... the Gentoo Chief Marketing Officer made the following statement:
"We welcome the Cray XD1 as the first platform on which Gentoo installs in less than 12 hours. Looking forward to renaming Gentoo to 'One-Click-Linux'. Stay tuned !"
oops, i should have said 'closed orbits' instead of 'orbits'. The dyn. sys. will also have non-closed orbits and they won't correspond to a prime number. Also there will be one fixed point, and it won't correspond to a prime number.
Hi, i'm a mathematician, i attendend one of the most "promising" talks by someone pretending to prove RH, and there was no reason to believe that he actually proved it. So please be sceptical when it comes about RH
RH seems to be one order of magnitude more difficult than the other 'Millenium problems'.
David Hilbert once said "If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?"
More specifically RH is about the structure of the set of prime numbers. One can formulate it as a statement on the distribution of prime numbers within the real numbers, but that's probably missing the point of the story. The set of prime numbers 'behaves' like the set of orbits of a dynamical system (a dyn. sys. is anything that evolves with time), and the real progress towards RH consists in attemps to concretely describe this dynamical system. See the work by Connes, Deninger... you have free papers on arXiv. If you want to have a look, I recommend especially the paper math.NT/9811068 on arXiv. here's an URL:
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/math.NT/9811068
But the serious people like Connes don't pretend to solve RH. Actually most people don't expect it to be solved within decades from now.
Well, I can only agree with you now, because your point of view is so balanced. Thanks for this reply.
Of course, I was just giving my own example, not generalizing to everyone. It is true that I'm not able to back the sentence "Game unite people", taken litterally.
I think my first post was more intended to be 'food for thought' than actually thought.
If there's one idea in this post that I'd still back, it's that religion and games have nothing to do with one another. But, actually, this statement is not worth backing, because : either it is false, in which case it's indeed not worth backing, or it is true, but then, any attempt to put religion seriously in games will result in a boring game, and noone will play it, and it will soon be forgotten.
In my first post I went farther, as I implied that this would be pernicious, but I couldn't back this very seriously now, though I continue to 'feel' it in some way. Maybe one day I'll have more clear ideas on this matter. If you want, we can continue this discussion by mail: benoit do jacob hat ens do fr (but don't feel forced if you think we've said enough about all this)
Maybe you just aren't much of a gamer? Or aren't observant?
It's just, as was mentionned by Sid Meier, that in those examples religion appears in a very superficial way. Sid has done what he could in Alpha Centauri (my favorite computer game), this game is one of the most spiritualized around, but it remains so superficial. In the special case of AC, what matters most is the consistency of the Sci-Fi world, and that's not being improved by putting a mix of buddhism, ecologism and ontologism (does that word exist ?) therein.
Can you back that up at all?
Take the best games ever : Chess and Go. They are the best games because when you play with someone these games, when you're losing, instead of feeling angry against your opponent, you admire the beauty of the game, and you're pleased. After having played a good game of Chess with someone, I always feel relaxed and I also have the impression of having shared something with this person. In this sense, I say that games can unite people.
The fact that for now, no video game has ever achieved this does not mean that it will always be so.
oh please
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"religion and spirituality add a lot to a game world"
Oh please. These must be really weird times, when people even _think_ about putting spirituality in games.
i'm amazed no-one suggested this one. besides, if QT4 final is as fast as promised, it will give a speed boost to the firefox UI under KDE, while giving it all the KDE eyecandy.
Also, by the time firefox 2.0 will be there, KDE users will probably outnumber Apple users, so, if the Firefox team takes so much care about Aqua integration, why not doing the same about KDE integration ?
I know that some computer systems have been built in such a way that they would crash on Y2K. But everyone knew this, so it was plain obvious that it's be fixed in time. The press has widely FUDded us on this one and it's a pity to see that even today there are people here trying to defend this press.
I say that the computer press has gone exactly as low as the gurus who announced the apocalypse for Y2K.
Concerning the argument "you're not thankful towards the coders who fixed it" : the Y2K was not an especially tough one to fix. Compare with other software maintenance problems. I don't understand why so much noise has been done about that.
Because smart people like him did something about it.
If it hadn't been him, it'd had been the next one to bother mentionning it to an ignorant journalist.
> NTFS is a _GREAT_ filesystem
> NTSF is journalling
false, 100% false.
even microsoft acknowledges that winfs will be the first ms journaling fs.
you should try a _real_ filesystem like ReiserFS or the upcoming Reiser4.
NTFS is not journaled, very, very slow (especially compared to ext2 or ReiserFS), very vulnerable under unexpected power-downs, and has trivial space management (only the directory structure is a tree, files aren't stored in a tree -> leads to fragmentation).
Filesystems is by far the domain where ms tech is most ridiculous.
Of course there exist ridiculous filesystems for *nix also, like ext3, by at least you're not forced to use them.
The name Kelkoo has probably been chosen by french-speaking people, because it is pronounced exactly like the french sentence "Quel cout ?" (sorry, slashdot doesn't seem to accept the circumflex accents, even when typed in HTML...) which means "What cost ?".
Besides I remember there has been a lot of advertising for Kelkoo in France a few years ago.
> You ask for the latest and greatest software and then complain that you can't get a stable release?
This is not asking for too much as long as I don't take beta versions or release candidates. Slackware -current + kernel 2.6 is giving me that stability. Except for konqueror of course.
OK, I can agree with some of your points. But there's one point where I haven't made myself clear. I *have* mdk 9.2 (powerpack). So I have the kernel you're mentionning. On the mdk CD-ROMs. What I want is to upgrade it to 2.6. So, being outside of the club, my only option (do we agree on this ?) is to go to cooker. But I have reluctance to doing so, because this is not supposed to be a stable release. Ok, I don't know how unstable the cooker kernel actually is, but do you agree that as a standard user, I can have reluctance to replacing my functionnal kernel by a kernel from a development branch ?
Same problem for other upgrades, like kde 3.2.
Now there's the club, who proposes me to pay $5 a month and then get an official upgrade instead of picking something possibly unstable from Cooker. Sounds much better ! But I'll have to pay on a regular basis for this, for a certain amount of time (is it 1 year ?) hence losing my part of my freedom to choose my software (since I'll be quite bound to mdk -- I don't want to pay $5/month for nothing).
Do we agree ?
Then one can discuss, but in my opinion this is already a way of making a pressure on me to get me pay on a regular basis and, what's more problematic, to get me bound to mdk for a certain amount of time. This last point, I think, is excessive.
Concerning the learning of unix... you're right to say that what I'm currently doing on my slackware, I could have done on mdk. But if I had stuck to mdk, I'd never had the idea of doing so. In 3 years I haven't. So my conclusion is : mdk is very good for total beginners, and is equivalent to nearly any other distro for the skilled user. But in the middle, there are many users who are technophile half-beginners, who could learn very quickly if they had to, but who won't as long as they're running mandrake. For these users, mandrake is not a good distribution.
And there would be absolutely no problem if mandrake was flawless, so there would be no need for them to learn more. But unfortunately this is not the case. They'd find a great benefit in learning more, as I have.
they're for mdk 10.0, not 9.2. Probably that wouldn't work.
(same thing applies for your two other points).
> urpmi kernel-source
where do I get a free, stable, mdk-modified kernel for 9.2 ? Only bugfix/security updates are freely available. And I wouldn't try to use in my 9.2 a kernel redesigned for 10.0.
> Stable releases are public
stable 10.0 doesn't exist yet. "Community" is PR for "beta".
> Current cooker is exaclty the same as the community release
That's what I say. Until 10.0 Official is released, there is no stable 10.0.
>If you're not paying, and you think the distro is "buggy", either don't complain, or file your bug reports like everyone else
I *have* payed 3 powerpacks, that's 3 times 80 euros, that's 240 euros, that's something like $290.
I have nothing against the idea of paying. But I don't want to *subscribe* to anything because it diminishes my freedom to switch to another distro whenever I want to - hence it diminishes the level of concurrence between the various distros.
I dislike the fact that mdk *isolates* its users from the rest of the free software world (I hate the word "community", it sounds like a sect) in two ways: 1) it uses too much mdk-modified software. It would be better to stick with totally standard sources, with a few exceptions like supermount and hyperthreading optimizations. A complete list of non-standard sources should be published. Even in the case of patched (hence nonstandard) sources, only standard patches should be used, ie patches available for any distro. 2) it prevents you from truly learning gnulinux. That I didn't notice as long as I runned mdk. But I've been running slackware for 3 weeks and I in 3 weeks I've learned more than in 3 years with mdk. How is it possible ? Don't know. Probably mdk has too many half-working config tools to do things that require only 1 minute to do under vi.
You don't need to subscribe to an udpates service, all security and bugfix updates are free (ie they don't hold the security of your box to ransom).
I've never said that. I was not talking about security updates.
You don't need to pay for upgrades if you don't want to (but there are some advantages...).
oh really ? Then tell me how I get the mdk rpm's for, say, kde 3.2 or kernel 2.6 if I'm not a club member ?
You don't need to be "very skilled" to update anything.
Oh. Then tell me how you compile a new kernel on a system like mdk that has its own *modified* kernel. Answer : you better don't try a standard kernel. Cause it will be difficult to make it work with mdk. You have to get a mdk-modified kernel. And for that you have to be a club member.
Have you heard of urpmi? Cooker? rpmdrake?
urpmi doesn't magically create the rpm's for you. If you aren't a club member, you don't get the rpm's, so urpmi doesn't help.
Cooker is the development version. I want a stable version. The pretendingly stable version is already buggy enough.
rpmdrake is a graphical frontend for rpm management. Same remarks as for urpmi apply.
I used to be a faithful user of Mandrake, and even bought them 3 powerpacks (7.1, 9.1 and 9.2) just to support them. But I've just dropped them in favor of Slackware (which, by the way, I now consider to be a much better distro except for beginners).
Why ?
Because Mandrakesoft is running a more and more weird policy to force us to suscribe to their "club" - for which we'd have to pay $5 or $10 a month - and to systematically buy their product rather than downloading it.
For example, the new "release scheme" they're running for 10.0 is just a PR-disguise of something that actually amounts to:
1) First, Community=Beta=Buggy version available in stores (only for brain-dead fanboys)
2) Then, Community=Beta=Buggy version available on BT/FTP
3) Then, Official=Stable version available in stores
4) Then, Download Edition = Castrated Edition on BT/FTP (but will you really want that ?)
Moreover, don't forget that *even* if you buy it, you don't get access to the upgrades. For this, you *have* to join the "club". Now this is getting more and more difficult to work around. I mean, as Mandrake adds more and more layers between the user and plain old UNIX, it's being more and more difficult to upgrade important pieces of software for a Mandrake system. If you want to update your kernel or your qt+kde system or (when the licences issues will be over...) your X server, unless you're very skilled, you'll have more and more problems to do it directly from the plain sources. Joining the club tends to be necessary. So here's an algorithm to help you choose your distro:
if (Level <= Beginner && OkToPayPerMonth >= 5 * __DOLLARS__ && CareAboutIdeology == false && WantToReallyLearn (UNIX) == false) { return MANDRAKE_WITH_SUBSCRIPTION_TO_CLUB; } else {...//Don't want to start a religion war here. }
Slashdot Mirror
... the Gentoo Chief Marketing Officer made the following statement :
"We welcome the Cray XD1 as the first platform on which Gentoo installs in less than 12 hours. Looking forward to renaming Gentoo to 'One-Click-Linux'. Stay tuned !"
oops, i should have said 'closed orbits' instead of 'orbits'. The dyn. sys. will also have non-closed orbits and they won't correspond to a prime number. Also there will be one fixed point, and it won't correspond to a prime number.
Hi, i'm a mathematician, i attendend one of the most "promising" talks by someone pretending to prove RH, and there was no reason to believe that he actually proved it. So please be sceptical when it comes about RH
:
RH seems to be one order of magnitude more difficult than the other 'Millenium problems'.
David Hilbert once said
"If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?"
More specifically RH is about the structure of the set of prime numbers. One can formulate it as a statement on the distribution of prime numbers within the real numbers, but that's probably missing the point of the story. The set of prime numbers 'behaves' like the set of orbits of a dynamical system (a dyn. sys. is anything that evolves with time), and the real progress towards RH consists in attemps to concretely describe this dynamical system. See the work by Connes, Deninger... you have free papers on arXiv. If you want to have a look, I recommend especially the paper math.NT/9811068 on arXiv. here's an URL
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/math.NT/9811068
But the serious people like Connes don't pretend to solve RH. Actually most people don't expect it to be solved within decades from now.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200408252 24344827
these last days, such redundancies have become quite frequent. My guess is that cowboyneal is on a vacation.
mod parent up
:0 64859996
besides, this has already been discussed at Groklaw
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040814
Well, I can only agree with you now, because your point of view is so balanced. Thanks for this reply.
:
Of course, I was just giving my own example, not generalizing to everyone. It is true that I'm not able to back the sentence "Game unite people", taken litterally.
I think my first post was more intended to be 'food for thought' than actually thought.
If there's one idea in this post that I'd still back, it's that religion and games have nothing to do with one another. But, actually, this statement is not worth backing, because : either it is false, in which case it's indeed not worth backing, or it is true, but then, any attempt to put religion seriously in games will result in a boring game, and noone will play it, and it will soon be forgotten.
In my first post I went farther, as I implied that this would be pernicious, but I couldn't back this very seriously now, though I continue to 'feel' it in some way. Maybe one day I'll have more clear ideas on this matter. If you want, we can continue this discussion by mail
benoit do jacob hat ens do fr
(but don't feel forced if you think we've said enough about all this)
Sorry : I have failed to express myself clearly in my previous answer. Here's the more direct answer :
I don't like religions/philosophies/whatever.
(I could elaborate, but not here, since it won't be of much interest to the Slashdotters).
Maybe you just aren't much of a gamer? Or aren't observant?
It's just, as was mentionned by Sid Meier, that in those examples religion appears in a very superficial way. Sid has done what he could in Alpha Centauri (my favorite computer game), this game is one of the most spiritualized around, but it remains so superficial. In the special case of AC, what matters most is the consistency of the Sci-Fi world, and that's not being improved by putting a mix of buddhism, ecologism and ontologism (does that word exist ?) therein.
Can you back that up at all?
Take the best games ever : Chess and Go. They are the best games because when you play with someone these games, when you're losing, instead of feeling angry against your opponent, you admire the beauty of the game, and you're pleased. After having played a good game of Chess with someone, I always feel relaxed and I also have the impression of having shared something with this person. In this sense, I say that games can unite people.
The fact that for now, no video game has ever achieved this does not mean that it will always be so.
Oh please. These must be really weird times, when people even _think_ about putting spirituality in games.
Games unite people. Religion separates people.
It's a funny thing : BugMeNot (still haven't installed this Firefox extension ?) already works with this website...
i'm amazed no-one suggested this one. besides, if QT4 final is as fast as promised, it will give a speed boost to the firefox UI under KDE, while giving it all the KDE eyecandy.
Also, by the time firefox 2.0 will be there, KDE users will probably outnumber Apple users, so, if the Firefox team takes so much care about Aqua integration, why not doing the same about KDE integration ?
Would you go as far as comparing this guy to Einstein ? If not, then what's your point ?
Besides, please don't write "sic" when people misspell on internet, it's not easy to write a perfect english when it's not your native language.
I say that the computer press has gone exactly as low as the gurus who announced the apocalypse for Y2K.
Concerning the argument "you're not thankful towards the coders who fixed it" : the Y2K was not an especially tough one to fix. Compare with other software maintenance problems. I don't understand why so much noise has been done about that. If it hadn't been him, it'd had been the next one to bother mentionning it to an ignorant journalist.
> More interesting is that he predicted the Y2K bug all the way back in 1971!"
which has not happened.
>The highlights are that SCOX only collected $11k
Don't forget several dozens of millions from Microsoft, via BayStar.
SCO has a weird behaviour for a company because it's no longer a company. It's sort of a zombie.
>Linus Not The Father Of Linux
:
of course. by the way
War Is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s= &postid=287035010#post287035010
> NTFS is a _GREAT_ filesystem > NTSF is journalling false, 100% false. even microsoft acknowledges that winfs will be the first ms journaling fs. you should try a _real_ filesystem like ReiserFS or the upcoming Reiser4. NTFS is not journaled, very, very slow (especially compared to ext2 or ReiserFS), very vulnerable under unexpected power-downs, and has trivial space management (only the directory structure is a tree, files aren't stored in a tree -> leads to fragmentation). Filesystems is by far the domain where ms tech is most ridiculous. Of course there exist ridiculous filesystems for *nix also, like ext3, by at least you're not forced to use them.
The name Kelkoo has probably been chosen by french-speaking people, because it is pronounced exactly like the french sentence "Quel cout ?" (sorry, slashdot doesn't seem to accept the circumflex accents, even when typed in HTML...) which means "What cost ?".
Besides I remember there has been a lot of advertising for Kelkoo in France a few years ago.
Dude, as far as I know, the "TRUTH" can't fit in a book !
(just my $0.02...)
> You ask for the latest and greatest software and then complain that you can't get a stable release?
This is not asking for too much as long as I don't take beta versions or release candidates. Slackware -current + kernel 2.6 is giving me that stability. Except for konqueror of course.
OK, I can agree with some of your points. But there's one point where I haven't made myself clear. I *have* mdk 9.2 (powerpack). So I have the kernel you're mentionning. On the mdk CD-ROMs. What I want is to upgrade it to 2.6. So, being outside of the club, my only option (do we agree on this ?) is to go to cooker. But I have reluctance to doing so, because this is not supposed to be a stable release. Ok, I don't know how unstable the cooker kernel actually is, but do you agree that as a standard user, I can have reluctance to replacing my functionnal kernel by a kernel from a development branch ?
Same problem for other upgrades, like kde 3.2.
Now there's the club, who proposes me to pay $5 a month and then get an official upgrade instead of picking something possibly unstable from Cooker. Sounds much better ! But I'll have to pay on a regular basis for this, for a certain amount of time (is it 1 year ?) hence losing my part of my freedom to choose my software (since I'll be quite bound to mdk -- I don't want to pay $5/month for nothing).
Do we agree ?
Then one can discuss, but in my opinion this is already a way of making a pressure on me to get me pay on a regular basis and, what's more problematic, to get me bound to mdk for a certain amount of time. This last point, I think, is excessive.
Concerning the learning of unix... you're right to say that what I'm currently doing on my slackware, I could have done on mdk. But if I had stuck to mdk, I'd never had the idea of doing so. In 3 years I haven't. So my conclusion is : mdk is very good for total beginners, and is equivalent to nearly any other distro for the skilled user. But in the middle, there are many users who are technophile half-beginners, who could learn very quickly if they had to, but who won't as long as they're running mandrake. For these users, mandrake is not a good distribution.
And there would be absolutely no problem if mandrake was flawless, so there would be no need for them to learn more. But unfortunately this is not the case. They'd find a great benefit in learning more, as I have.
> In the ISOs that were just released?
:
they're for mdk 10.0, not 9.2. Probably that wouldn't work.
(same thing applies for your two other points).
> urpmi kernel-source
where do I get a free, stable, mdk-modified kernel for 9.2 ?
Only bugfix/security updates are freely available. And I wouldn't try to use in my 9.2 a kernel redesigned for 10.0.
> Stable releases are public
stable 10.0 doesn't exist yet. "Community" is PR for "beta".
> Current cooker is exaclty the same as the community release
That's what I say. Until 10.0 Official is released, there is no stable 10.0.
>If you're not paying, and you think the distro is "buggy", either don't complain, or file your bug reports like everyone else
I *have* payed 3 powerpacks, that's 3 times 80 euros, that's 240 euros, that's something like $290.
I have nothing against the idea of paying. But I don't want to *subscribe* to anything because it diminishes my freedom to switch to another distro whenever I want to - hence it diminishes the level of concurrence between the various distros.
I dislike the fact that mdk *isolates* its users from the rest of the free software world (I hate the word "community", it sounds like a sect) in two ways
1) it uses too much mdk-modified software. It would be better to stick with totally standard sources, with a few exceptions like supermount and hyperthreading optimizations. A complete list of non-standard sources should be published. Even in the case of patched (hence nonstandard) sources, only standard patches should be used, ie patches available for any distro.
2) it prevents you from truly learning gnulinux. That I didn't notice as long as I runned mdk. But I've been running slackware for 3 weeks and I in 3 weeks I've learned more than in 3 years with mdk. How is it possible ? Don't know. Probably mdk has too many half-working config tools to do things that require only 1 minute to do under vi.
oh really ? Then tell me how I get the mdk rpm's for, say, kde 3.2 or kernel 2.6 if I'm not a club member ?
Oh. Then tell me how you compile a new kernel on a system like mdk that has its own *modified* kernel. Answer : you better don't try a standard kernel. Cause it will be difficult to make it work with mdk. You have to get a mdk-modified kernel. And for that you have to be a club member.
urpmi doesn't magically create the rpm's for you. If you aren't a club member, you don't get the rpm's, so urpmi doesn't help. Cooker is the development version. I want a stable version. The pretendingly stable version is already buggy enough. rpmdrake is a graphical frontend for rpm management. Same remarks as for urpmi apply.
I've been running mdk since 7.1. Thank you.
Why ?
Because Mandrakesoft is running a more and more weird policy to force us to suscribe to their "club" - for which we'd have to pay $5 or $10 a month - and to systematically buy their product rather than downloading it.
For example, the new "release scheme" they're running for 10.0 is just a PR-disguise of something that actually amounts to
1) First, Community=Beta=Buggy version available in stores (only for brain-dead fanboys)
2) Then, Community=Beta=Buggy version available on BT/FTP
3) Then, Official=Stable version available in stores
4) Then, Download Edition = Castrated Edition on BT/FTP (but will you really want that ?)
Moreover, don't forget that *even* if you buy it, you don't get access to the upgrades. For this, you *have* to join the "club". Now this is getting more and more difficult to work around. I mean, as Mandrake adds more and more layers between the user and plain old UNIX, it's being more and more difficult to upgrade important pieces of software for a Mandrake system. If you want to update your kernel or your qt+kde system or (when the licences issues will be over...) your X server, unless you're very skilled, you'll have more and more problems to do it directly from the plain sources. Joining the club tends to be necessary. So here's an algorithm to help you choose your distro