Correct me if I'm wrong, but heat is bad for computer parts.
"In the lower and middle temperature ranges, higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates." Google's Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population.
If your disks really live in a >45C environment, then I take it back.
There's a difference between "deriving from a free software program" and "using the output of a free software program." You can use gcc to compile non-free programs, just like you can use OpenOffice to write a non-free report or book. In both cases, the product of the program is non-free, even though the program itself and any derivatives of the program have to be GPL.
Bison 2.4.1 is plain GPL3. Flex isn't GPL at all. GCC is plain GPL (v2 and v3).
Check out the GPL faq.
I listened to a number of mission scientists explain why we don't stop.
First, it is suspected that Pluto's atmosphere, made up of (hypothesized) 3 chemicals, will snow onto the surface soon, as its elliptical orbit recedes from being closest to the sun. If we went slow enough to stop, we'd miss the atmosphere (lessening the results of instruments such as REX).
Second, since we know so little about what's at Pluto, New Horizons is a reconaissance probe, emphasizing cameras. Once we've been there once, and scientists here have flung theories around for a couple years, there will be some interesting ideas about exactly what kind of specific measurements to make, and can send New Horizons II.
Third, Pluto is just one body in the Kuiper Belt, a huge collection of bodies way out there. It'd be more interesting to see two sets of science results than just one, so we'll fly past Pluto and aim towards a Kuiper Belt object as well.
We didn't even know until last year that Pluto had two more moons. Which particular Kuiper Belt object we will visit hasn't even been decided, and won't be until a couple years/months before we get to Pluto. The knowledge about Pluto at this point is far too small to waste the money on an orbiting spacecraft.
But hey, if people want to pay for it, the engineers and scientists would be ecstatic to have orbiting spacecrafts around everything out there.
I had a 40GB drive off some cheap vendor from pricewatch, i think it was a "white-label Maxtor" or something, in a carputer i had. Lived in Colorado, parked the Jeep outside in the winter, also never had problems, even starting up when the car was below freezing. Even when I drove over bumps, no problems. I have heard (although this may just be crap) that modern hard drives have so much momentum (think gyroscope) from angular speed that it requires very large disturbances to upset them. Car suspensions also help a lot - even though it may seem like a bumpy ride, it's probably less g's than the shock of dropping a laptop hard onto a table from only a few inches height.
I'd be interested in seeing you jog without changing the direction in which an iPod was moving. Remember, velocity has both magnitude (miles per hour) and direction (up/down, north/south). When I run with a walkman, it jiggles an awful lot.
I used to work at a Carmike Cinemas in Colorado Springs, and well, the soda spouts are the least of your concerns. When the butthead boss was in, we had to clean the INSIDE of the popcorn hoppers with stainless steel cleaner. Also, we had rats. The solution - move the candy with teeth marks on the corners to the back of the stand, where it isn't visible, and sell it first. To me, it was the materialization of "The Jungle".
And the PGP "web of trust" would keep spammers from massively infecting the system, because no one trusts the new kid to delete a few thousand entries.
I would gladly donate some of my cable bandwidth to a distributed solution.
being a visible minority probably boosted my chances of getting in (even though my averages were already well above the minimum for guaranteed acceptance
I would imagine that he doesn't feel anything about that at all, since he would have gotten in regardless of his skin color.
United States citizens don't have a right to responsibly vote, they have a right to vote. If you open a door for literacy, why not require that people have certain moral standards? Why not require that they not be communists? Why not require that they be conservative or liberal or white or black?
And, to me, the GPL is thought control. It says (to me), "use this code, and you must agree with RMS's view of open source free software".
It's a protective copyright. If he (or anyone else licensing under GPL) wrote it, it's his. If his rules are, if you want to play with his toys you have to be his friend, then it's easy. You either play nice (use the GPL, even if you don't want to) or get out of the sandbox (go back to closed source/proprietary).
What RMS is (unapologetically) hoping for is that you need his software bad enough that you'll flex to exist inside GPL rules.
I think that RMS and the sticklers need Linus and the benders for balance in the force. If RMS ruled the OSS world, we probably wouldn't have ever gotten the LGPL, and NVidia would have never written accelerated drivers, and I couldn't play RTCW. If RMS had never existed, neither would the original GCC. Of course, I'm stepping on some toes here, and don't mean to imply in the slightest that RMS or Linus make up a majority (or even a large minority) of the OS by themselves - there are thousands of other major players, who are typically anonymous in these issues.
Other than that, I agree with you. I, too, think DRM is permissible in Linux, but I'll never use it.
In fact, what the article says would have drastically less of an effect on the appearance of the moon than even a large above-ground probe that we never retrieved.
Desknotes are good so long as you know what you're getting, which is NOT a laptop. Desknotes are full-fledged computers with a small enough form factor to look like laptops. They come with no battery, and one isn't even available for most. Again, if what you want is a portable computer that runs off of wall current, then that's fine, just so long as you know that's what you're getting.
I get what you're saying (I took a Cisco class in high school, now I'm at the University of Colorado, Electrical & Computer Engineering, I'm glad I'm "mind expanding"), but I'll tell you that many of the kids in my high school Cisco certification class wouldn't have made it through 4 years of college, and many of them weren't planning on it. Not necessarily because of intelligence, but school just isn't a great fit for lots of 18 year old kids. 4 more years of school just doesn't make sense. They might not get a "systems administrator" position, but maybe they'll start by laying cable or helping a large IT staff. As their "maturity" develops, they'll move into higher positions, and they'll already have the credentials to back it up.
Not everybody should have to go to 4 years of college to get a job or be viewed as "smart".
System files are protected from inadvertent change.
Of all the things you got wrong, this is the most painfully obvious. The home series, through Windows Me at least, has NOT been this way. UNIX, and thus Linux, has had permissions on files since before I was born, protecting them from inadvertent change. Plus, the fact that Linux config files are human readable (Picking through XML with cat is still easier than juggling different GUIDs!) means you have less chance of screwing up. Also, Linux configuration has a much clearer file->objective setup - I know that lilo.conf is the configuration file for lilo. If I need more help, I can look at lilo.conf.sample, or try man lilo.conf. In windows, finding the registry setting for whether Office uses landscape or portrait by default could be in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office 97\Config or a million other places. And there is still no man command!
In built support, from time of consumer device launch, for peripherals and card types (PCMCIA, USB etc. - Linux got late to market here).
Again wrong - Windows doesn't support my Linksys LNE100TX ethernet card, linksys does. And, I have to download new drivers from their website to do it (not possible if i use the card to get broadband internet). Whereas all modern linuxes detect and install the driver themselves, or at most a "modprobe tulip" is needed. Plus, if I have trouble, I have a handful of tools - lspci, modprobe, cat/dev/* - at my disposal, whereas in windows, its "reboot into safe mode, delete all your drivers, reinstall them all. IF that didn't work, do it again."
Simpler setup with very few questions.
My latest install of RedHat 8.0 asked me significantly fewer questions than Windows 98. And I didn't have to find 30 damn license keys! Packages were installed by group - do I want graphical internet? Sure - check that box and I get the normal mozilla, gaim, xchat. Do I want to add mozchat? Click details, then click mozchat. This is similar to Windows, but adding the Gimp is easy, in windows, I have to find my Adobe CD(s), load them in order, type in the license key, la la la. Oh and don't forget the magical reboot. Adding XMMS is easy, but I'd have to go download winamp (version 2, because 3 locks up all the time) and run that setup program. Reboot again. While you're wearing out your BIOS with all those reboots, I'm on AIM and MSN at the same time, cruising the internet with no pop-ups, pumping the MP3s from my girlfriend's computer across campus, and playing Wolfenstein on my second (or third) display. And I saved a few hundred bucks.
I'm not trying to flame, I understand where you're going, and for the most part, you're right. I just don't think you're right in all respects. I love linux configuration, because for the first time, I can DO something for myself. I love having tools to diagnose problems and probe my computer. I love not having to crawl manufacturer's websites for drivers, or end up with dud cards because the drivers are not available for download (Creative Dxr3, for instance). There are two ways Linux can take over the world: We realize Linux is not windows, and try to make it like windows, or we realize Linux is not windows, and try to keep it that way. Many seem to suggest number 1 (but I don't want to put words in your mouth), but I'd hate to see Linux commercialized and watered-down too much.
Your boxen will be shipped in 4-6 weeks.
Sweet! I didn't know I'd get free boxen for reading your post!
This guy would have a field day with "All your boxen are belong to us"
I've noticed that in RedHat 8.0, in order to get changes to XF86Config to take effect, you have to either CTRL-ALT-BS twice, or log off (to the GDM login window) and then CTRL-ALT-BS once. This suggests that RH always keeps a "backup" X Server running. Weird. The nice thing is, if it was really critical to you, you could certainly turn off this two-server behavior.
Then again, maybe I'm insane, and I just can't hit CTRL-ALT-BS on the first try.
Either way, for my.02 (Read: Not trying to start a flame war), it was much easier to set up my Wacom tablet in Linux than it was in Windows 98. Plus, there's nothing near the GIMP that's free in windows.
Ehhh. I'm happy with Linux. It'll evolve, into what, who knows? But I trust the immense group of OSS developers, of whom Linus is a (large) part, to take Linux in a unique direction.
So what if it doesn't "kill" windows? It started as one man's little hack and RMS' personal mission and evolved into a worldwide phenomenon of software freedom. I don't think we can make people "be free," and even if we could, I wouldn't want to. You can hate it if you want, and everyone else can flame you if they want, but me and those like me will just keep on using (and hacking, and tinkering, and supporting, and spreading) what we love.
Standards are a good thing, to a point. I love being able to choose between Gnome and KDE (and twm, and straight sawfish, and Enlightenment), and I appreciate the hard work of the developers of all those different WMs (or desktop environments, as the case may be). While they are diverse, none of them could have been developed quite as far if there wasn't the device-independent X Windows core to provide a set of "standards" to build on. I appreciate all the programmers who stay up sleepness nights so that my DeskJet can work with the CUPS standard, or my Wacom tablet can work with the GIMP standards for free.
Linux may be a waste of your time, but I'm glad the community has taken a stand to make it professional. It is by far my most enjoyable hobby.
P.S., the GIMP is the Photoshop destroyer:)
My computer went from BIOS to playing MP3s in a graphical X window (running linuxfromscratch) in ~20 seconds. I'm including BIOS in this. And, 2GHz Pentium IV it was not - try a Celeron 667. So, linux was only responsible for about 10-15 seconds. And it did EXACTLY what I needed, every, EVERY single time, with NEVER a blue box.
XP ain't got nothin. And longhorn still doesn't seem significantly different from Windows 95. Your OS can be any color, so long as its black, right?
As an aside, what about an Anti-Palladium petition? Of course, presenting this to Microsoft would be a waste of Perl code, but what if we took this to VIA or NVidia or whoever, and said we wouldn't buy their products if they included support for this spyware? They might be tempted to turn down Microsoft, and if even one moderate hardware manufacturer refused to implement Palladium, Microsoft would probably have to yield, because having Media Player work only on VIA boards would be a mess, eliminating Microsoft's idea of simplicity. Or, someone would develop a program for VIA boards that bypassed Palladium, and then disarray.
And then, we could all rise up against Microsoft and create a digital utopia, and stick those "Designed for Microsoft Whatever" stickers on our garbage cans (oh wait, I already did that).
I'd do this instead of babbling, but I don't have access to much in the way of webhosting (read: I'm too dumb to be any good at Perl or PHP).
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, but heat is bad for computer parts.
"In the lower and middle temperature ranges, higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates." Google's Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population.
If your disks really live in a >45C environment, then I take it back.
There's a difference between "deriving from a free software program" and "using the output of a free software program." You can use gcc to compile non-free programs, just like you can use OpenOffice to write a non-free report or book. In both cases, the product of the program is non-free, even though the program itself and any derivatives of the program have to be GPL. Bison 2.4.1 is plain GPL3. Flex isn't GPL at all. GCC is plain GPL (v2 and v3). Check out the GPL faq.
I listened to a number of mission scientists explain why we don't stop.
First, it is suspected that Pluto's atmosphere, made up of (hypothesized) 3 chemicals, will snow onto the surface soon, as its elliptical orbit recedes from being closest to the sun. If we went slow enough to stop, we'd miss the atmosphere (lessening the results of instruments such as REX).
Second, since we know so little about what's at Pluto, New Horizons is a reconaissance probe, emphasizing cameras. Once we've been there once, and scientists here have flung theories around for a couple years, there will be some interesting ideas about exactly what kind of specific measurements to make, and can send New Horizons II.
Third, Pluto is just one body in the Kuiper Belt, a huge collection of bodies way out there. It'd be more interesting to see two sets of science results than just one, so we'll fly past Pluto and aim towards a Kuiper Belt object as well.
We didn't even know until last year that Pluto had two more moons. Which particular Kuiper Belt object we will visit hasn't even been decided, and won't be until a couple years/months before we get to Pluto. The knowledge about Pluto at this point is far too small to waste the money on an orbiting spacecraft.
But hey, if people want to pay for it, the engineers and scientists would be ecstatic to have orbiting spacecrafts around everything out there.
I had a 40GB drive off some cheap vendor from pricewatch, i think it was a "white-label Maxtor" or something, in a carputer i had. Lived in Colorado, parked the Jeep outside in the winter, also never had problems, even starting up when the car was below freezing. Even when I drove over bumps, no problems. I have heard (although this may just be crap) that modern hard drives have so much momentum (think gyroscope) from angular speed that it requires very large disturbances to upset them. Car suspensions also help a lot - even though it may seem like a bumpy ride, it's probably less g's than the shock of dropping a laptop hard onto a table from only a few inches height.
I'd be interested in seeing you jog without changing the direction in which an iPod was moving. Remember, velocity has both magnitude (miles per hour) and direction (up/down, north/south). When I run with a walkman, it jiggles an awful lot.
I used to work at a Carmike Cinemas in Colorado Springs, and well, the soda spouts are the least of your concerns. When the butthead boss was in, we had to clean the INSIDE of the popcorn hoppers with stainless steel cleaner. Also, we had rats. The solution - move the candy with teeth marks on the corners to the back of the stand, where it isn't visible, and sell it first. To me, it was the materialization of "The Jungle".
And the PGP "web of trust" would keep spammers from massively infecting the system, because no one trusts the new kid to delete a few thousand entries. I would gladly donate some of my cable bandwidth to a distributed solution.
being a visible minority probably boosted my chances of getting in (even though my averages were already well above the minimum for guaranteed acceptance
I would imagine that he doesn't feel anything about that at all, since he would have gotten in regardless of his skin color.
United States citizens don't have a right to responsibly vote, they have a right to vote. If you open a door for literacy, why not require that people have certain moral standards? Why not require that they not be communists? Why not require that they be conservative or liberal or white or black?
They scan anyways - the proofreaders compare the ASCII version to the scanned image of a page to make sure they match.
That offer is doubleplusungood.
And, to me, the GPL is thought control. It says (to me), "use this code, and you must agree with RMS's view of open source free software".
It's a protective copyright. If he (or anyone else licensing under GPL) wrote it, it's his. If his rules are, if you want to play with his toys you have to be his friend, then it's easy. You either play nice (use the GPL, even if you don't want to) or get out of the sandbox (go back to closed source/proprietary).
What RMS is (unapologetically) hoping for is that you need his software bad enough that you'll flex to exist inside GPL rules.
I think that RMS and the sticklers need Linus and the benders for balance in the force. If RMS ruled the OSS world, we probably wouldn't have ever gotten the LGPL, and NVidia would have never written accelerated drivers, and I couldn't play RTCW. If RMS had never existed, neither would the original GCC. Of course, I'm stepping on some toes here, and don't mean to imply in the slightest that RMS or Linus make up a majority (or even a large minority) of the OS by themselves - there are thousands of other major players, who are typically anonymous in these issues.
Other than that, I agree with you. I, too, think DRM is permissible in Linux, but I'll never use it.
Most Definitely!!!
And I'm only 18.
In fact, what the article says would have drastically less of an effect on the appearance of the moon than even a large above-ground probe that we never retrieved.
Desknotes are good so long as you know what you're getting, which is NOT a laptop. Desknotes are full-fledged computers with a small enough form factor to look like laptops. They come with no battery, and one isn't even available for most. Again, if what you want is a portable computer that runs off of wall current, then that's fine, just so long as you know that's what you're getting.
I get what you're saying (I took a Cisco class in high school, now I'm at the University of Colorado, Electrical & Computer Engineering, I'm glad I'm "mind expanding"), but I'll tell you that many of the kids in my high school Cisco certification class wouldn't have made it through 4 years of college, and many of them weren't planning on it. Not necessarily because of intelligence, but school just isn't a great fit for lots of 18 year old kids. 4 more years of school just doesn't make sense. They might not get a "systems administrator" position, but maybe they'll start by laying cable or helping a large IT staff. As their "maturity" develops, they'll move into higher positions, and they'll already have the credentials to back it up.
Not everybody should have to go to 4 years of college to get a job or be viewed as "smart".
System files are protected from inadvertent change.
/dev/* - at my disposal, whereas in windows, its "reboot into safe mode, delete all your drivers, reinstall them all. IF that didn't work, do it again."
Of all the things you got wrong, this is the most painfully obvious. The home series, through Windows Me at least, has NOT been this way. UNIX, and thus Linux, has had permissions on files since before I was born, protecting them from inadvertent change. Plus, the fact that Linux config files are human readable (Picking through XML with cat is still easier than juggling different GUIDs!) means you have less chance of screwing up. Also, Linux configuration has a much clearer file->objective setup - I know that lilo.conf is the configuration file for lilo. If I need more help, I can look at lilo.conf.sample, or try man lilo.conf. In windows, finding the registry setting for whether Office uses landscape or portrait by default could be in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office 97\Config or a million other places. And there is still no man command!
In built support, from time of consumer device launch, for peripherals and card types (PCMCIA, USB etc. - Linux got late to market here).
Again wrong - Windows doesn't support my Linksys LNE100TX ethernet card, linksys does. And, I have to download new drivers from their website to do it (not possible if i use the card to get broadband internet). Whereas all modern linuxes detect and install the driver themselves, or at most a "modprobe tulip" is needed. Plus, if I have trouble, I have a handful of tools - lspci, modprobe, cat
Simpler setup with very few questions.
My latest install of RedHat 8.0 asked me significantly fewer questions than Windows 98. And I didn't have to find 30 damn license keys! Packages were installed by group - do I want graphical internet? Sure - check that box and I get the normal mozilla, gaim, xchat. Do I want to add mozchat? Click details, then click mozchat. This is similar to Windows, but adding the Gimp is easy, in windows, I have to find my Adobe CD(s), load them in order, type in the license key, la la la. Oh and don't forget the magical reboot. Adding XMMS is easy, but I'd have to go download winamp (version 2, because 3 locks up all the time) and run that setup program. Reboot again. While you're wearing out your BIOS with all those reboots, I'm on AIM and MSN at the same time, cruising the internet with no pop-ups, pumping the MP3s from my girlfriend's computer across campus, and playing Wolfenstein on my second (or third) display. And I saved a few hundred bucks.
I'm not trying to flame, I understand where you're going, and for the most part, you're right. I just don't think you're right in all respects. I love linux configuration, because for the first time, I can DO something for myself. I love having tools to diagnose problems and probe my computer. I love not having to crawl manufacturer's websites for drivers, or end up with dud cards because the drivers are not available for download (Creative Dxr3, for instance). There are two ways Linux can take over the world: We realize Linux is not windows, and try to make it like windows, or we realize Linux is not windows, and try to keep it that way. Many seem to suggest number 1 (but I don't want to put words in your mouth), but I'd hate to see Linux commercialized and watered-down too much.
Your boxen will be shipped in 4-6 weeks.
Sweet! I didn't know I'd get free boxen for reading your post!
This guy would have a field day with "All your boxen are belong to us"
I noticed that too. Some federal recorder was probably on autopilot and had just finished typing in all the l337 h4x0r.
On a side note, saying Sweeeeden is kinda fun.
I've noticed that in RedHat 8.0, in order to get changes to XF86Config to take effect, you have to either CTRL-ALT-BS twice, or log off (to the GDM login window) and then CTRL-ALT-BS once. This suggests that RH always keeps a "backup" X Server running. Weird. The nice thing is, if it was really critical to you, you could certainly turn off this two-server behavior. Then again, maybe I'm insane, and I just can't hit CTRL-ALT-BS on the first try. Either way, for my .02 (Read: Not trying to start a flame war), it was much easier to set up my Wacom tablet in Linux than it was in Windows 98. Plus, there's nothing near the GIMP that's free in windows.
Ehhh. I'm happy with Linux. It'll evolve, into what, who knows? But I trust the immense group of OSS developers, of whom Linus is a (large) part, to take Linux in a unique direction. :)
So what if it doesn't "kill" windows? It started as one man's little hack and RMS' personal mission and evolved into a worldwide phenomenon of software freedom. I don't think we can make people "be free," and even if we could, I wouldn't want to. You can hate it if you want, and everyone else can flame you if they want, but me and those like me will just keep on using (and hacking, and tinkering, and supporting, and spreading) what we love.
Standards are a good thing, to a point. I love being able to choose between Gnome and KDE (and twm, and straight sawfish, and Enlightenment), and I appreciate the hard work of the developers of all those different WMs (or desktop environments, as the case may be). While they are diverse, none of them could have been developed quite as far if there wasn't the device-independent X Windows core to provide a set of "standards" to build on. I appreciate all the programmers who stay up sleepness nights so that my DeskJet can work with the CUPS standard, or my Wacom tablet can work with the GIMP standards for free.
Linux may be a waste of your time, but I'm glad the community has taken a stand to make it professional. It is by far my most enjoyable hobby.
P.S., the GIMP is the Photoshop destroyer
My computer went from BIOS to playing MP3s in a graphical X window (running linuxfromscratch) in ~20 seconds. I'm including BIOS in this. And, 2GHz Pentium IV it was not - try a Celeron 667. So, linux was only responsible for about 10-15 seconds. And it did EXACTLY what I needed, every, EVERY single time, with NEVER a blue box. XP ain't got nothin. And longhorn still doesn't seem significantly different from Windows 95. Your OS can be any color, so long as its black, right?
As an aside, what about an Anti-Palladium petition? Of course, presenting this to Microsoft would be a waste of Perl code, but what if we took this to VIA or NVidia or whoever, and said we wouldn't buy their products if they included support for this spyware? They might be tempted to turn down Microsoft, and if even one moderate hardware manufacturer refused to implement Palladium, Microsoft would probably have to yield, because having Media Player work only on VIA boards would be a mess, eliminating Microsoft's idea of simplicity. Or, someone would develop a program for VIA boards that bypassed Palladium, and then disarray. And then, we could all rise up against Microsoft and create a digital utopia, and stick those "Designed for Microsoft Whatever" stickers on our garbage cans (oh wait, I already did that). I'd do this instead of babbling, but I don't have access to much in the way of webhosting (read: I'm too dumb to be any good at Perl or PHP).