I don't want to complain, I am glad that the Savannah team (consisting mostly of volunteers) handled the breakin there with great care and responsibility. But still we have to give extra credits to the team handling the gnome servers for bringing up the services so quickly. (At savannah, it took more than a month until CVS write access was reenabled.)
Oh my god. An old rule of thumb is that the user experience is noticeably better if the performance doubles. That may be an overstatement, but how on earth should 7% faster startup
make a difference for daily work?
Of course, it's nice to see they are going in the right direction, but I suppose it will take me a while until I have made up for the time following the link and downloading it (not to speak of the time it cost to post this comment:P) by the increased productivity...
Boarding in at the Northwest Terminal in Detroit, there are always separate lines at the security into which selected persons are being assigned for extensive checking and searching of the carry-on baggage.
Of course, it could just be random screening, but I that seems unlikely to me. I got selected the last few times I flew from Detroit.
Frankly, I still find the procedure somewhat humiliating. It's incredible how inefficient they are. There are always 6-8 TSA guards standing around waiting until the next guard can take over their passenger for the next step. Apparently collecting the documents from the passengers, waiving the next person through the metal detector, staring at the xray monitors, handing over the documents to the person doing the baggage searching, and doing the metal detector screening are all highly specialized tasks that require special skills so that it is strictly impossible for one guard to take over the responsibility of the next one.
Their metal detectors are so sensitive that they regularly "detect" the trouser buttons. Then you have to roll over over the trousers a bit, so that they can check more closely. Their baggage searching doesn't exactly make the impression of being undefeatable, to say the least, but at least that means that it doesn't take ages and they put everything back together as well.
Now imagine you started queueing 30 mins before your boarding deadline, and all this goes on and on, inefficiently etc. First some 15 mins in the queue, then you have to wait again until your baggage got x-rayed, then again for the metal detector checking. I think the worst thing is -- even if they seem nice, maybe I actually feel like chatting with them, then I start think, "Oh better don't, might get misunderstood", "Oh come on, they are humans, too, after all", "Better not, even if it just causes a delay, remember your flight is going in 15 mins". It's like being in an exam without knowing what you are being tested in.
Well sorry about my ramblings, many of you probably know the procedure yourself, but had to get this off my chest. But I would be curious if there is reliable information on whether this "selected security screening" is purely random based, or based on some sort of profiling.
SuSE 9.0 has a really nice NTFS resize utility during install. Works quite well.
However, AFAIK, it cannot move data. So you should first try your windows defragmentation program to see how much space it leaves at the end of the partition. In case there is enough space left for your Linux partitions, you can go ahead and just run SuSE's installation pograms.
In my case, there wasn't. But it's still possible by downloading a statically linked beta version of ntfsresize (google for it), which has relocation support since about 2 months ago. Burn it on a CD, start the SuSE Rescue system, and follow the instructions on the ntfsresize FAQ carefully. Worked flawlessly for me.
Yes, it's beta, but the developers seem very careful, and they didn't get a data-loss bug report yet.
I don't understand why antitrust sanctions always focus on the application-bundling issue. I would find it much more useful if MS was forced to play nicely with respect to interoperability. (Yes, it's mentioned in TFA, but only in very specific cases.)
If I were the dictator, MS would be forced to document the file formats it is using (including all WMV formats, of course), all network protocols, and to provide sufficient NTFS documentation so that I can finally can mount/dev/hda2 with read-write soonish.
According to a friend of mine who has done all sorts of things in the DSP business, the classic cassette recorder is still the tool of choice for most journalists to record interviews (whether for radio or press). Despite Minidiscs and lots of attempts at digital recording devices.
The killer of all the digital equipment was always that it wasn't as easy to use as the cassette recorder: Start, Stop, Record, Rewind is all you need. Never has any company designing an electronic replacement managed to keep the interface that simple.
No that is just your perception. Note that he is talking about bugs that came up in the time span between 2.0.39 and 2.0.40 -- note that 2.0.39 is now 3 years old!
There were a lot security related bugs fixedin 2.4 in the same period. 2.4.23 was put out only for a security relevant patch. Another bug was fixed in 2.4.21 that later turned out to have been exploited in the Debian compromise. Local root exploits are not rare, unfortunately. If you also count the local-DoS (i.e., non-root user can cause kernel crash), then you get plenty, in fact.
There is a well-written article (in German) on the end-of-life of the shuttle program in 2010. Among other things, it mentions that the shuttle program alone had higher costs (4 billion $) than the whole European space program. And it talks about the difficulties of the replacement program.
Most people in the know seem to assume that Andrea Arcangeli's tree is a clear winner over 2.4 vanilla in these kind of performance tests. Would have been much more interesting to see a comparison of 2.4.23-aa with 2.6.
(Any SuSE or United Linux 2.4 kernel is based on
2.4-aa.)
The fact is, 2.6 is considered extremely stable on servers by those who use it. (It's a little more problematic on the desktop where a big variety of hardware needs to be supported, and one of the drivers you need might not be so well-tested yet.)
In fact, some of the more server-oriented developers were so content with the stability of 2.5 early on that they started making mild pushes towards a 2.6.0 release almost a year ago.
This is possible some of the most useless research I've ever seen.
That is a little harsh. See, psychological research tends to go in small steps. First, someone develops an IQ test. Then, someone finds out that people with higher IQ tend to be more successful in their career later. Suprise? News? Of course not. But then this phenomenon is investigated in more and more detail, and it turns out that an IQ test is the singe most successful criterion to predict career success. And so it makes sense for companies to do IQ tests when selecting new employees. Then you can start optimizing IQ tests for specific job profiles. Etc.
Of course, this is not a very revolutionary paper. But it probably does contain a new idea, namely to measure the value of privacy in monetary terms. And the message of this paper is mainly that this method works. Now they can gradually start trying more sophisticated tests. That will lead to more surprising results.
The second bid auction, or in this case, the reverse second bid acution is a brillian idea. I wonder why it isn't used more in real life.
Well, if you assume people bid rationally, then 2nd bid auction is the same as a standard auction with small increments, as explained in another post. The only advantage is that it leads to the same result faster.
But part of the point of auctions is that people don't act completely rationally. Let's say there is a really cool _____ that you would like to get. You think it's so great that you would pay 500$ for it. You bid that. Now someone else bids 510$. Don't you think you would go on? And maybe still go on over 530$? And there you are, the seller getting 10% more than in the 2nd bid auction.
In my perception, one of the differences between the US (where I have now been almost 10 times for 2-4 weeks) and German society (where I live) is that the pressure to conform is noticeably higher in the American society. Of course, you can always find niches where pretty much anything is accepted. And yes, intolerance does exist in Germany, too:) But as a small tendency, I would say this difference clearly exists. So my prediction would be that the correlation would be considerable smaller among German participants.
Btw, I am not sure whether I should find this study interesting or distasteful. The idea of someone trying to find out how much I value my privacy in monetary terms makes me feel pretty uneasy, to say the least.
I hadn't known that there were people with access to Unix source that were working on this.
Oh come on. Don't you think Novell might have access to the Unix source? Don't you think they might have one of their employers write a couple of scripts to find similarities between the souce trees before they indemnify all new SuSE customers? Don't you think that IBM has a way to get access to the Unix sources? And do some checking before they increase the stakes in the law suit?
Do you really believe that we need to wait until the great ESR illegitimately gets access to the Unix sources and write an incredibly clever program to do the checking?
...hasn't been commented on yet IMHO. It is where he talks about how personally he took all the SCO stuff. I can't remember any interview where he talked so openly about this before. This time he gives us an idea that it must have been quite a blow to him.
And on the other hand, you can tell he feels some relieve now from the development in recent weeks (e.g. him being able to completely disprove within some 30 minutes every concrete claim SCO has made so far).
And those of us that feel as Linux supporters have been through a similar process, although in a much smaller scale. Why else did we keep moderating boring anti-SCO flamebaits as insightful, despite we had seem then a dozens of times already? We, too, took this a bit too personally.
Anyway, I think this is all much more interesting than yet another Linux-on-the-Desktop-prediction. (I don't see why Linus' opinion on that matter should carry more weight on this than that of a random SuSE or Mandrake sales person.)
of the methods they are using? And how many people will be subject to the screening each year? Say, if it's one in 10 millions, and some 20 millions entering the US that way, then the method would be pretty irresponsible IMHO. With 1000 terrorists on a watch list, that would mean identifying 2000 innocent people a year as terrorists.
Oh well, why do I ask, I am sure a responsible administration would never ever consider holding some hundreds of innocent people in custody for the sake of possibly capturing one or two suspected terrorists.
why is it that always people get a +5 Informative when they post a bug report to slashdot instead of sending it to LKML? When Logitech wireless hypersonic ultra XZ763 keyboard isn't working, the responsible maintainer should be informed, but why post it here?
Those who are interested in such reports should read LKML. Let's keep slashdot for posts of general interest.
I am sure he was as disappointed as me that the installation didn't follow the./configure && make && make install standard procedure, and that it defaulted to/usr instead of/usr/local as installation directory.
Seriously:
The Spamassassin installation documentation could be better written IMHO.
Why doesn't RedHat's update service offer constand updates to the current version of SpamAssassin?
Why doesn't it (as mentioned in another post) have the most important configuratoin setups included in their overall configuration GUI?
I really wish distributions would support SA better.
...as I recently discoverd that when one googles for the free software project I am maintaining, one gets a sponsored link for an equivalent commercial program. Now, I don't earn anything anyway with my project, so I don't care so much, but still it feels
a little odd.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to complain, I am glad that the Savannah team (consisting mostly of volunteers) handled the breakin there with great care and responsibility. But still we have to give extra credits to the team handling the gnome servers for bringing up the services so quickly. (At savannah, it took more than a month until CVS write access was reenabled.)
Of course, it's nice to see they are going in the right direction, but I suppose it will take me a while until I have made up for the time following the link and downloading it (not to speak of the time it cost to post this comment :P) by the increased productivity...
Of course, it could just be random screening, but I that seems unlikely to me. I got selected the last few times I flew from Detroit.
Frankly, I still find the procedure somewhat humiliating. It's incredible how inefficient they are. There are always 6-8 TSA guards standing around waiting until the next guard can take over their passenger for the next step. Apparently collecting the documents from the passengers, waiving the next person through the metal detector, staring at the xray monitors, handing over the documents to the person doing the baggage searching, and doing the metal detector screening are all highly specialized tasks that require special skills so that it is strictly impossible for one guard to take over the responsibility of the next one.
Their metal detectors are so sensitive that they regularly "detect" the trouser buttons. Then you have to roll over over the trousers a bit, so that they can check more closely. Their baggage searching doesn't exactly make the impression of being undefeatable, to say the least, but at least that means that it doesn't take ages and they put everything back together as well.
Now imagine you started queueing 30 mins before your boarding deadline, and all this goes on and on, inefficiently etc. First some 15 mins in the queue, then you have to wait again until your baggage got x-rayed, then again for the metal detector checking. I think the worst thing is -- even if they seem nice, maybe I actually feel like chatting with them, then I start think, "Oh better don't, might get misunderstood", "Oh come on, they are humans, too, after all", "Better not, even if it just causes a delay, remember your flight is going in 15 mins". It's like being in an exam without knowing what you are being tested in.
Well sorry about my ramblings, many of you probably know the procedure yourself, but had to get this off my chest. But I would be curious if there is reliable information on whether this "selected security screening" is purely random based, or based on some sort of profiling.
Yes. Yes. See my other post in this thread.
However, AFAIK, it cannot move data. So you should first try your windows defragmentation program to see how much space it leaves at the end of the partition. In case there is enough space left for your Linux partitions, you can go ahead and just run SuSE's installation pograms.
In my case, there wasn't. But it's still possible by downloading a statically linked beta version of ntfsresize (google for it), which has relocation support since about 2 months ago. Burn it on a CD, start the SuSE Rescue system, and follow the instructions on the ntfsresize FAQ carefully. Worked flawlessly for me.
Yes, it's beta, but the developers seem very careful, and they didn't get a data-loss bug report yet.
If I were the dictator, MS would be forced to document the file formats it is using (including all WMV formats, of course), all network protocols, and to provide sufficient NTFS documentation so that I can finally can mount /dev/hda2 with read-write soonish.
Sincerely, /. style nazi
...and I suspect that's why their drives die an early death so often...
The killer of all the digital equipment was always that it wasn't as easy to use as the cassette recorder: Start, Stop, Record, Rewind is all you need. Never has any company designing an electronic replacement managed to keep the interface that simple.
There were a lot security related bugs fixedin 2.4 in the same period. 2.4.23 was put out only for a security relevant patch. Another bug was fixed in 2.4.21 that later turned out to have been exploited in the Debian compromise. Local root exploits are not rare, unfortunately. If you also count the local-DoS (i.e., non-root user can cause kernel crash), then you get plenty, in fact.
Come on slashdot, you can do better than that!!!
Translate: Konqueror has increased compatibility with widely accepted html standard-violations.
There is a well-written article (in German) on the end-of-life of the shuttle program in 2010. Among other things, it mentions that the shuttle program alone had higher costs (4 billion $) than the whole European space program. And it talks about the difficulties of the replacement program.
(Any SuSE or United Linux 2.4 kernel is based on 2.4-aa.)
In fact, some of the more server-oriented developers were so content with the stability of 2.5 early on that they started making mild pushes towards a 2.6.0 release almost a year ago.
That is a little harsh. See, psychological research tends to go in small steps. First, someone develops an IQ test. Then, someone finds out that people with higher IQ tend to be more successful in their career later. Suprise? News? Of course not. But then this phenomenon is investigated in more and more detail, and it turns out that an IQ test is the singe most successful criterion to predict career success. And so it makes sense for companies to do IQ tests when selecting new employees. Then you can start optimizing IQ tests for specific job profiles. Etc.
Of course, this is not a very revolutionary paper. But it probably does contain a new idea, namely to measure the value of privacy in monetary terms. And the message of this paper is mainly that this method works. Now they can gradually start trying more sophisticated tests. That will lead to more surprising results.
Well, if you assume people bid rationally, then 2nd bid auction is the same as a standard auction with small increments, as explained in another post. The only advantage is that it leads to the same result faster.
But part of the point of auctions is that people don't act completely rationally. Let's say there is a really cool _____ that you would like to get. You think it's so great that you would pay 500$ for it. You bid that. Now someone else bids 510$. Don't you think you would go on? And maybe still go on over 530$? And there you are, the seller getting 10% more than in the 2nd bid auction.
In my perception, one of the differences between the US (where I have now been almost 10 times for 2-4 weeks) and German society (where I live) is that the pressure to conform is noticeably higher in the American society. Of course, you can always find niches where pretty much anything is accepted. And yes, intolerance does exist in Germany, too :) But as a small tendency, I would say this difference clearly exists. So my prediction would be that the correlation would be considerable smaller among German participants.
Btw, I am not sure whether I should find this study interesting or distasteful. The idea of someone trying to find out how much I value my privacy in monetary terms makes me feel pretty uneasy, to say the least.
Oh come on. Don't you think Novell might have access to the Unix source? Don't you think they might have one of their employers write a couple of scripts to find similarities between the souce trees before they indemnify all new SuSE customers? Don't you think that IBM has a way to get access to the Unix sources? And do some checking before they increase the stakes in the law suit?
Do you really believe that we need to wait until the great ESR illegitimately gets access to the Unix sources and write an incredibly clever program to do the checking?
And on the other hand, you can tell he feels some relieve now from the development in recent weeks (e.g. him being able to completely disprove within some 30 minutes every concrete claim SCO has made so far).
And those of us that feel as Linux supporters have been through a similar process, although in a much smaller scale. Why else did we keep moderating boring anti-SCO flamebaits as insightful, despite we had seem then a dozens of times already? We, too, took this a bit too personally.
Anyway, I think this is all much more interesting than yet another Linux-on-the-Desktop-prediction. (I don't see why Linus' opinion on that matter should carry more weight on this than that of a random SuSE or Mandrake sales person.)
Seriously, I think you must be quite a lot into BSD not get this very simple point the parent post is making.
Oh well, why do I ask, I am sure a responsible administration would never ever consider holding some hundreds of innocent people in custody for the sake of possibly capturing one or two suspected terrorists.
Those who are interested in such reports should read LKML. Let's keep slashdot for posts of general interest.
Seriously:
- The Spamassassin installation documentation could be better written IMHO.
- Why doesn't RedHat's update service offer constand updates to the current version of SpamAssassin?
- Why doesn't it (as mentioned in another post) have the most important configuratoin setups included in their overall configuration GUI?
I really wish distributions would support SA better....as I recently discoverd that when one googles for the free software project I am maintaining, one gets a sponsored link for an equivalent commercial program. Now, I don't earn anything anyway with my project, so I don't care so much, but still it feels a little odd.