Same here. I had a friend on AIM to help me, but i think i asked a total of three questions...he just said, "Look at the config file...i think it's/etc/X11/XF86Config or something." And I did...and I got it to work. It really wasn't all that difficult. That was back in the good ol' days, though. Back when I was still in high school. Ahh, memories. Then I went to college and discovered FreeBSD. Then Gentoo.. Then DragonFly. And now? Sex. It's better than all of them put together.
Dude, this is an easy one. The default location of the little Gear do-dad to bring up the menu is the same as the start button in windows. With gnome, it's on the mirror opposite side of the screen. Duh.
But seriously, KDE gives me a headache. It does have a lot of really really nice features...but there are almost too many...it's just not for me. I do, however, think people should try both, along with XFCE, and see what they like best. Personally, gnome gives me what I need out of a desktop environment.
Sometimes I wonder why I still read slashdot, and then I read something like this and I remember:
Geeks have the most annoying superiority complexes, and when someone who actually KNOWS (aka, the nerd of the Geek-Nerd-Dork triad) knocks them down a peg, I smile.
And then there's always the theory that we actually first existed on mars, then around 6,000 years ago had to migrate because of some crazy intense cataclysmic event and wanted to start completely fresh, and so we founded this awesome city - Atlantis. But everyone was being jerks, so there was a big war. Different factions went their spearate ways and started their own oral traditions, though two of the factions kept to the old traditions...with a little bit of interpretation. They were headed by Egy Patian and Maz Teknolopiant. They still built great observatories, hoping that one day they could return back to Mars. They also kept crops of Martian homeland plants, known mainly today as Salvia Divinorum, Cannibus, a couple special types of mushrooms, and some other things. They found these special plants had amazing abilities to transport them to other dimensions, without actually harming them (or seemingly so) physically. Cause...i dunno about you, but it freakin hurts to try and enter another dimension by walking through a wall. It's just not possible. I'ved tried, trust me.
Anyway, long story short, the other factions didn't like all of this old-school martian mumbo jumbo, so they engrained into their oral tradition the concept of dominance and conquest, basically rasied both of the old-school factions to the ground (thats a weird turn of phrase, "raise to the ground!"...language is so WEIRD!), and thats how we got here today. Oh, and this was all totally conscious until just after the printing press was invented, when religious leaders from around the globe came together to discuss the threat from the old ways (which promoted individuality and freedom from the material world) to their power. They decided that for the next two hundred years, printing presses would be subsidized for approved uses, and incredibly expensive otherwise, citing that while the rich might try and revive the old ways, they would be easily chastized by the church leaders as being greedy, promoting crazy far-out ideas to get more money from the unsuspecting commoners. And so, all knowledge of the old ways dissapeared until Archaeology came about, when scientists began discovering alien-seeming civilizations in south america and along the nile...
Thats basically what i'm saying - And not all bacteria have the ability to create a neat little protein cuticle around their cell walls. So, fist the bacteria that was pre-existing on the probe would have to have the ability to encyst. We probably have brought a few over...but the evolutionary leap from life on earth or life on mars is...well...fucking huge. That would cull off a HUGE majority, if not all. But really...you only need one sucessful bacteria to colonize.
Another thought that the conspiracy theory side of me digs - what if NASA has been developing a microbe that would have the ability to live on mars (selectively "breeding" microbes is done all the time, especially in bioremediation), and then plan on sending them up in latter probes to begin terraforming? All they would have to account for would be the basic nutrient requirements, mainly H, C, N, P, and K; then have them be photo-energetic (not necesarily photosynthetic...there's not much carbon dioxide over there as I understand), somehow using oxygen as their terminal electron acceptor...It would be difficult...but i'm not so sure it's undoable. Those sly bastards. All it would take would be one wayward biologist.
Re:It's deeper than just bugs and republicans...
on
Biomorphic Software
·
· Score: 1
I doubt it, bacteria that exists plentifully on earth have been on earth for quite a while and are pretty well adapted to the way things are on earth. In order for bateria to be introduced on mars a population would have to:
A) Survive on a surface with little to no food (the probe)
B) Survive exiting earth's atmosphere
C) Survive in the vacuume of space, existing only on whatever particles are in it's immediate suroundings on the probe
D) Survive on mars, basically living off the same food source (the probe) until it either found a food source on mars, or, after sever hundred generations (ball park estimate), it evolved into a new species that could survive on mars.
While it is entirely possible for this to happen (bacteria are freakin machines when it comes to evolution), I think it would be highly unlikely.
It's a different way to do it. Please, extract your head from your ass. Options are usually not a bad thing.
It's deeper than just bugs and republicans...
on
Biomorphic Software
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Your entire nervous system works like this, as do things like active transport protiens in your cells, the majority of organelles in your cells. A whole lot of nature follows, "The individuals posess little (or no) independant thought, only giving responses to electrical or chemical signals" plan. The interesting stuff comes from emergent properties which still seem to baffle scientists. For example, your brain is a collection of basically binary gates - few than are in current CPUs - and yet we (and several other animals) exibit fascinating emergent properties like emotion, abstract thought, and pooping, that computers don't have yet. I think figuring out the mechanism behind emergent properties (besides saying, "oh, well...uhh...there's a bunch of things interacting...and this happens because they're...uh...interacting") will really propel biocomputing. Hopefully whatever engineers implement the science have an eye for ethics, as well.
which works great if you friend has the same plugin, otherwise it doesn't work at all, and your messages are still sent plain-text. I really wish all IM clients would include encryption support. It can't be that much development overhead, right?
Depending on which one you get. If you use the mini ISO, it doesn't. If you use the two floppy disk method, it doesn't (and i happen to prefer the two floppy disk method, myself). There is no defacto packaging system in dfly as of yet, unlike FreeBSD, and so I would imagine that's why there are no third party packages included in this first official release. You get the base system. No more, no less. And FreeBSD does not include links or lynx in the base system.
Depedending on the person. If you really think it should be in there, send a message to one of the dragonfly mailinglists with a convincing argument. They're reasonable people and might just do it. But expect many, many responses as to why a person it NOT cripped without a text-based browser. Also...this kind of ends up sounding like a broken record on FreeBSD/Dfly posts, but..
As someone who has posted a couple stupid comments and questions to the DFly kernel mailing list, i can assure you that they are extremely curteous. When they have nothing nice to say, they don't say it at all. I don't think i've seen a single flame war in the past few months i've watched the list. Seriously, they're nice people.
- DOES NOT INSTALL A TEXT-BASED BROWSER OR WGET. This really got on my nerves. I had to download the links browser tarball onto my server and FTP in to get it. Without a working text browser, it is hard to download needed packages.
Cvsup. Thats all i gotta say. I'm happy they actually included CVSup in the base system - unlike freebsd - as that is the main means of updating the system. The supfile is in/usr/share/examples (i think, i don't have my dfly system booted up). Read through it, it's pretty self explanitory. That'll give you ports and the dfports override, then you won't have to report all kinds of software for it.
Not right now, and not in the immediate future. As i understand, if the hardware were donated, they would get it to work on PPC. It's a small project with small funds.
First of all I'd like to point out that I neither agree nor disagree with the whole of the Gaia hypothesis. I find it an interesting extrapolation of the current scientific base into philosophy. All of nature does seem to tend toward equillibrium. From acid-base equillibria in chemistry to the tendency towards lack of motion in physics when you take into account all forces acting on an object (my expertise only extends to simple mechanics, I haven't gotten into string theory and all that fun stuff yet), to biological interactions like predetor-prey relationships and more complex food-web interactions. Things just seem to balance out. Why? And why do humans have such a large impact on their environment as compared to other organisms? Has the rest of nature (because, we truely are a part of nature - sky scrapers and all...i absolutely despise the separationist line of thought that nature is around us, but does not include us) just not caught up to our form of biological augmentation of the natural world? The Gaia hypothesis simply tries to answer all of these whys, for better or worse.
And I do agree that some people have taken it way too far, but at the same time we seem to be the only organism that can question it's actions over the long term. Why is that? Is it an evolved mechnism to deal with the particularly extreme ends that seems coupled with our means of survival? From my point of view, if we have it, why not use it? I will give you that there does seem to be a current scientific dogma that humanity outpaces the evolutionary speed of the rest of nature. But, there is also a lot of evidence to back that up - we displace organisms fast, we can turn a normative riparian ecosystem into a biological wasteland in a few hours with the chemicals we've been able to harness, we can completely desolate millions of square miles of land with a single harnessed chemical reactions (ie, nuclear warfare). Humanity has a great potential for destruction, but it also has a great potential for understanding, using it's intellect - one of the oddest freakin' evolutionary means of survival i can think of. The duckbill platipuss' beak and funky tail makes more pragmatic sense in relation to it's ecosystem than an oversized mass of neural tissue, capable of what is, really, just binary communication, but from which emerges abstract thought. That one still has neuroscientists baffled. Basically, my point is this: We have the capacity to think before we act - why not use that? It's been the key to our survival so far, and now that the earth is arguably showing signs of stress from our ecological footprint, it just might be the key to our survival as a species in the future.
It has been argued a lot that humanity is like a virus...and there is a lot of evidence in favor of that. There is nothing that can sucessfully feed on a virus (that i know of, at least, I could be wrong). A virus feeds on what resources it's adapted to, until those resources are diminished. Then the virus more or less ceases to be. Humanity, at this point in time, effectively has no predators. We consume what resources we've adapted our culture around, until they're diminished, then we cease to exist or move on. Despite being arguably more mobile than a virus (on our scale...i think if we were scaled down to virus-size, it might be about equal, given the technology we've used to adapt ourselves to travel), there is one more thing that we have that a virus does not - the ability of foresight and the ability to learn, as a species, based upon our past actions as a species. Do we have to take into account the survival of all organisms in our quest for survival? No. Just one, really - homo sapiens. But, in order for us to survive, we have to depend on the free goods and services provided by a plethora of other organisms that give us food, clean our water, and our air. That understanding is the basis for ecology. It can be viewed serveral ways. Two follow. One:
It's on the national map, but not downloadable. I downloaded some data sets and haven't looked at them , though, so it might be included. Thanks again for the link.
Well, clearly someone paid close attention to biology class!
I love how people write ecological ideas off as "New Age" and "Man Hating." It's so cute! Pft! We're not part of nature! Nature is there for US! And clearly because almost all other animals exist within it without thinking twice about their impace, we should do that same! "Ecological Footprint"? Bah! Some new-age pot-smoking hippy-freak made that term up after he tripped on some especially potent "'shrooms"! Social darwinism! That's for me! Do what benefits you, screw all other living organisms on this planet!
Here's a fun tip! Learn about how your body works, how your cells are just a conglomeration of independently working biochemical machines that scale up to a moving, respirating, reproducing, growing animal. After you actually learn how biology works, then the Gaia hypothesis presents some fascinating parallels. It does, admittedly, have it's flaws though.
Yeah, that sucks. This is why I really only recommend installing linux to people who want to know how linux or operating systems in general work. When something like that comes up, you are FORCED to get deep into the wonderfulness of the kernel. It's not that hard, but it can take several trials and some google work. Definately not for my mom...maybe for my dad (but probably not). My mom would just throw her hands up and say, "I broke it again. Computers hate me. Its my magnetic field." Seriously, she does say that. But, if I want them to use linux, I will install it myself for them and make sure everything works, and they have neat little "internet" "e-mail" "solitare" etc icons on their desktop. It is possible for linux to be like that, it just tends not to happen in the big distros.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here. I had a friend on AIM to help me, but i think i asked a total of three questions...he just said, "Look at the config file...i think it's /etc/X11/XF86Config or something." And I did...and I got it to work. It really wasn't all that difficult. That was back in the good ol' days, though. Back when I was still in high school. Ahh, memories. Then I went to college and discovered FreeBSD. Then Gentoo.. Then DragonFly. And now? Sex. It's better than all of them put together.
Dude, this is an easy one. The default location of the little Gear do-dad to bring up the menu is the same as the start button in windows. With gnome, it's on the mirror opposite side of the screen. Duh.
But seriously, KDE gives me a headache. It does have a lot of really really nice features...but there are almost too many...it's just not for me. I do, however, think people should try both, along with XFCE, and see what they like best. Personally, gnome gives me what I need out of a desktop environment.
Sometimes I wonder why I still read slashdot, and then I read something like this and I remember:
Geeks have the most annoying superiority complexes, and when someone who actually KNOWS (aka, the nerd of the Geek-Nerd-Dork triad) knocks them down a peg, I smile.
And then there's always the theory that we actually first existed on mars, then around 6,000 years ago had to migrate because of some crazy intense cataclysmic event and wanted to start completely fresh, and so we founded this awesome city - Atlantis. But everyone was being jerks, so there was a big war. Different factions went their spearate ways and started their own oral traditions, though two of the factions kept to the old traditions...with a little bit of interpretation. They were headed by Egy Patian and Maz Teknolopiant. They still built great observatories, hoping that one day they could return back to Mars. They also kept crops of Martian homeland plants, known mainly today as Salvia Divinorum, Cannibus, a couple special types of mushrooms, and some other things. They found these special plants had amazing abilities to transport them to other dimensions, without actually harming them (or seemingly so) physically. Cause...i dunno about you, but it freakin hurts to try and enter another dimension by walking through a wall. It's just not possible. I'ved tried, trust me.
...language is so WEIRD!), and thats how we got here today. Oh, and this was all totally conscious until just after the printing press was invented, when religious leaders from around the globe came together to discuss the threat from the old ways (which promoted individuality and freedom from the material world) to their power. They decided that for the next two hundred years, printing presses would be subsidized for approved uses, and incredibly expensive otherwise, citing that while the rich might try and revive the old ways, they would be easily chastized by the church leaders as being greedy, promoting crazy far-out ideas to get more money from the unsuspecting commoners. And so, all knowledge of the old ways dissapeared until Archaeology came about, when scientists began discovering alien-seeming civilizations in south america and along the nile...
Anyway, long story short, the other factions didn't like all of this old-school martian mumbo jumbo, so they engrained into their oral tradition the concept of dominance and conquest, basically rasied both of the old-school factions to the ground (thats a weird turn of phrase, "raise to the ground!"
Man, i need to stop listening to Art Bell.
Thats basically what i'm saying - And not all bacteria have the ability to create a neat little protein cuticle around their cell walls. So, fist the bacteria that was pre-existing on the probe would have to have the ability to encyst. We probably have brought a few over...but the evolutionary leap from life on earth or life on mars is...well...fucking huge. That would cull off a HUGE majority, if not all. But really...you only need one sucessful bacteria to colonize.
Another thought that the conspiracy theory side of me digs - what if NASA has been developing a microbe that would have the ability to live on mars (selectively "breeding" microbes is done all the time, especially in bioremediation), and then plan on sending them up in latter probes to begin terraforming? All they would have to account for would be the basic nutrient requirements, mainly H, C, N, P, and K; then have them be photo-energetic (not necesarily photosynthetic...there's not much carbon dioxide over there as I understand), somehow using oxygen as their terminal electron acceptor...It would be difficult...but i'm not so sure it's undoable. Those sly bastards. All it would take would be one wayward biologist.
So, we're arguably getting closer.
I doubt it, bacteria that exists plentifully on earth have been on earth for quite a while and are pretty well adapted to the way things are on earth. In order for bateria to be introduced on mars a population would have to:
A) Survive on a surface with little to no food (the probe)
B) Survive exiting earth's atmosphere
C) Survive in the vacuume of space, existing only on whatever particles are in it's immediate suroundings on the probe
D) Survive on mars, basically living off the same food source (the probe) until it either found a food source on mars, or, after sever hundred generations (ball park estimate), it evolved into a new species that could survive on mars.
While it is entirely possible for this to happen (bacteria are freakin machines when it comes to evolution), I think it would be highly unlikely.
And their poo-hole is located right above their head. Personally, I find their way of life dirty and disgusting, but to each his own.
I'm getting my hopes up, baby!!! Yeah!!!!!! Life on Mars!! WOOOOO!! PARRRTTYYY!!!
It's a different way to do it. Please, extract your head from your ass. Options are usually not a bad thing.
Your entire nervous system works like this, as do things like active transport protiens in your cells, the majority of organelles in your cells. A whole lot of nature follows, "The individuals posess little (or no) independant thought, only giving responses to electrical or chemical signals" plan. The interesting stuff comes from emergent properties which still seem to baffle scientists. For example, your brain is a collection of basically binary gates - few than are in current CPUs - and yet we (and several other animals) exibit fascinating emergent properties like emotion, abstract thought, and pooping, that computers don't have yet. I think figuring out the mechanism behind emergent properties (besides saying, "oh, well...uhh...there's a bunch of things interacting...and this happens because they're...uh...interacting") will really propel biocomputing. Hopefully whatever engineers implement the science have an eye for ethics, as well.
which works great if you friend has the same plugin, otherwise it doesn't work at all, and your messages are still sent plain-text. I really wish all IM clients would include encryption support. It can't be that much development overhead, right?
Depending on which one you get. If you use the mini ISO, it doesn't. If you use the two floppy disk method, it doesn't (and i happen to prefer the two floppy disk method, myself). There is no defacto packaging system in dfly as of yet, unlike FreeBSD, and so I would imagine that's why there are no third party packages included in this first official release. You get the base system. No more, no less. And FreeBSD does not include links or lynx in the base system.
You really don't have to cvsup.
As someone who has posted a couple stupid comments and questions to the DFly kernel mailing list, i can assure you that they are extremely curteous. When they have nothing nice to say, they don't say it at all. I don't think i've seen a single flame war in the past few months i've watched the list. Seriously, they're nice people.
- DOES NOT INSTALL A TEXT-BASED BROWSER OR WGET. This really got on my nerves. I had to download the links browser tarball onto my server and FTP in to get it. Without a working text browser, it is hard to download needed packages.
/usr/share/examples (i think, i don't have my dfly system booted up). Read through it, it's pretty self explanitory. That'll give you ports and the dfports override, then you won't have to report all kinds of software for it.
Cvsup. Thats all i gotta say. I'm happy they actually included CVSup in the base system - unlike freebsd - as that is the main means of updating the system. The supfile is in
BAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAH
......
HAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAH
*deep breath*
HAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHHAHAH
awesome, man. Im putting my money on DragonFly though.
Not right now, and not in the immediate future. As i understand, if the hardware were donated, they would get it to work on PPC. It's a small project with small funds.
First of all I'd like to point out that I neither agree nor disagree with the whole of the Gaia hypothesis. I find it an interesting extrapolation of the current scientific base into philosophy. All of nature does seem to tend toward equillibrium. From acid-base equillibria in chemistry to the tendency towards lack of motion in physics when you take into account all forces acting on an object (my expertise only extends to simple mechanics, I haven't gotten into string theory and all that fun stuff yet), to biological interactions like predetor-prey relationships and more complex food-web interactions. Things just seem to balance out. Why? And why do humans have such a large impact on their environment as compared to other organisms? Has the rest of nature (because, we truely are a part of nature - sky scrapers and all...i absolutely despise the separationist line of thought that nature is around us, but does not include us) just not caught up to our form of biological augmentation of the natural world? The Gaia hypothesis simply tries to answer all of these whys, for better or worse.
And I do agree that some people have taken it way too far, but at the same time we seem to be the only organism that can question it's actions over the long term. Why is that? Is it an evolved mechnism to deal with the particularly extreme ends that seems coupled with our means of survival? From my point of view, if we have it, why not use it? I will give you that there does seem to be a current scientific dogma that humanity outpaces the evolutionary speed of the rest of nature. But, there is also a lot of evidence to back that up - we displace organisms fast, we can turn a normative riparian ecosystem into a biological wasteland in a few hours with the chemicals we've been able to harness, we can completely desolate millions of square miles of land with a single harnessed chemical reactions (ie, nuclear warfare). Humanity has a great potential for destruction, but it also has a great potential for understanding, using it's intellect - one of the oddest freakin' evolutionary means of survival i can think of. The duckbill platipuss' beak and funky tail makes more pragmatic sense in relation to it's ecosystem than an oversized mass of neural tissue, capable of what is, really, just binary communication, but from which emerges abstract thought. That one still has neuroscientists baffled. Basically, my point is this: We have the capacity to think before we act - why not use that? It's been the key to our survival so far, and now that the earth is arguably showing signs of stress from our ecological footprint, it just might be the key to our survival as a species in the future.
It has been argued a lot that humanity is like a virus...and there is a lot of evidence in favor of that. There is nothing that can sucessfully feed on a virus (that i know of, at least, I could be wrong). A virus feeds on what resources it's adapted to, until those resources are diminished. Then the virus more or less ceases to be. Humanity, at this point in time, effectively has no predators. We consume what resources we've adapted our culture around, until they're diminished, then we cease to exist or move on. Despite being arguably more mobile than a virus (on our scale...i think if we were scaled down to virus-size, it might be about equal, given the technology we've used to adapt ourselves to travel), there is one more thing that we have that a virus does not - the ability of foresight and the ability to learn, as a species, based upon our past actions as a species. Do we have to take into account the survival of all organisms in our quest for survival? No. Just one, really - homo sapiens. But, in order for us to survive, we have to depend on the free goods and services provided by a plethora of other organisms that give us food, clean our water, and our air. That understanding is the basis for ecology. It can be viewed serveral ways. Two follow.
One:
awing human beings into accepting some k
I understand this, I'm just pointing out that it pisses me off. I despise that kind of corporate branding. Someone get me a kleenex.
It's on the national map, but not downloadable. I downloaded some data sets and haven't looked at them , though, so it might be included. Thanks again for the link.
It's just more marketing propaganda, though - right?
PC = Personal Computer? How are RISC-based machines less personal than x86 machines?
Well, clearly someone paid close attention to biology class!
I love how people write ecological ideas off as "New Age" and "Man Hating." It's so cute! Pft! We're not part of nature! Nature is there for US! And clearly because almost all other animals exist within it without thinking twice about their impace, we should do that same! "Ecological Footprint"? Bah! Some new-age pot-smoking hippy-freak made that term up after he tripped on some especially potent "'shrooms"! Social darwinism! That's for me! Do what benefits you, screw all other living organisms on this planet!
Here's a fun tip! Learn about how your body works, how your cells are just a conglomeration of independently working biochemical machines that scale up to a moving, respirating, reproducing, growing animal. After you actually learn how biology works, then the Gaia hypothesis presents some fascinating parallels. It does, admittedly, have it's flaws though.
And Ayn Rand submersed herself in half-truths.
Pft. Except the answer is yes in most cases.
....MOST. Not all.
Yeah, that sucks. This is why I really only recommend installing linux to people who want to know how linux or operating systems in general work. When something like that comes up, you are FORCED to get deep into the wonderfulness of the kernel. It's not that hard, but it can take several trials and some google work. Definately not for my mom...maybe for my dad (but probably not). My mom would just throw her hands up and say, "I broke it again. Computers hate me. Its my magnetic field." Seriously, she does say that. But, if I want them to use linux, I will install it myself for them and make sure everything works, and they have neat little "internet" "e-mail" "solitare" etc icons on their desktop. It is possible for linux to be like that, it just tends not to happen in the big distros.