On a Beeb, you had to also make an extra hole in each side for the "start of revolution" hole near the middle of the disk. This was needed because 5.25 floppies could lock onto the spindle in any orientation, unlike 3.5s which have a shaped locating hole and so the sensor on the flywheel indicates the start of a revolution. Some computers didn't need the start-of-revolution pulse, because they stored a short header on each track; that made the electronics simpler {and in the 1980s you could save money buying a drive mech without all the bits populated, like the top side read-write heads and the start-of-revolution lamp and phototransistor} but meant they couldn't quite get the full capacity on a disk. Beebs and IBMs did it "properly" {though the BBC used a highly obsolete FDC chip, which sold out in the end and required a horrendous bodge and some wonderful emulation software}, but the IBM drive was already double sided.
That's because the Amiga's disk controller couldn't keep up with the data rate of 110kB per second (80 tracks = 1760kB => 1 track = 22kB; 300 rpm => 5 rps => 1 spin = 0.2"; so data rate 110kB/sec), so they slowed the drive down to 150rpm (half speed, easily done with one extra flip-flop) in order to read and write HD disks.
While we're still on the subject, was it the Amiga or the ST that could be made to write to read-only floppies?
A pen-knife is not so called because of any resemblance to a pen. Back in the days when people wrote with actual bird feathers, the "nibs" needed near-constant attention. If you were planning on doing a lot of writing, you would need to keep a small knife handy for trimming your quill. Such an implement became known as a pen-knife, and many fine examples were produced that became collectors' items in their own right. Of course, a knife can be a useful implement anyway, and the advent of metal nibs and internal ink reservoirs did not harm the secondary industry.
Re:GPL software will NEVER be used for this
on
Can Software Kill?
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· Score: 1
If I was buying mission critical applications, the source code would be the first thing I would want to see.
It's not that software kills, just that people die. It's an unavoidable consequence of being alive. Sometimes things happen that you can't do anything about. Accept it and move on.
Re:GPL software will NEVER be used for this
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 1
But there is a warranty with GPL software: the source code.
Just what is a company supposed to do when designing computerized medical equipment?
Give the purchaser the opportunity to examine the source code, in order that they may make an informed decision as to its suitability for use in a particular situation.
When you bought the DVD or CD, you acquired the right to experience the recording thereupon. The exact means by which this may be accomplished is a matter of your personal choice which it is not the proper place of the law to dictate. {Though if you stab someone and steal their hi-fi to listen to a CD, you probably have committed offences beyond the scope of copyright law, which only says that a copy is not infringing if making it is a necessary step}. The point is, you have the right to watch or listen to a disc that you own on any equipment you choose.
Without the "necessary step" clause it would be illegal to copy a computer programme into RAM in order to execute it. It would also be illegal to operate a PAL TV set, which uses a delay line to make a copy of the previous scan line's colour signal. {Admittedly the copy only lasts for 64 microseconds, but there are no applicable statutes of limitation.}
It also is not an offence to make a recording of a TV programme for time-shifting. A good lawyer could argue that media-shifting should be similarly permitted. And, as I hinted above, how many people on the jury would have travelled to court that morning in a car, while listening to a tape made from a CD or LP?
You have made my point for me. All that clicking and dragging is a bigger ball-ache than typing a command! The computer should be doing the hard work for me. If I have to fart-arse about selecting filtering methods through a GUI, dragging a box around my selections and what not, opening windows and dragging things in, then it's less convenient.
It is NOT illegal to rip your own CDs to MP3 in the UK, because it comes under the heading of a "necessary step" in making use of the recording. If you own a CD player, and you have only a cassette player in your car, then transcribing the CD onto cassette is a necessary step in listening to the CD in your car. {Remember that, before the invention of racism, terrorism or paedophilia, a person used to be considered innocent until proven guilty. You can be acquitted on the words of two out of twelve people. I don't believe that there are enough people in the country who have never copied something onto a cassette to listen in a car, for you actually to be able to get more than ten of them on the same jury.} Unfortunately, I've lost the reference {there goes some easy karma}, but the way the law was written meant that it could have been interpreted to mean that the law gave explicit permission for that. The copy would only become infringing if it were used other than in accordance with the necessitating situation, e.g. if you listened to it on a machine that was already capable of playing CDs.
By extension, it would be similarly legal to transfer movies to a PDA. It is merely a "necessary step" in the watching of this film on that device.
Precisely. Try doing the equivalent of this in a GUI;
for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done
You can spend more time fart-arsing around with a drag-and-drool interface than it would have taken you to do it on the command line. That was what I loved about AutoCAD R12..... you could type in exact co-ordinates instead of trying to get a pixel-perfect click, and it cared not which method you chose. Ah, happy days. I seem to remember there may have been an AutoCAD for Unix. Anyone ever get it to compile on Linux?
I too used to hate case sensitivity with a passion. Now I'm older, and wiser, and I have just..... got used to it. The fact is, it's just less effort to put up with it than to try to change it. Tab completion certainly makes it more bearable
It would have taken the original Unix developers just an extra eighteen keystrokes to do a case-agnostic comparison;
if (foo == bar) becomes if ((foo & \x5f) == (bar & \x5f))
That works fine in 7-bit ASCII, if you don't mind punctuation marks matching other things. To do it properly, you need a translation table; but, on the bright side, the t.t. can also be used to strip accents from foreign characters.
if (tt[foo] == tt[bar])
Back in the days, 256 words was a lot of memory to spend on simply making it easy for humans; 64K would have been utter sacrilege. So introducing case-insensitivity was never a high priority. After all, if people can get used to a figure 5 and a percent sign not having the same meaning despite being generated by the same key, then what is the problem with a small "a" and a capital "A" having different meanings?
Fixing it now will almost certainly break stuff {someone is bound to have used foo and Foo in the same directory}, but probably not as badly as taking something case-insensitive and making it case-sensitive.
Absolutely. CDs are for listening to {or at any rate, perceiving stored content through some kind of electronic reading device with sensory stimulators}, not looking at. I'll stick with an indelible marker pen. As for DVDs, I don't ever write anything on them anyway; I just write on the card in the box, because -- at four quid a pop for DVD+RW media -- sooner rather than later, they're going to get recorded over.
Ah. So it is a bit smarter than I thought, then..... in Standby mode, the card is actually checking packets to see if it is the intended recipient. Fair enough.
But if that is the case, why does network traffic not intended for that machine keep it awake? Surely it should just enter sleep mode a set time after the last event which, had it been asleep, would have woken it up; but, being awake already, just reset the timer?
What's the problem with paper? Paper comes from trees. Trees, which can be sold to make money, grow on private land, which costs money. If the owner of the land doesn't replant every tree they cut down, they make less money. This pretty much guarantees that every tree cut down to make paper will be replanted..... because it costs someone money not to!
Printing on paper almost certainly uses less energy than displaying text on a CRT monitor; and every time you read it, the mean energy-per-reading goes down. When done with, the paper can be burned to liberate heat which can be used in turn to generate electricity. (Since paper is made from plants, the total CO2 content in the atmosphere is unchanged; burying paper in landfill produces methane, which usually is either vented into the atmosphere where it actually does more harm than CO2, or burned without doing anything useful with the energy.) (It could alternatively be pulped to make paper, but since this uses almost no less energy and more toxic chemicals than making paper from fresh wood, this would only be recommended if suitable wood was in short supply.)
I took that to mean that if the computer is connected to a non-switching hub, where every packet is passed to every port, then the wake-on-LAN will unavoidably get activated by packets meant for other machines. (If those machines are running Windows, then those packets probably will just be virus propagation.) If you use a proper switch, packets will only be passed to their intended destination.
What is the study trying to say exactly, anyway? Not only is it highly misleading to include water in the raw materials count, but there is no useful comparison in the report. This could just be setting up a straw man, to try to paint another industry greener than it really is; or alternatively, it could be an attempt to sell us something. I'd take it with a pinch of salt.
The other thing that is interesting about water.. is evaporation.. which probably doesn't have anything to do with brake problems.. but might be related to why water absorbs (dissolves) gases easily.
Dead right they're related. Water is highly polar, which makes it a good solvent for anything with uneven distribution of electrical charge. Since most things have their charges at least slightly unevenly distributed, water can dissolve them. {Carbon tetrachloride has its charges very evenly distributed, being symmetrical, so it's good at dissolving whatever water isn't; but, since that tends to include people's insides, its use tends to be discouraged nowadays}. The molecules are held together by Hydrogen bonds, which have some peculiar behaviours..... look 'em up in your old A-level chemistry textbook..... they are weaker than an "ordinary" ionic or covalent bond, but strong enough to keep hydrogen oxide liquid at room temperature. It is also hydrogen bonds that account for the massive latent heat of melting ice and boiling water, the pretty hexagonal structures of ice crystals, and the helix structure of DNA.
Steady on -- you're getting paranoid. I'm not trying to disparage Mandrake users, or any beginners. Far from it -- I save that level of disdain for people who won't even try Linux, but insist on cursing at their Windows boxes as long as the plug's in the wall. All I'm saying is it's a good distribution for beginners to start with, because you don't have to muck about with it much to get it to work. Read my postings again with your brain switched on, will you?
And frankly, I don't get what you think is wrong with being "elitist". This seems to me to be a concept dreamed up by people with an inferiority complex, who can't handle the way the world works. I believe that it is entirely legitimate to discriminate against people who are no good at something. After all, prowess in a particular field -- whether that be mathematics, sports or eating baked beans with a toothpick -- can only ever be levelled up.
I know where you're coming from; it's all about horses for courses.
At work, we used to have Slackware servers and Windows 98 SE desktops. My Linux experience is with Debian and Mandrake. We are now in the process of moving to Debian servers {well, we're keeping Slackware for the mo', but my boss has fallen in love with apt-get so we've standardised on Debian for their eventual replacements:) }, Mandrake on every desktop that doesn't have to run Windows, and we're developing our own in-house replacements for all the Windows stuff we used to use.
We found Mandrake great for quickly setting up a workstation {mostly, just accept the defaults}; it's a bit less bother than installing Windows and a lot less crash-prone. The hardware auto-detection is just brilliant; we can just stick it on any old mobo and know it'll work {if that isn't tempting fate}.
For a server in co-lo, you have somewhat different requirements. A GUI installer is next to irrelevant; you want simple, quick and stable package management and no arsing about with mending dependencies {that's strictly for the spare-bedroom machine you muck about with ultra-new stuff on}. Neither my boss nor I are afraid of the command line, he a Slackware veteran and I a longtime Debian user, but Debian's package management swayed him.
The name says it all. Debian-style package management for Mandrake. I like apt-get, especially in conjunction with the kpackage front end. I also like Mandrake's installer {though I can put up with Debian's command line interface}.
I think the two would go very well together, but I acknowledge that grafting the one onto the other won't be an easy task as Mandrake is rpm-based and well-established.
If I thought I had the time to devote to it, I'd have a go myself.
Why have you moderated this off-topic? Mandrake users help one another out, after all. They even admitted it was off-topic. Life's too short to mod down short posts.
-Standard packaging system (no more.rpm,.deb..tgz... just one type)
There is one package standard: source.tar.gz. Everything else is a more or less ugly hack to try to fit one particular idea of how Linux should be set up. Today's typical hardware is generally up to the job of compiling things from source -- that may not have been the case a few years ago. With auto-detecting configuration scripts and good use of environment variables, it should be possible to adapt to many different setups. Pre-compiled binary packages save time auto-detecting system setup, by making certain assumptions; but the assumptions differ between distributions, so SUSE RPMs may not work properly on Fedora or Mandrake.
Compiling everything from source has traditionally been a ball-ache. If someone can find a way to alleviate that, then they could be on to a winner; but I get the feeling that the market for a user-friendly but source-based distribution will be very fragmentated at first.
I'll reply, rather than mod you down, because I want to contribute elsewhere in this discussion. If you're a Slackware user then you probably know enough to handle that. But Mandrake is a different animal altogether -- it is intended for less advanced users. And I see nothing wrong with that; after all, everybody needs to start somewhere. Mandrake was my first X11-based distribution {though I'd been tinkering about on the command line with Debian for some time} so I'll admit to a liking for it:)
Slackware is more a geek's distro, whereas Mandrake is pitched more at n00bz. Slackware is good for customising {if I was being unkind, I'd say you have to customise it to make it usable} and runs well on less powerful systems; whereas Mandrake is purposely designed so that you can just slot it in and go, but it needs a fast machine to show off what it can do.
The sort of person who installs Slackware is probably an old hand with several years' Linux experience; more likely to be mellower and less outspoken than the first-timer. Mandrake is a good choice for a beginner, and it has a very loyal and vocal band of followers.
But just because Mandrake is aimed at the newcomer, it is no less powerful a distribution -- and it doesn't compromise on security. In its own way, it's a very hardcore distribution {there's one for the apostrophe nazis}: everything in it is open-source {unlike some distributions *cough* SUSE *cough*} and there is a real emphasis on community members helping one another with their problems.
Water will work..... for awhile..... the problem with using water for hydraulic fluid is that it tends to absorb gases readily. The definition of an ideal liquid is that it is incompressible; but a liquid with a gas dissolved in it is not an ideal liquid, and has some liquid-like and some gas-like properties. In particular, the dissolved gas {and therefore the composite fluid as a whole} can be compressed. Under enough pressure, the dissolved gas will liquefy, but what essentially happens is that the first few cm. of pedal travel are just compressing the gas, not doing anything useful. Thermal expansion {brakes get hot..... remember kinetic energy =.5 * m * v ** 2 and all that KE has to change state into heat..... it takes 4170J of heat to make 1kg. of water 1 degree hotter} will work in your favour; but since heat doesn't travel instantaneously, your brakes won't feel "right".
If you use water in the clutch cylinder {assuming you have a hydraulic as opposed to cable clutch.....}, then you run the risk of wearing out the friction plate as it may not disengage properly. And you might not be able to hold it on the biting point at traffic lights..... fair enough, apply the handbrake if the lights are red, but red and amber together means hand brake off, clutch to biting point ready..... doesn't it?;-)
Just because something will work in an emergency doesn't mean it's recommended to do so all the time.
Song identification could be done in theory just by compressing very lossily; to, say, 1kbit.sec-1. I guess it might require an extension to the envelope transform to work at low bit rates; but, ultimately, it ought to be possible to determine, say, that a compressed file is a particular piece of music.
However, it probably would break down with encrypted file transfers; and in many jurisdictions, it is against the law to attempt to decrypt something unless you are the intended recipient {hence DeCSS is fine, because the owner of a DVD is the intended recipient of the encrypted data}.
I personally use apache-ssl for all my file sharing needs, mainly because the client is so readily available. Although I haven't paid for a proper SSL certificate, that doesn't mean the transfers aren't encrypted.....
And if someday, somebody does decide to include some sort of song-identifying bit in their file sharing software, then what exactly is there to stop me from just downloading the.tar.gz, commenting out the "unwanted" checks and recompiling it?
The RIAA et al must face facts. Their business model is dependent on an assumption which time has given the lie: that the equipment needed to manufacture high-quality recordings was beyond the reach of the lumpenproletariat. It was great while it lasted, but it has come to an end, and only a fool could have failed to see that this would be the case. The only way there is any money left to be made is by selling stamped CDs cheaper than burned CDs {the cost of which includes bandwidth, time and hassle} -- after all, whoever saw a bootleg copy of a book?
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On a Beeb, you had to also make an extra hole in each side for the "start of revolution" hole near the middle of the disk. This was needed because 5.25 floppies could lock onto the spindle in any orientation, unlike 3.5s which have a shaped locating hole and so the sensor on the flywheel indicates the start of a revolution. Some computers didn't need the start-of-revolution pulse, because they stored a short header on each track; that made the electronics simpler {and in the 1980s you could save money buying a drive mech without all the bits populated, like the top side read-write heads and the start-of-revolution lamp and phototransistor} but meant they couldn't quite get the full capacity on a disk. Beebs and IBMs did it "properly" {though the BBC used a highly obsolete FDC chip, which sold out in the end and required a horrendous bodge and some wonderful emulation software}, but the IBM drive was already double sided.
That's because the Amiga's disk controller couldn't keep up with the data rate of 110kB per second (80 tracks = 1760kB => 1 track = 22kB; 300 rpm => 5 rps => 1 spin = 0.2"; so data rate 110kB/sec), so they slowed the drive down to 150rpm (half speed, easily done with one extra flip-flop) in order to read and write HD disks.
While we're still on the subject, was it the Amiga or the ST that could be made to write to read-only floppies?
A pen-knife is not so called because of any resemblance to a pen. Back in the days when people wrote with actual bird feathers, the "nibs" needed near-constant attention. If you were planning on doing a lot of writing, you would need to keep a small knife handy for trimming your quill. Such an implement became known as a pen-knife, and many fine examples were produced that became collectors' items in their own right. Of course, a knife can be a useful implement anyway, and the advent of metal nibs and internal ink reservoirs did not harm the secondary industry.
If I was buying mission critical applications, the source code would be the first thing I would want to see.
It's not that software kills, just that people die. It's an unavoidable consequence of being alive. Sometimes things happen that you can't do anything about. Accept it and move on.
But there is a warranty with GPL software: the source code.
When you bought the DVD or CD, you acquired the right to experience the recording thereupon. The exact means by which this may be accomplished is a matter of your personal choice which it is not the proper place of the law to dictate. {Though if you stab someone and steal their hi-fi to listen to a CD, you probably have committed offences beyond the scope of copyright law, which only says that a copy is not infringing if making it is a necessary step}. The point is, you have the right to watch or listen to a disc that you own on any equipment you choose.
Without the "necessary step" clause it would be illegal to copy a computer programme into RAM in order to execute it. It would also be illegal to operate a PAL TV set, which uses a delay line to make a copy of the previous scan line's colour signal. {Admittedly the copy only lasts for 64 microseconds, but there are no applicable statutes of limitation.}
It also is not an offence to make a recording of a TV programme for time-shifting. A good lawyer could argue that media-shifting should be similarly permitted. And, as I hinted above, how many people on the jury would have travelled to court that morning in a car, while listening to a tape made from a CD or LP?
You have made my point for me. All that clicking and dragging is a bigger ball-ache than typing a command! The computer should be doing the hard work for me. If I have to fart-arse about selecting filtering methods through a GUI, dragging a box around my selections and what not, opening windows and dragging things in, then it's less convenient.
It is NOT illegal to rip your own CDs to MP3 in the UK, because it comes under the heading of a "necessary step" in making use of the recording. If you own a CD player, and you have only a cassette player in your car, then transcribing the CD onto cassette is a necessary step in listening to the CD in your car. {Remember that, before the invention of racism, terrorism or paedophilia, a person used to be considered innocent until proven guilty. You can be acquitted on the words of two out of twelve people. I don't believe that there are enough people in the country who have never copied something onto a cassette to listen in a car, for you actually to be able to get more than ten of them on the same jury.} Unfortunately, I've lost the reference {there goes some easy karma}, but the way the law was written meant that it could have been interpreted to mean that the law gave explicit permission for that. The copy would only become infringing if it were used other than in accordance with the necessitating situation, e.g. if you listened to it on a machine that was already capable of playing CDs.
By extension, it would be similarly legal to transfer movies to a PDA. It is merely a "necessary step" in the watching of this film on that device.
It would have taken the original Unix developers just an extra eighteen keystrokes to do a case-agnostic comparison; That works fine in 7-bit ASCII, if you don't mind punctuation marks matching other things. To do it properly, you need a translation table; but, on the bright side, the t.t. can also be used to strip accents from foreign characters. Back in the days, 256 words was a lot of memory to spend on simply making it easy for humans; 64K would have been utter sacrilege. So introducing case-insensitivity was never a high priority. After all, if people can get used to a figure 5 and a percent sign not having the same meaning despite being generated by the same key, then what is the problem with a small "a" and a capital "A" having different meanings?
Fixing it now will almost certainly break stuff {someone is bound to have used foo and Foo in the same directory}, but probably not as badly as taking something case-insensitive and making it case-sensitive.
Absolutely. CDs are for listening to {or at any rate, perceiving stored content through some kind of electronic reading device with sensory stimulators}, not looking at. I'll stick with an indelible marker pen. As for DVDs, I don't ever write anything on them anyway; I just write on the card in the box, because -- at four quid a pop for DVD+RW media -- sooner rather than later, they're going to get recorded over.
Ah. So it is a bit smarter than I thought, then ..... in Standby mode, the card is actually checking packets to see if it is the intended recipient. Fair enough.
But if that is the case, why does network traffic not intended for that machine keep it awake? Surely it should just enter sleep mode a set time after the last event which, had it been asleep, would have woken it up; but, being awake already, just reset the timer?
What's the problem with paper? Paper comes from trees. Trees, which can be sold to make money, grow on private land, which costs money. If the owner of the land doesn't replant every tree they cut down, they make less money. This pretty much guarantees that every tree cut down to make paper will be replanted ..... because it costs someone money not to!
Printing on paper almost certainly uses less energy than displaying text on a CRT monitor; and every time you read it, the mean energy-per-reading goes down. When done with, the paper can be burned to liberate heat which can be used in turn to generate electricity. (Since paper is made from plants, the total CO2 content in the atmosphere is unchanged; burying paper in landfill produces methane, which usually is either vented into the atmosphere where it actually does more harm than CO2, or burned without doing anything useful with the energy.) (It could alternatively be pulped to make paper, but since this uses almost no less energy and more toxic chemicals than making paper from fresh wood, this would only be recommended if suitable wood was in short supply.)
I took that to mean that if the computer is connected to a non-switching hub, where every packet is passed to every port, then the wake-on-LAN will unavoidably get activated by packets meant for other machines. (If those machines are running Windows, then those packets probably will just be virus propagation.) If you use a proper switch, packets will only be passed to their intended destination.
What is the study trying to say exactly, anyway? Not only is it highly misleading to include water in the raw materials count, but there is no useful comparison in the report. This could just be setting up a straw man, to try to paint another industry greener than it really is; or alternatively, it could be an attempt to sell us something. I'd take it with a pinch of salt.
Steady on -- you're getting paranoid. I'm not trying to disparage Mandrake users, or any beginners. Far from it -- I save that level of disdain for people who won't even try Linux, but insist on cursing at their Windows boxes as long as the plug's in the wall. All I'm saying is it's a good distribution for beginners to start with, because you don't have to muck about with it much to get it to work. Read my postings again with your brain switched on, will you?
And frankly, I don't get what you think is wrong with being "elitist". This seems to me to be a concept dreamed up by people with an inferiority complex, who can't handle the way the world works. I believe that it is entirely legitimate to discriminate against people who are no good at something. After all, prowess in a particular field -- whether that be mathematics, sports or eating baked beans with a toothpick -- can only ever be levelled up.
I know where you're coming from; it's all about horses for courses.
:) }, Mandrake on every desktop that doesn't have to run Windows, and we're developing our own in-house replacements for all the Windows stuff we used to use.
At work, we used to have Slackware servers and Windows 98 SE desktops. My Linux experience is with Debian and Mandrake. We are now in the process of moving to Debian servers {well, we're keeping Slackware for the mo', but my boss has fallen in love with apt-get so we've standardised on Debian for their eventual replacements
We found Mandrake great for quickly setting up a workstation {mostly, just accept the defaults}; it's a bit less bother than installing Windows and a lot less crash-prone. The hardware auto-detection is just brilliant; we can just stick it on any old mobo and know it'll work {if that isn't tempting fate}.
For a server in co-lo, you have somewhat different requirements. A GUI installer is next to irrelevant; you want simple, quick and stable package management and no arsing about with mending dependencies {that's strictly for the spare-bedroom machine you muck about with ultra-new stuff on}. Neither my boss nor I are afraid of the command line, he a Slackware veteran and I a longtime Debian user, but Debian's package management swayed him.
DebDrake.
The name says it all. Debian-style package management for Mandrake. I like apt-get, especially in conjunction with the kpackage front end. I also like Mandrake's installer {though I can put up with Debian's command line interface}.
I think the two would go very well together, but I acknowledge that grafting the one onto the other won't be an easy task as Mandrake is rpm-based and well-established.
If I thought I had the time to devote to it, I'd have a go myself.
Why have you moderated this off-topic? Mandrake users help one another out, after all. They even admitted it was off-topic. Life's too short to mod down short posts.
Compiling everything from source has traditionally been a ball-ache. If someone can find a way to alleviate that, then they could be on to a winner; but I get the feeling that the market for a user-friendly but source-based distribution will be very fragmentated at first.
I'll reply, rather than mod you down, because I want to contribute elsewhere in this discussion. If you're a Slackware user then you probably know enough to handle that. But Mandrake is a different animal altogether -- it is intended for less advanced users. And I see nothing wrong with that; after all, everybody needs to start somewhere. Mandrake was my first X11-based distribution {though I'd been tinkering about on the command line with Debian for some time} so I'll admit to a liking for it :)
Slackware is more a geek's distro, whereas Mandrake is pitched more at n00bz. Slackware is good for customising {if I was being unkind, I'd say you have to customise it to make it usable} and runs well on less powerful systems; whereas Mandrake is purposely designed so that you can just slot it in and go, but it needs a fast machine to show off what it can do.
The sort of person who installs Slackware is probably an old hand with several years' Linux experience; more likely to be mellower and less outspoken than the first-timer. Mandrake is a good choice for a beginner, and it has a very loyal and vocal band of followers.
But just because Mandrake is aimed at the newcomer, it is no less powerful a distribution -- and it doesn't compromise on security. In its own way, it's a very hardcore distribution {there's one for the apostrophe nazis}: everything in it is open-source {unlike some distributions *cough* SUSE *cough*} and there is a real emphasis on community members helping one another with their problems.
Water will work ..... for awhile ..... the problem with using water for hydraulic fluid is that it tends to absorb gases readily. The definition of an ideal liquid is that it is incompressible; but a liquid with a gas dissolved in it is not an ideal liquid, and has some liquid-like and some gas-like properties. In particular, the dissolved gas {and therefore the composite fluid as a whole} can be compressed. Under enough pressure, the dissolved gas will liquefy, but what essentially happens is that the first few cm. of pedal travel are just compressing the gas, not doing anything useful. Thermal expansion {brakes get hot ..... remember kinetic energy = .5 * m * v ** 2 and all that KE has to change state into heat ..... it takes 4170J of heat to make 1kg. of water 1 degree hotter} will work in your favour; but since heat doesn't travel instantaneously, your brakes won't feel "right".
..... fair enough, apply the handbrake if the lights are red, but red and amber together means hand brake off, clutch to biting point ready ..... doesn't it? ;-)
If you use water in the clutch cylinder {assuming you have a hydraulic as opposed to cable clutch.....}, then you run the risk of wearing out the friction plate as it may not disengage properly. And you might not be able to hold it on the biting point at traffic lights
Just because something will work in an emergency doesn't mean it's recommended to do so all the time.
Song identification could be done in theory just by compressing very lossily; to, say, 1kbit.sec-1. I guess it might require an extension to the envelope transform to work at low bit rates; but, ultimately, it ought to be possible to determine, say, that a compressed file is a particular piece of music.
.....
.tar.gz, commenting out the "unwanted" checks and recompiling it?
However, it probably would break down with encrypted file transfers; and in many jurisdictions, it is against the law to attempt to decrypt something unless you are the intended recipient {hence DeCSS is fine, because the owner of a DVD is the intended recipient of the encrypted data}.
I personally use apache-ssl for all my file sharing needs, mainly because the client is so readily available. Although I haven't paid for a proper SSL certificate, that doesn't mean the transfers aren't encrypted
And if someday, somebody does decide to include some sort of song-identifying bit in their file sharing software, then what exactly is there to stop me from just downloading the
The RIAA et al must face facts. Their business model is dependent on an assumption which time has given the lie: that the equipment needed to manufacture high-quality recordings was beyond the reach of the lumpenproletariat. It was great while it lasted, but it has come to an end, and only a fool could have failed to see that this would be the case. The only way there is any money left to be made is by selling stamped CDs cheaper than burned CDs {the cost of which includes bandwidth, time and hassle} -- after all, whoever saw a bootleg copy of a book?