (probably a secretary in a micro-office).. so I faxed it there.. and about 7 months after buying my computer Dell finally mailed me the check...
I would fully understand someone who is not a student and dooes not have the kind of free time that I have would have been left with 0$... This HORRIBLE process must same Dell thousands if not millions of dollars... in unpaid rebates....
I have a Laserjet II and there is a little sticker at the back that says it was built in november 1992. I bought it used, but I know that before I got it, it was heavily used in a office.. on the secratarie's desk. Sure, its not color.. and its not very fast.. But it prints very very well, and the ink is very cheap.. So I highly recommend old laser printers... old HPs.. (Laserjet 2-3-4) or old "professional grade" laser printers. some of them are very big.. but they are very solid.. and you can get cheap ink
I use 2.4.20 on debian stable on a SparcClassic and s SparcStation 5 and it works very well. I never had any problem with it.. And with the speed of the disk on that thing, I really need ext3, because when my roomate pulls the plug I can't really wait 3 hours before my firewall is back up.. SparcClassics make really nice firewall especially if you find a scsi-1 hardware that's not too noisy..
I think the opposite, I played B&W for quite a while and the gestures were just a pain in the ***. If they could have had keyboard shortcuts instead.. it would have been much easier.
I'm sorry to disapoint you.. but I have no problem agreing with you that the clock speed is not all... But its still important... On our CFD (Computation Flow Dynamics) the kind of thing that SGI super-computers are made to handle.. Our el-cheapo AMD Athlon based cluster kicks the ass of pretty much every SGI in the data-center where it is.. and I think it even kicks the ass of the NEC... So yes, I'm sorry but 3Ghz is more than 4 times 0.7ghz and it does heck a difference.. And if you look at operation per dollar, there is not even a comparison... And I wont tell you how much their OS sucks.. the latest Irix versions feels like linux for 8 years ago (I mean the userspace stuff, I dont know much about their kernel...)..
I worked all summer in an all-SGI shop.. And I call tell you how far behind they are. The place where I work is specialized in HPC, so when they started in 1992, SGI was probably a pretty good choice, but now for workstation, I wouldnt say its overkill, I would actually say that its underkill. We made a benchmark comparing an SGI Origin and a linux Ahtlon cluster, the athlon needed only two nodes to beat the origin and with all 16 nodes where about 10 times faster... SGIs are just overpriced, for 99.999% (that's 5 nines) PCs can do the job and even do it better and especially do it much cheaper. So their workstation market is being destroyed from under them.
On the other end, their HPC (super-computers) is being attacked from above. On that sector, price is not really a problem, its just pure performance. And there too they are being beaten, SGI just does not have the research power that
NEC or IBM can have. So they are starting to be pretty much behind, so they become not only more expensive (which does not really matter), but more importantly much slower...
Also on the workstation market, their desktop SUCKS, its just a pain to use. They are still stuck in the pre-win95 era... It might have been good compared to win3.1 or twm, but it just is not in the same world as GNOME, KDE, WinXP or MacOSX.
Also, their other strengh where there graphics board, they invented modern 3D hardware. And for a long time the roadmap for the PC 3d hardware was simple, they just had to do what SGI already had, but we have now passed a point where the PC hardware has actually more features then the SGI stuff. The only difference now between the pro and game markets are the amount of ram/cache and those "pro" cards exist on PCs. They do cost $ 2000-3000, but they are nowhere near the cost of the SGI workstation that includes them...
SGI has no future. They have been losing money for years. I have been thinking for quite a while that they where a good target for an acquisition, but now that MSFT has bought much of their patents. It might be cheaper to wait for them to go bankrupt and to pick up the pieces. They where in a fast playing game and they have gotten slow.....
For almost a year, I have boycotted going to the movies and I dont really seem to be worst off. There are lots of movies on TV (except that an MPAA company might own your cable system / tv networks...)... And well, Books are still fun.. And most movies suck anyways...
The page claims that the new NVidia drivers support power management, as in suspend/resume on laptops.. That doesnt seem to be the case.. Have I missed something?
Yes I admit it, I still use pine even if its not free software. Why? Its to my knownledge the only email client that supports remote imap properly. By that I mean one that doesnt try to re-download the whole list of all messages in the folder like mutt (Very usefull with huge folders). Evolution would probably do the job as it keeps a local copy. But it was way to unstable the last time I tried it. And I need something that I can use over the network.
Any mutt user can tell me if mutt now supports imap properly? And don't tell me gnus is the solution, even if I'm starting to consider it...
Since its an IIS server and it clearly can't handle Slashdot, could someone post the content here?
I think I read in somewhere that SATA could do command queueing. Does that mean that it will allow the driver to re-order them like SCSI drives? That was, I think, one of the main advantage of SCSI over IDE/ATA drives.. That they could re-order the commands and send answers in a different order to maximize performance.
is that debian is NOT a desktop distribution. Even if the debian people would like to think that it is. The default configuration of "desktop software" is soo bad its just unusable.. Even Gentoo, which is even more hardcore than debian seems to be have a nicer default desktop setup.. And I never had on Gentoo the kind of problem that I have with debian...
But, I use debian on ALL of my servers. Debian on the server just rocks. Especially being able to upgrade it without ever going to the console.. Why do you have to reboot a RedHat system to upgrade it?? I never understood that.. Upgrading debian is a breeze...
Reading how people think that the debian installer is the worst. Those people clearly have not installed OpenBSD... But hey, for them its a security feature, only an expert can install it!
If two chess players play perfectly, then the game will always result in a tie. That's one of the big problems with chess as a man-vs-machine benchmark... If both become too good, they will tie all the time.. We might have to move to another game that might be much harder from a computational point of view. (I've been told that the Japanese (or is it Chinese) game of Go is one such game)...
I'd like to point out that the mozilla 1.1 ebuild in gentoo actually includes enigmail... But yes I know that it is still masked for some reason that's outside of my understanding.
I've been around for quite a while and to me Mandrake is still RedHat+KDE.. Or as I like to call it "unethical RedHat". And everytime I see something about them I have that prejudice. Even tho I've seen their recent distribution and they seemed quite good as a desktop distribution...
Am I the only one?
Actually redhat does.. the "kudzu" that mandrake is using actually comes from RedHat...
Another important problem is that last time I checked Deb could not be signed, while all RedHat RPMS at least are PGP signed. The last time I heard about that on debian, they couldnt agree on a way to make signing meaningful... RH signs all its packages with one key, but that would be hard for deb...
It should be noted that the files are NOT released in a open format, but in Liquid Audio.. For which, to my knownledge, there is no Linux player. So its still a Windows-only format..
MandrakeSoft, which more and more appears to be now #2 in term of installed user base, is the biggest defender of Free Software after Debian.
May I say bulls**t... I'd like to remind you of how Mandrake came to be.. They where RedHat+KDE ans why didnt RH already integrate KDE? Because it was based on non-free software.
There are in my opinion only two major distribution that are true defenders of Free Software, RedHat and Debian. (Well, there's also Gentoo, but its in a class of its own).
Mandrake is just like TurboLinux, Suse and Caldera... They are doing nothing innovative, they are just trying to survive because they didnt move fast enough out of the "sell boxes" market.. Which was also rh's market a few years back (but they moved to offer much more because its a fairly limited market.
In my opinion, Red Hat is lucky because they can stay open and make real business, MandrakeSoft is *extremely* innovative in inventing a real business model for Free Software while being a fervent defender of its rules.
RedHat is not lucky, they are very very good. They have gone from one profitable business model to another when the market changed. They have been very well managed since the beginning and that's the reason they are #1. As for Mandrake, they tried to follow in RedHat footsteps, but following is never a good idea... So at least after a few years, out of desesparation they tried that Club thing.. Its corporate charity, its not a business model!
Caldera and TurboLinux are already almost dead... And Suse, if they dont play well, they will follow. Here at work, we had a bunch of Suse fans who just said "Suse 8.0 sucks, its the worst linux distro that I have seen in years"...
Now for innovation, see Gentoo and Debian
For good business, see Redhat
The rest is crap