how can i believe we pitifull humans are causing global warming???
Most scientific researchers, as they reported at the recent UN-founded COP-9 summit in Milan, have settled on the hypotesis that we, as a species, are not causing the global warming (which is a pretty much undeniable fact); instead, we are contributing to it. Climate changes are quite natural; in the past 4 billion years, climate on this planet has changed countless times. 3 and a half billion years ago, the introduction of oxygen as the byproduct of the first algae capable of photosynthesis altered the athmosphere and thus climate; extended volcanism, asteroid/comet impacts, the shifting of life from sea to earth... and we're not counting ice, or extra hot, ages.
What scientists are studying is how much our species is accelerating the process of global warming, which could be (and possibly is) natural, in source. That is: if the climate was supposed to change, and we're approaching a new hot age, how much is our species contibuting to this change. And what could be the effective strategy to lessen our part?
Stopping the global warming is as irrational as controlling the climate: we can not simply do that. Also, even if the climate does change, the worst that can happen is a big extintion event of the species that are incapable of adapting to this change (including us). But, for me, I'd like not to be considered responsable for messing up with a chaotic system.
it is proven that the sun will naturally heat the earth 1deg in 10yrs without us.
Damn, never heard this one.:-)
so untill there is SOLID sci PROVABLE evidence
The problem is, though, that a probable and solid evidence would be obtained when it's too late to do something. If a pipe in your house has a leak, you'd better fix it when it's just a drop, and not when you find a foot of water in your basement.
turn off lights not in use
You mean that you really leave your lights on when nobody uses them? Americans: they'll never end amusing me with their costumes.:-)
I do wonder how you could have impiled such a large amount of crap, false statements and utter bullshit in a single post. Sometimes AC really amuse me; and how the hell did this post got modded up as Insightful amuses me even more...
Debian has a history of trouble and should be avoided.
Give me a list of this history of trouble you're babbling about.
First of all, Debian is extremely user-unfriendly. If nothing else, it has a reputation of being next to impossible to install.
It's hard to install, yes. It's hard to maintain, no. Debian is extremely coherent, and many distro should learn the solutions that Debian has had for ages (such as the update-modules tool). I've yet to find a better tool to create console connections like ppp-config, for instance. Oh, and juding a distro by its installer is plain stupid.
Second, Debian is extremely out of date.
Again, wrong. Debian stable is out of date, wrt programs version. But it's intended audience it's not the desktop user.
Even if you use unstable, packages such as Perl 5.8 are not available
What the fuck are you taling about? I've been using Unstable and Perl 5.8 for ages (I develop with gtk2-perl and it won't even compile without Perl 5.8, since it extensively uses UTF8).
And fourth, the Debian project itself has a horrible record of security. Just recently, four of its machines were compromised. They weren't hit through some unknown exploit, but because a user sent an unencrypted password over the network.
WTF? How the hell a user related security breach has anything to do with the intrinsic security of an OS? Damn, you look like a MS fanboy trying to tell that Linux is insecure because a user just fucked up something.
If you want to bash Debian, please come up with something insightful, and not the same "stable is old, it's hard to install" pre-cooked speech.
Without pesky people to share surface area, they can deploy much larger solar panels (and collect much more energy) than would be feasible down here.
It's not only a matter of space, but also of athmosphere: on the Moon (or in geosyncronous orbit) you do not have an athmosphere that filters the most energetic (and lethal for us carbon-based lifeforms) frequencies of sunlight. Thus, a space based solar panel would be more efficient, spacewise, that its counterpart here.
noone died on Apollo 13. Contrary to the shuttle program I do think Apollo was a marvelous successful example of the KISS paradigm.
Even though the Apollo was simplier than the Shuttle, it was far from being simple. BTW, listening to the astronauts that flown with the Apollo, it was nearly a miracle it didn't kill more.
if something like what happened to 13 happened to a shuttle, the shuttle would be toast, 13 made it down in one piece.
The Apollo ship has flown less than 20 times in space. The first model even took fire without lifting-off. This means that the Apollo had a failure ration of 2/17 (roughly 12%), whereas the Shuttle had 2 incidents in ~100 flies, that is a failure ratio of 2%.
So, even though I wouldn't like to fly with the shuttle, I'd never want to set foot on the Apollo, sorry.
But as far as I know none of the countries has its own space program
Italian Space Agency (ASI), even if part of the ESA, has its own space programme. Part of the International Space Station (the habitats, AFAIR) is provided directly by ASI; there's the "Beppo Sax" satellite, which was successfully used for studying the gamma ray burst events; the tethered satellites tested in two shuttle missions (1992 and 1996); part of the Cassini/Huygens probe that will arrive on Saturn next year; Integral, a gamma ray observatory, etc.
The Italian Space Agency is also working on vector for small payloads (
They're also working on a fission-based propulsion system, codenamed "Project 242".
XFree86: explode the tarball and copy the fonts inside $HOME/.fonts
If this doesn't work, you're using a 4 years old version of XFree86 or you're a subhuman with 30 as IQ.
BTW: the omnly thing I had to restart in order to refresh the fonts list, was epiphany. GNOME detected the new Bitstream Vera almost as soon as I drop the ttf inside the fonts folder.
The ending song, with camera that pans right through the sky, ends on a star that just grow dimmer and dimmer, until it just fades out; as the indian chief tells to Jet, when a star fades out from the sky, a great warrior is dead.
So what is Gecko doing that's innovative? Or, at least, more innovative than Opera? Seems to me they're both neck-for-neck for implementing the standards correctly and completely.
The challenge is just to render web pages as the W3C standards mandate. And trying to render as good as possible b0rken pages (e.g. pages designed for Internet Exploder only). Especially the latter, IMO, is an interesting challenge.:-)
Gecko seems to be stealing all its good ideas from Opera. From mouse gestures to good cookie management
Gecko is not responsible for mouse gestures, or for cookie management: these are browser's (the "interface") task, while Gecko is the HTML rendering engine. Gecko (or KHTML, the HTML rendering engine used by both Konqueror and Safari) doesn't care about cookies, or gestures, or whatever: it only offers a visualization of an HTML data stream.
So, you should rephrase to: "Mozilla seems to be stealing etc, etc."; and it's true: if it's a good idea, why not copy it? I don't like Opera, so if someone whishes to implement those features in Mozilla, I could use them too.
I do think the telephone and the lightbulb are from American inventors (though I'm sure very country on the planet wants to claim that it had some local hobbyist made one in his basement decades earlier)
In fact, telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci (italian/american), although re-patented (if not illegally, in a morally questionable fashion) by Bell:
here and here.
And what loads bootsector into memory? Boot fairy maybe?
Almost true. A boot sector loader, as a matter of fact. It scans the physical place where the OS boot system should be located, and transfers control to it immediately after.
So, since it disappears as soon as the operating system boot manager kicks in, and since it manages only the "preboot" phase, it's not a Basic Input/Output System. (that is, a layer between the very lowly hardware level and the OS).
BIOSes are used by old operating systems (DOS, for instance).
And Windows ME, and OS/2, and NetWare -- all still in production.
I did not say "old" as in "released long time ago": I meant old by design, which OS/2, WinME (to an extent, that is maintaining the backward compatibility with old drivers) and NetWare are, just like DOS.
I don't use floppies, and most of my computers don't have floppy drives. Many computers don't come with floppies anymore.
Right. That's when bootable CDs kick in.
And the OS doesn't do better hardware detection in my experiences. Remember, the OS detects the hardware THRU the bios, by comparing it to a list of known hardware.
Bzzzt. Wrong.
Practically, all hardware interaction is done, nowadays, with drivers that can access directly to the barenaked metal stuff inside the case.
A BIOS should only prepare the OS to boot up from a physical medium, i.e. a drive, a flash card, a ethernet connection. Given that need, that is fulfilled in about 3/5 seconds, everything else is only unneeded crap, since modern OS can handle it much better, from the programmer's point of view, and from userland.
And I prefer to have more control over the resources.
That's operating systems and userland applications' stuff, not BIOS'.
Windows doesn't handle that very well, even now.
I'm really sorry for you, and whoever is using a retarded operating system that isn't even good on retrieving the information it needs directly from the hardware, instead on relying on possibly buggy and/or incorrect information from a piece of crap that survived beyond its use.
With a more sophisticated bios, i could debug and tweak the way it was seen by the OS.
Sounds like you need a better OS, not a better BIOS.;-)
Admittedly, I'm over my head here, but can't you have a complex BIOS that gets out of the way when the OS boots, or acts as a mini OS when the real OS wont load?
"Old" Alpha servers from Digital used to have a "BIOS" that had a shell and supported even TCP/IP connection; i't was used for diagnostic and recovery purpose when the machine was rebooted, something went bad in the process, and maybe the sysadmin isn't even in the building...
On a standard workstation or on a PC, this doesn't strike me as useful: what good would it do, when I do have a boot floppy lying around?
Even having a BIOS isn't that useful anymore: OSes do better hardware detection and resource assignment (you OS does them every time it starts, unless you are using DOS) than any BIOS.
Because we need a standard way to interface with hardware from the OS
Standard way?
That's funny, because my BIOS (a pre-98 Award BIOS) recognizes my primary HDD as a 8GB drive, while the label upon my drive, and my OS, say that it's a 15GB...
BIOSes are used by old operating systems (DOS, for instance). Modern OS rely on their personal hardware recognition. On modern machines, a BIOS is only the crap that makes your machine to boot up in 15/30 seconds, while you could have a 2 seconds boot sequence (cfr. LinuxBIOS).
[Interesting? Alas, I don't have moderator points today...]
(and they also like to have Windows-ish desktops, ala GNOME and KDE)
Standing aside from the fact that my GNOME2 desktop doesn't look anything like Windows (any windows release), would you please state which GUI environment has an interface that is so dramatically different from the one that has been practically invented in the PARC Xerox labs more than 20 years ago, and that insipired Windows GUI, among others?
Until the metaphore used to represent an environment on computers changes drastically, I do not see the point of not using the current one on every GUI.
The driver layer break between Windows XP and Windows 98 was the total removal of the 16 bit hardware layer that the Windows 98 kernel ran on.
And, in this case, the kernel hackers have modified a (questionable) facility that some binary drivers used... So?
Dis-allowing binary only drivers is just absurd, Linux was about `Freedom and Choice, the freedom to run whatever software I want, how ever i want.'
But binary only drivers will not be disallowed: they simply won't be able to access to the GPL exported symbols. Is this an ideologically-driven choice? In (a very much) part, yes. Is there some techincal issue in this choice? In part, yes.
To make a long story short: binary modules will not be allowed to tamper deeply inside kernel core functionalities. I see this as a good thing: if a binary module breaks something inside kernel-core, how do the kernel hackers know that, without sources? These restrictions, too, could lead to more OSI-friendly licenses, or better interaction between a company that delivers these drivers and the linux kernel community.
Obviously, if $BIG_COMPANY wants to continue releasing the Linux version of their drivers (and if there's a market for those drivers, it will).
What an arrogant attitude. The kernel developers need to be reminded that widespread acceptance of Linux might very well require the support of big commercial enterprises, not just hobbiests and open source enthusiasts.
First: they wrote the toy, so they decide when to break it.
Then, binary only modules are a major pain in the ass: they can't be debugged, they tend to break by themselves from version to version, and their licenses are quite questionable (nVidia anyone?).
They are useful, sometimes. They are used, yes. But let's not forget who owns the damn thing.
When Microsoft broke the driver layer between 9x and XP, nobody complained. If $ANY_BIG_COMPANY wants to sell/provide a driver for Linux, it has to accept that some things could be broken from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
The codes are roughly:
1xx -- Not done yet
2xx -- You win
3xx -- You lose, but try again
4xx -- You lose; your fault
5xx -- You lose; my bad
Then, the:
6xx -- You lose; blame CowboyNeal
code class should be added.
how can i believe we pitifull humans are causing global warming???
Most scientific researchers, as they reported at the recent UN-founded COP-9 summit in Milan, have settled on the hypotesis that we, as a species, are not causing the global warming (which is a pretty much undeniable fact); instead, we are contributing to it. Climate changes are quite natural; in the past 4 billion years, climate on this planet has changed countless times. 3 and a half billion years ago, the introduction of oxygen as the byproduct of the first algae capable of photosynthesis altered the athmosphere and thus climate; extended volcanism, asteroid/comet impacts, the shifting of life from sea to earth... and we're not counting ice, or extra hot, ages.
What scientists are studying is how much our species is accelerating the process of global warming, which could be (and possibly is) natural, in source. That is: if the climate was supposed to change, and we're approaching a new hot age, how much is our species contibuting to this change. And what could be the effective strategy to lessen our part?
Stopping the global warming is as irrational as controlling the climate: we can not simply do that. Also, even if the climate does change, the worst that can happen is a big extintion event of the species that are incapable of adapting to this change (including us). But, for me, I'd like not to be considered responsable for messing up with a chaotic system.
it is proven that the sun will naturally heat the earth 1deg in 10yrs without us.
Damn, never heard this one. :-)
so untill there is SOLID sci PROVABLE evidence
The problem is, though, that a probable and solid evidence would be obtained when it's too late to do something. If a pipe in your house has a leak, you'd better fix it when it's just a drop, and not when you find a foot of water in your basement.
turn off lights not in use
You mean that you really leave your lights on when nobody uses them? Americans: they'll never end amusing me with their costumes. :-)
I do wonder how you could have impiled such a large amount of crap, false statements and utter bullshit in a single post. Sometimes AC really amuse me; and how the hell did this post got modded up as Insightful amuses me even more...
Debian has a history of trouble and should be avoided.
Give me a list of this history of trouble you're babbling about.
First of all, Debian is extremely user-unfriendly. If nothing else, it has a reputation of being next to impossible to install.
It's hard to install, yes. It's hard to maintain, no. Debian is extremely coherent, and many distro should learn the solutions that Debian has had for ages (such as the update-modules tool). I've yet to find a better tool to create console connections like ppp-config, for instance. Oh, and juding a distro by its installer is plain stupid.
Second, Debian is extremely out of date.
Again, wrong. Debian stable is out of date, wrt programs version. But it's intended audience it's not the desktop user.
Even if you use unstable, packages such as Perl 5.8 are not available
What the fuck are you taling about? I've been using Unstable and Perl 5.8 for ages (I develop with gtk2-perl and it won't even compile without Perl 5.8, since it extensively uses UTF8).
And fourth, the Debian project itself has a horrible record of security. Just recently, four of its machines were compromised. They weren't hit through some unknown exploit, but because a user sent an unencrypted password over the network.
WTF? How the hell a user related security breach has anything to do with the intrinsic security of an OS? Damn, you look like a MS fanboy trying to tell that Linux is insecure because a user just fucked up something.
If you want to bash Debian, please come up with something insightful, and not the same "stable is old, it's hard to install" pre-cooked speech.
Without pesky people to share surface area, they can deploy much larger solar panels (and collect much more energy) than would be feasible down here.
It's not only a matter of space, but also of athmosphere: on the Moon (or in geosyncronous orbit) you do not have an athmosphere that filters the most energetic (and lethal for us carbon-based lifeforms) frequencies of sunlight. Thus, a space based solar panel would be more efficient, spacewise, that its counterpart here.
Preferences tree? XML backend?
Why this API reminds me of Havoc Pennington's GConf used by GNOME 2?
noone died on Apollo 13. Contrary to the shuttle program I do think Apollo was a marvelous successful example of the KISS paradigm.
Even though the Apollo was simplier than the Shuttle, it was far from being simple. BTW, listening to the astronauts that flown with the Apollo, it was nearly a miracle it didn't kill more.
if something like what happened to 13 happened to a shuttle, the shuttle would be toast, 13 made it down in one piece.
The Apollo ship has flown less than 20 times in space. The first model even took fire without lifting-off. This means that the Apollo had a failure ration of 2/17 (roughly 12%), whereas the Shuttle had 2 incidents in ~100 flies, that is a failure ratio of 2%.So, even though I wouldn't like to fly with the shuttle, I'd never want to set foot on the Apollo, sorry.
How in the world is posiible, that no KDE user has been whining yet that there's no make kconfig
They did not whine, because "make xconfig" == "make kconfig" ;-)
But as far as I know none of the countries has its own space program
Italian Space Agency (ASI), even if part of the ESA, has its own space programme. Part of the International Space Station (the habitats, AFAIR) is provided directly by ASI; there's the "Beppo Sax" satellite, which was successfully used for studying the gamma ray burst events; the tethered satellites tested in two shuttle missions (1992 and 1996); part of the Cassini/Huygens probe that will arrive on Saturn next year; Integral, a gamma ray observatory, etc.
The Italian Space Agency is also working on vector for small payloads (
They're also working on a fission-based propulsion system, codenamed "Project 242".
Most albums are $9.90 or $9.99 if bought as a complete album. There are some exceptions (Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon for one).
In Italy[1], an album sells at ~20. DSotM sells at 25. Dunno about other countries in EU, though... Now, if only I've had DSL at home... :-)
[1] and we have VAT at 20% on audiovisive material too! Yippie!
The only thing that matters is where the control key is.
Since this "star trek"'s tricorder-like thingy comes with Windows XP, I'd also be looking for Alt and Del keys... ;-)
I know, I know it's a troll, but I'll bite...
XFree86: explode the tarball and copy the fonts inside $HOME/.fonts
If this doesn't work, you're using a 4 years old version of XFree86 or you're a subhuman with 30 as IQ.
BTW: the omnly thing I had to restart in order to refresh the fonts list, was epiphany. GNOME detected the new Bitstream Vera almost as soon as I drop the ttf inside the fonts folder.
At the very end of the series, did Spike survive?
Okay, since you ask... :-)
Yes: Spike does die, at the end of the series.
The ending song, with camera that pans right through the sky, ends on a star that just grow dimmer and dimmer, until it just fades out; as the indian chief tells to Jet, when a star fades out from the sky, a great warrior is dead.
So what is Gecko doing that's innovative? Or, at least, more innovative than Opera? Seems to me they're both neck-for-neck for implementing the standards correctly and completely.
The challenge is just to render web pages as the W3C standards mandate. And trying to render as good as possible b0rken pages (e.g. pages designed for Internet Exploder only). Especially the latter, IMO, is an interesting challenge. :-)
Gecko seems to be stealing all its good ideas from Opera. From mouse gestures to good cookie management
Gecko is not responsible for mouse gestures, or for cookie management: these are browser's (the "interface") task, while Gecko is the HTML rendering engine. Gecko (or KHTML, the HTML rendering engine used by both Konqueror and Safari) doesn't care about cookies, or gestures, or whatever: it only offers a visualization of an HTML data stream.
So, you should rephrase to: "Mozilla seems to be stealing etc, etc."; and it's true: if it's a good idea, why not copy it? I don't like Opera, so if someone whishes to implement those features in Mozilla, I could use them too.
I do think the telephone and the lightbulb are from American inventors (though I'm sure very country on the planet wants to claim that it had some local hobbyist made one in his basement decades earlier)
In fact, telephone was invented by Antonio Meucci (italian/american), although re-patented (if not illegally, in a morally questionable fashion) by Bell: here and here.
And what loads bootsector into memory? Boot fairy maybe?
Almost true. A boot sector loader, as a matter of fact. It scans the physical place where the OS boot system should be located, and transfers control to it immediately after.
So, since it disappears as soon as the operating system boot manager kicks in, and since it manages only the "preboot" phase, it's not a Basic Input/Output System. (that is, a layer between the very lowly hardware level and the OS).
And I'd like to flash out my BIOS with it, if only I'd have a little time...
Some risk certainly makes it more interesting to me... ;-)
And if it goes wrong, I'd have an excuse to change my old, crappy, motherboard, so it ain't that bad, after all... :-)
BIOSes are used by old operating systems (DOS, for instance).
And Windows ME, and OS/2, and NetWare -- all still in production.
I did not say "old" as in "released long time ago": I meant old by design, which OS/2, WinME (to an extent, that is maintaining the backward compatibility with old drivers) and NetWare are, just like DOS.
I don't use floppies, and most of my computers don't have floppy drives. Many computers don't come with floppies anymore.
Right. That's when bootable CDs kick in.
And the OS doesn't do better hardware detection in my experiences. Remember, the OS detects the hardware THRU the bios, by comparing it to a list of known hardware.
Bzzzt. Wrong.
Practically, all hardware interaction is done, nowadays, with drivers that can access directly to the barenaked metal stuff inside the case.
A BIOS should only prepare the OS to boot up from a physical medium, i.e. a drive, a flash card, a ethernet connection. Given that need, that is fulfilled in about 3/5 seconds, everything else is only unneeded crap, since modern OS can handle it much better, from the programmer's point of view, and from userland.
And I prefer to have more control over the resources.
That's operating systems and userland applications' stuff, not BIOS'.
Windows doesn't handle that very well, even now.
I'm really sorry for you, and whoever is using a retarded operating system that isn't even good on retrieving the information it needs directly from the hardware, instead on relying on possibly buggy and/or incorrect information from a piece of crap that survived beyond its use.
With a more sophisticated bios, i could debug and tweak the way it was seen by the OS.
Sounds like you need a better OS, not a better BIOS. ;-)
I completely agree with you.
LinuxBIOS is doing something similar.
And I'd like to flash out my BIOS with it, if only I'd have a little time...
Admittedly, I'm over my head here, but can't you have a complex BIOS that gets out of the way when the OS boots, or acts as a mini OS when the real OS wont load?
"Old" Alpha servers from Digital used to have a "BIOS" that had a shell and supported even TCP/IP connection; i't was used for diagnostic and recovery purpose when the machine was rebooted, something went bad in the process, and maybe the sysadmin isn't even in the building...
On a standard workstation or on a PC, this doesn't strike me as useful: what good would it do, when I do have a boot floppy lying around?
Even having a BIOS isn't that useful anymore: OSes do better hardware detection and resource assignment (you OS does them every time it starts, unless you are using DOS) than any BIOS.
Because we need a standard way to interface with hardware from the OS
Standard way?
That's funny, because my BIOS (a pre-98 Award BIOS) recognizes my primary HDD as a 8GB drive, while the label upon my drive, and my OS, say that it's a 15GB...
BIOSes are used by old operating systems (DOS, for instance). Modern OS rely on their personal hardware recognition. On modern machines, a BIOS is only the crap that makes your machine to boot up in 15/30 seconds, while you could have a 2 seconds boot sequence (cfr. LinuxBIOS).
[Interesting? Alas, I don't have moderator points today...]
(and they also like to have Windows-ish desktops, ala GNOME and KDE)
Standing aside from the fact that my GNOME2 desktop doesn't look anything like Windows (any windows release), would you please state which GUI environment has an interface that is so dramatically different from the one that has been practically invented in the PARC Xerox labs more than 20 years ago, and that insipired Windows GUI, among others?
Until the metaphore used to represent an environment on computers changes drastically, I do not see the point of not using the current one on every GUI.
The driver layer break between Windows XP and Windows 98 was the total removal of the 16 bit hardware layer that the Windows 98 kernel ran on.
And, in this case, the kernel hackers have modified a (questionable) facility that some binary drivers used... So?
Dis-allowing binary only drivers is just absurd, Linux was about `Freedom and Choice, the freedom to run whatever software I want, how ever i want.'
But binary only drivers will not be disallowed: they simply won't be able to access to the GPL exported symbols. Is this an ideologically-driven choice? In (a very much) part, yes. Is there some techincal issue in this choice? In part, yes.
To make a long story short: binary modules will not be allowed to tamper deeply inside kernel core functionalities. I see this as a good thing: if a binary module breaks something inside kernel-core, how do the kernel hackers know that, without sources? These restrictions, too, could lead to more OSI-friendly licenses, or better interaction between a company that delivers these drivers and the linux kernel community.
Obviously, if $BIG_COMPANY wants to continue releasing the Linux version of their drivers (and if there's a market for those drivers, it will).
What an arrogant attitude. The kernel developers need to be reminded that widespread acceptance of Linux might very well require the support of big commercial enterprises, not just hobbiests and open source enthusiasts.
First: they wrote the toy, so they decide when to break it.
Then, binary only modules are a major pain in the ass: they can't be debugged, they tend to break by themselves from version to version, and their licenses are quite questionable (nVidia anyone?).
They are useful, sometimes. They are used, yes. But let's not forget who owns the damn thing.
When Microsoft broke the driver layer between 9x and XP, nobody complained. If $ANY_BIG_COMPANY wants to sell/provide a driver for Linux, it has to accept that some things could be broken from time to time.