Apparently my learned friend is in the stone age of package management:-P
aptitude keeps track of when it installs a package to satisfy a dependency and then uninstalls it when it is no longer needed to satisfy any dependencies. If you want to install a library for a non package managed program (e.g. you want to compile the latest wine) you can just use apt-get which doesn't mark them for removal when they're not depended on.
I think he probably means DFSG which stands for Debian Free Software Guidelines. This is essentially the debian project's definition of what counts as Free Software (and can therefore be included in the debian distribution, though there's also the non-free section)
Adblock will indeed block entire domains, by the way, just use *domain.com* as the pattern and anything from that domain will be blocked...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
A long standing bug can be seen in the Longhorn screenshots. Personally, I'd be more interested in a solid bit of engineering than yet another heap of rubbish with another irritatingly over-keen GUI.
here you can see that just executing a dos program (which cuold have been made aware of long filenames by now, but hasn't) will confuse the heck out of the poor (and I mean porr) CLI so it loses track of the "long filename" version of the working directory. I mean, how difficult can it be? On any OS I've ever used (and I've used more than a couple) the environment is inherited by child processes but *not* un-inherited at the end, so I'm frankly at a loss to know how this bug appeared in the first place. Then there's the fact that the horrendous hacky short/long filename situation was a bad idea in the first place, poorly dealt with (I can quite happily use any number of filesystems with differing ideas of valid filenames simultaneously on my linux machines, how does microsoft not get this right? Then there's the fact that, although edit has been a part of windows for around a decade of long filenames and *still* can't understand it.
I'll say it again, Microsoft, you really need to start producing some good software, rather than just polishing pap.,
My favourite was LOGO which would cause endless amusement (when I was 8):
> Forwarsd 100
I don't know how to Forwarsd (oops)
> shut up
I don't know how to shut up (grr!)
> work
I don't know how to work (hehe)
> go to the loo on my own
I don't know how to go to the loo on my own (Guffaw)
etc.
I was going to attack your reasoning on your other points, but figured others would do that (and quite possibly better) but this struck me as interesting:
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
(I'm assuming you meant <1%)
Since surveys are starting to put linux at over 3% of desktops (and in any case, comparable numbers, or even more than Macs, which few people would not call "user friendly") it must, therefore, be "user friendly"?
I would submit that at the least that 3% has been convinced it is...
Assuming these are legally downloadable / redistributable, you could just tell me where I can get them via FTP or whatever and I'll set up a torrent. I currently have bandwidth to spare...
For up-to-date information on Debian, it's a good idea to check out Debian Wekly News (http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/ - there are also e-mail and RSS versions) which recently has had Sarge release reports.
In summary, it's been frozen since about the 3rd of May, final release is currently expected about "now"!
This is the latest schedule I can find, though if you were to read the mailing lists you'd probably find a more up-to-date one. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/05/msg00001.html
Methanol can also be produced by fermenting celulose (the substance the cell wall of plants is made out of) which grass and wood (and celery) contain bucket loads of. In fact, running cars on Meths is another avenue of investigation, we already have sustainable tree farms for paper.
if you can beam stuff in, you can probably record stuff out.
Non Sequitur. You can beam a TV signal into my house, but you can't get a TV signal out unless I have a TV camera in my house.
In the same way, you can beam an ultrasound signal into my brain and that (maybe, subject to actually trying it) is converted in some way into a brainwave or whatever. To get information out by equivalent means would require that my brainwaves were being converted into sound by some means, possibly by me talking about what I'm thinking...
I doubt anyone'll read this as it's an oldish story, but as far as I can see (and IANAL) you're both wrong.
1. The GPL explicitly requires that you can't restrict the rights of anyone you provide the source to, so if the CherryOS people manage to legally get hold of a copy of the source code (it's easily available via FTP) then whoever they get it from gives it to them under the GPL, along with all the rights that licenses to them.
2. They have, however, violated the copyright inherent in the code by distributing derivative versions without a license (their rights under the GPL only cover distribution that fulfills the requirements of that license)
HTH
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
It's possibly worth noting that the BIOS is only used to initialise certain hardware and load the kernel, the various functions provided by the BIOS for hard drive access etc. aren't used after the kernel's initialised.
Unless you have a boot-from-lan option in your BIOS, you'd have to actually be AT the machine concerned to exploit any security problems in the BIOS (default "backdoor" passwords are on idea that springs to mind) in which case you might as well open it up and replace hard drives etc.
In short, you don't generally *need* to trust the BIOS and it's a well known rule that anyone who has physical access to a machine *owns* the machine.
To install software on Knoppix (or Ubuntu, or Gnoppix, or any other of the squillions of Debian based distributions, liveCD or otherwise) the procedure is something like the following:
check the configuration of/etc/apt/sources.list - usually the default is perfectly sensible, but you may want to add things like the aGnula project for music software (see http://www.agnula.org)
"apt-get update" to make sure your computer is up to date with the latest versions of everything - no need to do this every time, but you should be keeping up with the security patches and if you're tracking testing or unstable you should do it at least once every couple of days
"apt-get install mygroovypackage" to install the package, you may be asked a variety of configuration questions depending on the package, many install without any interactive input.
enjoy your groovynewsoftware
If you don't know the name of the package you want to install (often they can be guessed, but not always) then consider using one of the many front-ends like dselect (hardcore, a little old fashioned) aptitude (prettier, but still text based), or whatever others here will suggest.
Actually, raytraced shadows look like crap, at least in the classical sense. Classical raytracing is done by tracing rays back from the pixels to light sources.
[...]
Radiosity is a popular method.
Another method used more recently is called photon mapping, in which the illumination of the scene is calculated by ray-tracing from the light source to the various surfaces, via reflection / refraction etc.
It's kinda like the next step on from radiosity calculation (in both efficacy and how much of a ball-ache it is on the processor!) but the single greatest effect is that you can calculate accurate caustics (ever see the strange light patterns cast by a glass of water on the desk? or the wavy patterns on the bottom of a pool?)
The results can be truly stunning. Incidentally, the round silvery that turns up as the 16th hit from where I'm searching from is exactly the same as the one I bought from ikea several years ago...
If you want to see what physics are already available for PC and which could easily be implemented with considerably less CPU power than the next generation of consoles is likely to have, you absolutely must have a look at Meqon whose demos incidentally run really rather well under Wine.
The GPL only allows distribution of a work (i.e. the driver) if the source for anything the code is linked with is distributed under the GPL.
It has nothing to do with derivative works, the GPL is the only license you have to distribute the driver and the only ways you can distribute the driver in accordance with the license are:
on its own, not linked with anything (binary or source, but if it's binary you have to make the source available)
linked only with GPLable works
according to some (including Linus Torvalds) a dynamically linked driver module that can be distributed separately doesn't count as linked. I believe RMS would disagree on this one, though...
The GPL FAQ is good, I recommend everyone reads it whenever they're not sure how it works:)
... large propane bubbles formed and sank because propane is heavier than air.
Although propane is heavier than air, this isn't really all that significant, as even bubbles of air will sink for two reasons: 1) the bubble itself is heavier than air, even without the air in it, 2) it's interesting to note that the bubble actually compresses the air every so slightly.
An interesting experiment:
Take two identical baloons, fill them with exactly the same amount of air (how is an excersise left to the reader)
Put the two baloons on a balance, they should weigh the same.
Now burst one of the baloons (or just let it down) and compare the weights of the baloons again.
You should find that the baloon full of (slightly compressed) air is heavier...
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently my learned friend is in the stone age of package management :-P
aptitude keeps track of when it installs a package to satisfy a dependency and then uninstalls it when it is no longer needed to satisfy any dependencies. If you want to install a library for a non package managed program (e.g. you want to compile the latest wine) you can just use apt-get which doesn't mark them for removal when they're not depended on.
HTH
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
I think he probably means DFSG which stands for Debian Free Software Guidelines. This is essentially the debian project's definition of what counts as Free Software (and can therefore be included in the debian distribution, though there's also the non-free section)
See http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
HTH
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Adblock will indeed block entire domains, by the way, just use *domain.com* as the pattern and anything from that domain will be blocked... Cheers & God bless Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Microsoft CEOs also have criminal records... Bill Gates' Mugshot
PPS I'll promise to proof-read in future
A long standing bug can be seen in the Longhorn screenshots. Personally, I'd be more interested in a solid bit of engineering than yet another heap of rubbish with another irritatingly over-keen GUI.
here you can see that just executing a dos program (which cuold have been made aware of long filenames by now, but hasn't) will confuse the heck out of the poor (and I mean porr) CLI so it loses track of the "long filename" version of the working directory. I mean, how difficult can it be? On any OS I've ever used (and I've used more than a couple) the environment is inherited by child processes but *not* un-inherited at the end, so I'm frankly at a loss to know how this bug appeared in the first place. Then there's the fact that the horrendous hacky short/long filename situation was a bad idea in the first place, poorly dealt with (I can quite happily use any number of filesystems with differing ideas of valid filenames simultaneously on my linux machines, how does microsoft not get this right? Then there's the fact that, although edit has been a part of windows for around a decade of long filenames and *still* can't understand it.
I'll say it again, Microsoft, you really need to start producing some good software, rather than just polishing pap.,
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
PS
My favourite was LOGO which would cause endless amusement (when I was 8):
> Forwarsd 100
I don't know how to Forwarsd (oops)
> shut up
I don't know how to shut up (grr!)
> work
I don't know how to work (hehe)
> go to the loo on my own
I don't know how to go to the loo on my own (Guffaw)
etc.
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
I was going to attack your reasoning on your other points, but figured others would do that (and quite possibly better) but this struck me as interesting:
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.
(I'm assuming you meant <1%)
Since surveys are starting to put linux at over 3% of desktops (and in any case, comparable numbers, or even more than Macs, which few people would not call "user friendly") it must, therefore, be "user friendly"?
I would submit that at the least that 3% has been convinced it is...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
PS. have a look at http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp, http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/35688.html
You obviously never talked to anyone who bought one thinking he/she was getting better performance than a similarly priced AMD.
Generally POS would be the favourite term...
Assuming these are legally downloadable / redistributable, you could just tell me where I can get them via FTP or whatever and I'll set up a torrent. I currently have bandwidth to spare...
HTH
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
For up-to-date information on Debian, it's a good idea to check out Debian Wekly News (http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/ - there are also e-mail and RSS versions) which recently has had Sarge release reports. In summary, it's been frozen since about the 3rd of May, final release is currently expected about "now"! This is the latest schedule I can find, though if you were to read the mailing lists you'd probably find a more up-to-date one. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005 /05/msg00001.html
Methanol can also be produced by fermenting celulose (the substance the cell wall of plants is made out of) which grass and wood (and celery) contain bucket loads of. In fact, running cars on Meths is another avenue of investigation, we already have sustainable tree farms for paper.
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
The lunk-to page says this: "There's a clever anti-tilt device in the launcher, so you can't fire the rocket anywhere but up"
;)
That sounds like a challenge to me!
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
if you can beam stuff in, you can probably record stuff out.
Non Sequitur. You can beam a TV signal into my house, but you can't get a TV signal out unless I have a TV camera in my house.
In the same way, you can beam an ultrasound signal into my brain and that (maybe, subject to actually trying it) is converted in some way into a brainwave or whatever. To get information out by equivalent means would require that my brainwaves were being converted into sound by some means, possibly by me talking about what I'm thinking...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
I doubt anyone'll read this as it's an oldish story, but as far as I can see (and IANAL) you're both wrong. 1. The GPL explicitly requires that you can't restrict the rights of anyone you provide the source to, so if the CherryOS people manage to legally get hold of a copy of the source code (it's easily available via FTP) then whoever they get it from gives it to them under the GPL, along with all the rights that licenses to them. 2. They have, however, violated the copyright inherent in the code by distributing derivative versions without a license (their rights under the GPL only cover distribution that fulfills the requirements of that license) HTH Cheers & God bless Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Better yet, use their sets function.
To my knowledge, nobody else does this and I find it very useful!
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
If somebody can boot a floppy on your machine, then the OS is irrelevant, and it doesn't take a bug in the BIOS to totally do over the machine.
Boot-from-LAN, well maybe, but I've never seen it. Perhaps I've just been in different workplaces than you...
Owner of the machine, certainly the user isn't the owner, perhaps I should have used the term "pwn3d"...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Switching to PPC.
Made by IBM...
Hmm
I'd be with you but for that point...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
It's possibly worth noting that the BIOS is only used to initialise certain hardware and load the kernel, the various functions provided by the BIOS for hard drive access etc. aren't used after the kernel's initialised.
Unless you have a boot-from-lan option in your BIOS, you'd have to actually be AT the machine concerned to exploit any security problems in the BIOS (default "backdoor" passwords are on idea that springs to mind) in which case you might as well open it up and replace hard drives etc.
In short, you don't generally *need* to trust the BIOS and it's a well known rule that anyone who has physical access to a machine *owns* the machine.
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
To install software on Knoppix (or Ubuntu, or Gnoppix, or any other of the squillions of Debian based distributions, liveCD or otherwise) the procedure is something like the following:
If you don't know the name of the package you want to install (often they can be guessed, but not always) then consider using one of the many front-ends like dselect (hardcore, a little old fashioned) aptitude (prettier, but still text based), or whatever others here will suggest.
HTH
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Actually, raytraced shadows look like crap, at least in the classical sense. Classical raytracing is done by tracing rays back from the pixels to light sources.
[...]
Radiosity is a popular method.
Another method used more recently is called photon mapping, in which the illumination of the scene is calculated by ray-tracing from the light source to the various surfaces, via reflection / refraction etc.
It's kinda like the next step on from radiosity calculation (in both efficacy and how much of a ball-ache it is on the processor!) but the single greatest effect is that you can calculate accurate caustics (ever see the strange light patterns cast by a glass of water on the desk? or the wavy patterns on the bottom of a pool?)
The results can be truly stunning. Incidentally, the round silvery that turns up as the 16th hit from where I'm searching from is exactly the same as the one I bought from ikea several years ago...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
If you want to see what physics are already available for PC and which could easily be implemented with considerably less CPU power than the next generation of consoles is likely to have, you absolutely must have a look at Meqon whose demos incidentally run really rather well under Wine.
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
I'm amazed nobody so far has mentioned pokia.
If you want to go retro / futuristic at the same time, this is the way!
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
That's not how it works.
The GPL only allows distribution of a work (i.e. the driver) if the source for anything the code is linked with is distributed under the GPL.
It has nothing to do with derivative works, the GPL is the only license you have to distribute the driver and the only ways you can distribute the driver in accordance with the license are:
The GPL FAQ is good, I recommend everyone reads it whenever they're not sure how it works :)
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny
Although propane is heavier than air, this isn't really all that significant, as even bubbles of air will sink for two reasons: 1) the bubble itself is heavier than air, even without the air in it, 2) it's interesting to note that the bubble actually compresses the air every so slightly.
An interesting experiment:
Take two identical baloons, fill them with exactly the same amount of air (how is an excersise left to the reader)
Put the two baloons on a balance, they should weigh the same.
Now burst one of the baloons (or just let it down) and compare the weights of the baloons again.
You should find that the baloon full of (slightly compressed) air is heavier...
Cheers & God bless
Sam "SammyTheSnake" Penny