If you read the full paragraph, it makes it clear that "your new computer must be purchased with an OS" for the upgrade to apply. That is, you can't buy an OS-free computer and then have the univ give you a cheap Windows XP.
This so-called GNU-Darwin is an adaptation of the BSD ports system. There's nothing GNU or GPL about that, nor does the name acknowledge the origins in any way. (In contrast, at least GNU/Linux is vaguely justifiable...)
The very nomenclature is a fraud, and I think they deserve to die.
(In passing, though, OS X does ship with the GNU toolchain, it's built with gcc. RMS has made it clear that that alone isn't enough to demand prefixing a GNU-- for example he doesn't demand calling FreeBSD GNU/FreeBSD. Clearly Realm & Co are bigger zealots than him.)
They are both nice, but the FreeBSD ports system comes out on top wrt flexibility.
Funny, I have quite the opposite judgement. I'm a huge FreeBSD fan, am typing this on my FreeBSD laptop in fact, but it now dual-boots Gentoo. One of the big selling points of FreeBSD, for me, was the ports system -- RPM is just so much of a headache -- but that was until I met gentoo. It has really gotten rid of many of the headaches associated with FreeBSD's ports: in particular, if you have a port A installed, and then port B pulls in a newer version of port A, the old version can be uninstalled automatically and safely in Gentoo without touching any of the new files. (In fact Gentoo now does it automatically.) And that's just one aspect: I like the fact that gentoo portage supports multiple versions of ports, that it generates the CONTENTS file automatically, and if your favourite port hasn't been updated to the latest version, you can often trivially do it yourself (you can also do that in FreeBSD but it's more complicated to get the CONTENTS right, and if you don't it won't uninstall cleanly). Now that I've used Gentoo for some time, FreeBSD's ports system is clearly showing its rough edges and deficiencies.
So why am I sticking with FreeBSD? Because it performs better (especially under load), and a lot of things just work better -- eg, I occasionally have problems with ppp or dhcp/cable modem in linux, never in FreeBSD. But gentoo has huge potential, in fact it's already a pretty spiffy system, I think. If I had multiple machines, I'd install FreeBSD on the "mission critical" ones and gentoo on the "play" ones (bleeding-edge software, multimedia, etc).
"American Airlines nominated..." By whom, given that there are no links? The "anonymous reader"? If so, why is it news? Yes, it's interesting that their agreement is so long, but who knows, maybe there are longer ones out there.
May I suggest that you talk your French friends into trying the "French Canadian" keyboard?
I suspect it's even harder to find in France than a US qwerty keyboard. I think they're happy the way they are....
For myself, when I use vim I can use its built-in digraph support, otherwise I just drop accents too.
As for Poincaré, I would say: "Pwain Ca (CAtastrophic) Ray", as you did,
Are you Quebecois? The French would not say "pwain" to rhyme with "Twain" anyway -- it would be closer to a rhyme with "won" but not quite that either. And nobody in France pronounces "ca" as in "catastrophic" even in English words -- or perhaps you mean "catastrophique"? (cah-tah-strofeek, with both t's soft)
Uh, it's poin as in french (roughly poan or pwan
with the n a nasal ending, not hard);
ca somewhere between ca (car) and cu (cuff);
re as in ray, as you say.
bah, screw it, just call me Henri
pronounced, roughly, ahn-ree or on-ree, again the n is a nasal sound not a hard consonant.
And btw, if you're not on a French azerty keyboard, feel free to leave out the accents. Most French people I know on qwerty keyboards drop the accents, in fact. As they generally do with capital letters too.
Not my experience, and I did my PhD in India. Theoretical physics people are pretty much standardized on linux. So are many engineering and mathematics departments. Experimental physicists, chemists and biologists on the other hand tend to use windows. It's exactly the same situation in the US. The physics group I was with in India had been using linux since around 1993 (I joined in 1994). Back then they still had a lot of msdos/windows 3.1 machines, but by around 1997 windows was almost extinct in my group.
Uh, it's an Indian newspaper, with a mostly Indian readership, who'd know what the exchange rate is (roughly, $1 = Rs 48.40 these days). Round that to
say $1 = Rs 50. That's well within the quick mental math capabilities of most Indians, since our classrooms haven't yet been taken over by graphing calculators.
The "peak of the signal" (ie, the phase velocity)
can travel faster than light -- big deal. It's been known for a long time. The "group velocity", as the article points out, is not faster than light, so no energy is being transferred faster than light, so relativity isn't being violated.
If you want to see a "thing" travelling faster than light, sweep a searchlight across a cloudy sky. That lit-up patch can, in principle, travel faster than light -- but it's not matter or energy, only an appearance.
And the last paragraph: "electrons usually travel at two thirds the speed of light". Wow, who needs particle accelerators?
What is a writer who can't distinguish the speed of electrons from the speed of the electrical signal doing writing for New Scientist? What is New Scientist doing publishing such crap?
Um, it's just one guy doing this, so far and he'll do whatever interests him, obviously. If all free software people did what was "needed" and not what was personally interesting to them, commercial OS's would be extinct by now.
I mean come on guys xf86cfg isn't exactly rocket science, it no harder to use than playing with the control panel in Windows.
Now, depending on one's point of view, that comment could be modded flamebait, troll, funny, interesting, informative, or insightful. Which did you mean it to be?
Not a substitute...
on
Is Linux Dead?
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
Kuro5hin is not a news site. It's more aimed at original writing and commentary. Slashdot claims to be a "news for nerds" site.
Yes, Slashdot is Taco's project, the crew can do as they like, blah... but it's self-proclamedly a news site. If they don't realize that credibility is important, it's going to bite them in the long run. I'm looking for something better than a London tabloid, and it's possible that at present Slashdot is just barely better -- in choice of topics if nothing else. But when it clearly isn't (I think the day isn't far) I'll go away. I think many have done that already.
Wanted: moderation for the articles
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Absolutely.
Sometimes (often!) I wish Slashdot let you moderate the articles and not just the posts; this one would have been (-1, Troll) very quickly.
Point. New York is the only city I've seen where the pedestrian signs say "Don't walk" in a whitish yellow or "Walk" in a yellowish white. If that's good enough for Americans, greenbacks are good enough too...
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the full paragraph, it makes it clear that "your new computer must be purchased with an OS" for the upgrade to apply. That is, you can't buy an OS-free computer and then have the univ give you a cheap Windows XP.
The very nomenclature is a fraud, and I think they deserve to die.
(In passing, though, OS X does ship with the GNU toolchain, it's built with gcc. RMS has made it clear that that alone isn't enough to demand prefixing a GNU-- for example he doesn't demand calling FreeBSD GNU/FreeBSD. Clearly Realm & Co are bigger zealots than him.)
These can't be worse than the Asterix live-action movies.
is improved, but not new: it has been there in some form since at least version 4.30.
Linus Torvalds uses it (as email headers from his lkml messages confirm).
Funny, I have quite the opposite judgement. I'm a huge FreeBSD fan, am typing this on my FreeBSD laptop in fact, but it now dual-boots Gentoo. One of the big selling points of FreeBSD, for me, was the ports system -- RPM is just so much of a headache -- but that was until I met gentoo. It has really gotten rid of many of the headaches associated with FreeBSD's ports: in particular, if you have a port A installed, and then port B pulls in a newer version of port A, the old version can be uninstalled automatically and safely in Gentoo without touching any of the new files. (In fact Gentoo now does it automatically.) And that's just one aspect: I like the fact that gentoo portage supports multiple versions of ports, that it generates the CONTENTS file automatically, and if your favourite port hasn't been updated to the latest version, you can often trivially do it yourself (you can also do that in FreeBSD but it's more complicated to get the CONTENTS right, and if you don't it won't uninstall cleanly). Now that I've used Gentoo for some time, FreeBSD's ports system is clearly showing its rough edges and deficiencies.
So why am I sticking with FreeBSD? Because it performs better (especially under load), and a lot of things just work better -- eg, I occasionally have problems with ppp or dhcp/cable modem in linux, never in FreeBSD. But gentoo has huge potential, in fact it's already a pretty spiffy system, I think. If I had multiple machines, I'd install FreeBSD on the "mission critical" ones and gentoo on the "play" ones (bleeding-edge software, multimedia, etc).
"American Airlines nominated..." By whom, given that there are no links? The "anonymous reader"? If so, why is it news? Yes, it's interesting that their agreement is so long, but who knows, maybe there are longer ones out there.
I suspect it's even harder to find in France than a US qwerty keyboard. I think they're happy the way they are....
For myself, when I use vim I can use its built-in digraph support, otherwise I just drop accents too.
As for Poincaré, I would say: "Pwain Ca (CAtastrophic) Ray", as you did,
Are you Quebecois? The French would not say "pwain" to rhyme with "Twain" anyway -- it would be closer to a rhyme with "won" but not quite that either. And nobody in France pronounces "ca" as in "catastrophic" even in English words -- or perhaps you mean "catastrophique"? (cah-tah-strofeek, with both t's soft)
Uh, it's poin as in french (roughly poan or pwan with the n a nasal ending, not hard);
ca somewhere between ca (car) and cu (cuff); re as in ray, as you say.
bah, screw it, just call me Henri
pronounced, roughly, ahn-ree or on-ree, again the n is a nasal sound not a hard consonant.
And btw, if you're not on a French azerty keyboard, feel free to leave out the accents. Most French people I know on qwerty keyboards drop the accents, in fact. As they generally do with capital letters too.
But you don't need a Windows install. That's the whole point.
They've played 7 games already. The upcoming game is the eighth and final game.
I think you're talking about the tailless sonic cruiser (you can find it on Boeing's site too but it seems to be slashdotted right now).
Not my experience, and I did my PhD in India. Theoretical physics people are pretty much standardized on linux. So are many engineering and mathematics departments. Experimental physicists, chemists and biologists on the other hand tend to use windows. It's exactly the same situation in the US. The physics group I was with in India had been using linux since around 1993 (I joined in 1994). Back then they still had a lot of msdos/windows 3.1 machines, but by around 1997 windows was almost extinct in my group.
Uh, it's an Indian newspaper, with a mostly Indian readership, who'd know what the exchange rate is (roughly, $1 = Rs 48.40 these days). Round that to say $1 = Rs 50. That's well within the quick mental math capabilities of most Indians, since our classrooms haven't yet been taken over by graphing calculators.
He paid them a six figure sum.
If you want to see a "thing" travelling faster than light, sweep a searchlight across a cloudy sky. That lit-up patch can, in principle, travel faster than light -- but it's not matter or energy, only an appearance.
And the last paragraph: "electrons usually travel at two thirds the speed of light". Wow, who needs particle accelerators?
What is a writer who can't distinguish the speed of electrons from the speed of the electrical signal doing writing for New Scientist? What is New Scientist doing publishing such crap?
Patents are patents. You're confused, or you're thinking of copyright.
see here.
And if it's wrong they won't apologize, oh no, and you're rude to point it out.
Um, it's just one guy doing this, so far and he'll do whatever interests him, obviously. If all free software people did what was "needed" and not what was personally interesting to them, commercial OS's would be extinct by now.
Now, depending on one's point of view, that comment could be modded flamebait, troll, funny, interesting, informative, or insightful. Which did you mean it to be?
Yes, Slashdot is Taco's project, the crew can do as they like, blah... but it's self-proclamedly a news site. If they don't realize that credibility is important, it's going to bite them in the long run. I'm looking for something better than a London tabloid, and it's possible that at present Slashdot is just barely better -- in choice of topics if nothing else. But when it clearly isn't (I think the day isn't far) I'll go away. I think many have done that already.
Sometimes (often!) I wish Slashdot let you moderate the articles and not just the posts; this one would have been (-1, Troll) very quickly.
Point. New York is the only city I've seen where the pedestrian signs say "Don't walk" in a whitish yellow or "Walk" in a yellowish white. If that's good enough for Americans, greenbacks are good enough too...
do you still run it as root in the default installation? If so, it loses a key advantage over windows: stability and safety.