I don't get it. If I choose to buy the Ubuntu version, why am I being ripped off? From my point of view: I'm getting the OS I want (thus saving half a day installing and tweaking my own Ubuntu installation, as compared to buying the Windows version), at what looks to me like a reasonable price.
If it turns out later that someone else finds a way to provide me a comparable product at less of a price--great, I'll consider the offer.
As for guessing the value of the deal to Dell--forget it, I'm not interested. If they're making a huge profit at it, great, maybe they (and their competitors) will see that as an opportunity, and I'll get more offers like this next time.
And I'm highly skeptical of armchair attempts to estimate Dell's costs--there's the cost of the Windows licenses, possible adware payments, costs of post-sales support for the two OS's, costs of pre-sale development (developing and testing the two OS install images, etc.), etc., etc., etc.
As a customer, I'm just interested in what I get for my money. And the linked-to deal ($1099 for a 13" laptop, Ubuntu preloaded, 4G ram, Core 2 Duo P8600, 320GB (7200rpm) drive, etc.)--looks totally reasonable to me.
I'm submitting this on a 1420n that came with Ubuntu preloaded, and I've been pretty happy with it.
Employment isn't like oil--it isn't a finite resource.
If I babysit the kids while you make dinner, and if we pay each other for that, the money will just go in a circle--but that doesn't mean it was the results cancelled each other out. There were real, concrete benefits. (Dinner got made, kids got taken care of.)
The economy is a much larger and more complicated version of that sort of mutual back-scratching machine. And whenever you add more people you're adding the potential for more of those relationships.
The "proper channels" set immigration limits drastically to less than what economic forces would set them to.
If you agree that massive disregard for the law creates problems, then, in tandem with increased enforcement, you should also support a huge increase in the amount of immigration allowed.
My impression is that most economists believe the eventual result of increased immigration would be an increase in employment and standard of living on *both* sides of the border.
Never, never, *never* ride within a car-door's width of a stopped car.
I've heard a few people say--oh, just ride along beside the parked cars, and if you keep an eye through the windows you'll be able to see the problem coming. But the expert advice I've seen (example) tells you to just stay out of the "door zone" completely, and that's what I've always done.
Surely somebody's had a heart attack in all that time? Not the train's fault, but I can't imagine, given the number of passenger-hours on the system, that they haven't had a few deaths....
Hm. My wife got called for jury duty a few years ago--someplace 45 minutes away by car, but we don't own one, and the local public transportation sucks. Basically it would have meant renting a car, or taking a train the day before and staying overnight. She called them up and told them this. I have no idea what the rules are--whether they would have had to compensate her for the expense, or what--all I know is that in her case they said "oh. uh. OK then, I guess you can't do it this time" and we didn't hear from them again.
And you know what, if that hadn't been the case--if they'd basically said "show up or else, and how you do it is your problem!"--at that point we would have looked at the cost of the options, among them buying or renting a car--and if it made the most sense to buy one we could have done that. There wasn't so little notice that it would have been impractical. And that makes more sense to me than buying a car now just in case we get called for jury duty someplace to far away in two years....
The only way you get rid of the fixed costs (like insurance and registration) is to get rid of the car altogether.
It's more complicated than that. Yes, there are a subset of households for which it makes sense to talk about "the car". But:
Most households have more than one car--one per spouse, often a third hand-me-down for a teenager or whatever.
The decision often isn't just whether to buy a car, but *when* to do it: do you make sure there's a car for the teenager the moment they get a learner's permit, or do you wait till they move out? Do college students bring cars to campus, or wait till they graduate, or till they've been out a few years and are buying a house and starting a family?
Public transportation is just one among a wide set of alternatives from walking to biking to taxis (too expensive for a commute but fine for few-times-a-year needs), to car rental, etc., any of which may be adequate to at least delay that second or third car for another year or two.
So this isn't as all-or-nothing as you'd think. Also:
there aren't too many areas in the US where that's a feasible option.
In the long term, of course, the place you live and work can change. When people move, they face choices, and time and money required to get between home and work (and the grocery store, and the in-laws, etc.) will always be one of the considerations.
Plug in the second monitor, run
System->Preferences->Screen Resolution. It should let you turn the two screens on and off, adjust resolutions, and adjust their placement with respect to each other. Maximizing/full-screening windows seems to make them fill up whichever screen they're on.
I've tried it a few times, but don't use it every day. I seem to recall a few glitches (e.g. maybe desktop effects got turned off?). This is on a laptop with a GM965; support for non-Intel hardware might lag given that Intel's been contributing the most work on this sort of thing....
I'm running Intrepid. The same configuration was there in Hardy, but in practice I found it didn't work nearly as well. Given the rate of progress, I'd expect it to be pretty solid in Jaunty and Karmic, but I'm no expert on X development....
If they are reluctant to act, explain to them very politely that you're trying to help them by not making this criminal theft a matter for the police, and won't they please consider doing something about it?
Well, we've only heard one side of the story, but: I doubt that'll be necessary. Talk to the department chair and/or dean, and they'll be as shocked as anyone else.
Stealing your students' notes is beyond the pale....
Well, even in a pure recount it's possible that machine-unreadable ballots may occur with slightly higher numbers in districts that lean one way or another. And when they're finally counted it's likely that the uncounted ballots will on average tend to be resolved to votes that lean in the same direction as the district they're in. So the difference between the original count and the recount may not just be random noise, it might give an advantage to one side or the other.
The uneven distribution of problematic ballots could be because the quality of voting machines or election workers varies somehow, or could be demographics (e.g. ballots from older voters, or younger voters, or new voters, might on average have slightly higher error rates than others).
Normally you'd expect these effects to be too small to matter, but in a race like say Minnesota, where the difference between candidates is about a hundredth of a percent, they might decide the election.
Weird. No accounting for taste, I guess; I like the current ibex-cave-painting wallpaper, and found the temporary stuff at the beginning of the beta a little dull.
And 8.04's heron wallpaper was an amazing piece of work.
Re:Building your own kernel these days ain't easy
on
Linux 2.6.27 Out
·
· Score: 1
A better reason for a "stripped down" configuration: to optimize for *compile* time. There it makes a huge difference--especially if, for example, you want to regularly compile and test the latest kernels. (And for a newbie interested in contributing to the kernel, the best thing they can do is test regularly and report regressions.)
You just need to do that once, after which running "make oldconfig" and accepting the defaults will normally be all you need.
"Secret society" is a bit over the top! I always had the impression it had the feeling more of a running joke; from the article:
In the 1950s, Ralph Boas of Northwestern University wrote an article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica on Bourbaki, explaining that it was the pseudonym for a consortium of French mathematicians. The editors of the encyclopedia soon received a scalding letter signed by Nicolas Bourbaki himself, declaring that he would not allow anyone to question his right to exist. In revenge, Bourbaki began spreading the rumor that Ralph Boas himself didn't exist, and that B.O.A.S was an acronym of a group of American mathematicians.
Though it wasn't *just* a joke--they wrote a lot of very serious mathematics!
a) as another commenter points out, you've got the requirements wrong--the brochure lists the requirements as: at least 17, registered to vote in the county you plan to work in, not a felon, not a candidate in the election you're working on.
b) I think working as a poll worker would be a great way to contribute to the community, and having more slashdot types with direct experience with the polls helps make us all smarter and more credible critics. (See, e.g., Avi Rubin's blog entries on his experience
So I can pretty well follow a spec, an algorithm description, or pseudo-code in C. But I'm no pro. Do I have the skills to start contributing to a top-tier open source project like the kernel, gcc, apache, etc? I'm looking at this link, what others would people recommend for how to get started?
One great thing to do is just to figure out how to download and build the latest development versions of the software, and try it out.
That's especially true for the kernel, which runs on a much wider variety of hardware than any one developer can have access to.
In the process of learning to write good bug reports, helping reproduce and debug problems, etc., you can learn a lot about the code.
Right, kernels just drop in, that's why people like the Debian kernel team spend months agonizing over whether 2.6.24 or 2.6.25 will be the release kernel for Lenny. Just drag and drop, man!
It's the job of distributions to agonize over things like which software versions to include in their new version--there's a balance between the benefits of new features and the risk of new bugs.
I upgrade kernels on my machines all the time without seeing backwards-compatibility problems. But then I'm seeing a much restricted set of hardware and workloads as compared to a distro kernel maintainer.
But the point is that those *are* bugs. Some projects take the major version number to mean that they're giving themselves the freedom to break certain external interfaces. The kernel doesn't--it attempts to keep interfaces userland stable, or as close to it as is possible.
s/no drivers/no third-party drivers, apart from nVidia, ATi, and others/
Yeah, I hate it when I boot a kernel and all my hardware just works. Why can't I while away my evenings tracking down the drivers I need from manufacturer's websites, like users of other OS's get to do?
Major and minor numbers have their place, too. They tell me something about the amount of change. I'll update from 2.6.25 to 2.6.26 without a second thought, as I expect nothing important to have changed. I'll spend a few minutes on the Changelog when I go from 2.6 to 2.7 because I expect a couple of minor things to have changed. I know that going from 2 to 3 will be a major update and might result in all kinds of incompatabilities, so I'd better make sure all my apps are ready first.
Kernel development no longer works that way--the current model is, every 2-3 months a new kernel is released, then there's a couple weeks to merge new work, then the rest of the time until the next release is spent tracking down regressions.
There's never going to be another long-lived development branch: having years where all the real development went on in a kernel that nobody actually used caused all sorts of problems: bugs would pile up because the development branch wasn't getting enough testing, and distro's had to backport a lot just to be able to distribute "stable" kernels with the features and hardware support their customers needed.
So the kernel version is *always* going to start with "2.6.". Hence the thought that maybe the version numbering doesn't explain the new process as well as something like "2008.07" might.
And as for incompatibilities, they shouldn't happen. You should be able to drop a new kernel into an old system and everything should work--if not, report it as a bug. There's a few exceptions where some interface is dropped or change, but normally the assumption is that it's something that won't cause a problem for people--so if it does, speak up, they need to hear from you.
(Of course, the above only applies to real userland interfaces, not to internal kernel interfaces. If you're trying to run a bunch of proprietary out-of-tree code (like the proprietary nVidia driver) inside the kernel, then you're on your own.)
Newsflash: when you buy cheap crap it is going to perform like cheap crap.
Unfortunately, expensive crap can also sometimes perform like crap. And when you're selling as many units as linksys or netgear probably does, the per-unit cost of the extra QA and such isn't likely to be all that much anyway (assuming it's a one-time cost for the firmware development), so in theory a stable router needn't be significantly more expensive.
And relying on price *alone* always invites the danger that someone will realize they can sell cheap crap at a higher price and people will assume it's worth it.
So, you're a consumer walking the aisles of your local (or virtual) computer shop, trying to pick a quality router. Price alone isn't a great help. What else do you have? As far as I can tell the computer magazines, for example, don't do a lot of really careful scientific testing of this kind of thing.
Figure out how to get consumers more information about the quality of alternatives, and you'll have figured out how to improve the quality of what's offered. It'd be better for everybody involved.
If you don't like the entirety of something, you shouldn't vote for it!
He's a senator, next year possibly a president. His *job* is to compromise, not to hold fast to a particular ideology. He has to work with everyone he needs to (including lots of people who are flat-out wrong--and please, anything you can help do to fix that is welcomed, but accept that when it comes time to make a real decision sometimes you're just going to have to work with them) to reach the best solution he can find that can win support.
This was a terrible bill. Voting for it may have been a mistake even given the political climate. But the position Obama's applying for requires compromise, and requires him to represent the whole of the US electorate (not just me), so it doesn't make sense to elect someone who's just going to stake out a position and refuse to budge.
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I don't get it. If I choose to buy the Ubuntu version, why am I being ripped off? From my point of view: I'm getting the OS I want (thus saving half a day installing and tweaking my own Ubuntu installation, as compared to buying the Windows version), at what looks to me like a reasonable price.
If it turns out later that someone else finds a way to provide me a comparable product at less of a price--great, I'll consider the offer.
As for guessing the value of the deal to Dell--forget it, I'm not interested. If they're making a huge profit at it, great, maybe they (and their competitors) will see that as an opportunity, and I'll get more offers like this next time.
And I'm highly skeptical of armchair attempts to estimate Dell's costs--there's the cost of the Windows licenses, possible adware payments, costs of post-sales support for the two OS's, costs of pre-sale development (developing and testing the two OS install images, etc.), etc., etc., etc.
As a customer, I'm just interested in what I get for my money. And the linked-to deal ($1099 for a 13" laptop, Ubuntu preloaded, 4G ram, Core 2 Duo P8600, 320GB (7200rpm) drive, etc.)--looks totally reasonable to me.
I'm submitting this on a 1420n that came with Ubuntu preloaded, and I've been pretty happy with it.
Employment isn't like oil--it isn't a finite resource.
If I babysit the kids while you make dinner, and if we pay each other for that, the money will just go in a circle--but that doesn't mean it was the results cancelled each other out. There were real, concrete benefits. (Dinner got made, kids got taken care of.)
The economy is a much larger and more complicated version of that sort of mutual back-scratching machine. And whenever you add more people you're adding the potential for more of those relationships.
Yup. And the way to do that is to provide more *legal* routes to immigration and to starve the traffickers of their customers.
The "proper channels" set immigration limits drastically to less than what economic forces would set them to.
If you agree that massive disregard for the law creates problems, then, in tandem with increased enforcement, you should also support a huge increase in the amount of immigration allowed.
My impression is that most economists believe the eventual result of increased immigration would be an increase in employment and standard of living on *both* sides of the border.
Never, never, *never* ride within a car-door's width of a stopped car.
I've heard a few people say--oh, just ride along beside the parked cars, and if you keep an eye through the windows you'll be able to see the problem coming. But the expert advice I've seen (example) tells you to just stay out of the "door zone" completely, and that's what I've always done.
Surely somebody's had a heart attack in all that time? Not the train's fault, but I can't imagine, given the number of passenger-hours on the system, that they haven't had a few deaths....
Hm. My wife got called for jury duty a few years ago--someplace 45 minutes away by car, but we don't own one, and the local public transportation sucks. Basically it would have meant renting a car, or taking a train the day before and staying overnight. She called them up and told them this. I have no idea what the rules are--whether they would have had to compensate her for the expense, or what--all I know is that in her case they said "oh. uh. OK then, I guess you can't do it this time" and we didn't hear from them again.
And you know what, if that hadn't been the case--if they'd basically said "show up or else, and how you do it is your problem!"--at that point we would have looked at the cost of the options, among them buying or renting a car--and if it made the most sense to buy one we could have done that. There wasn't so little notice that it would have been impractical. And that makes more sense to me than buying a car now just in case we get called for jury duty someplace to far away in two years....
It's more complicated than that. Yes, there are a subset of households for which it makes sense to talk about "the car". But:
So this isn't as all-or-nothing as you'd think. Also:
In the long term, of course, the place you live and work can change. When people move, they face choices, and time and money required to get between home and work (and the grocery store, and the in-laws, etc.) will always be one of the considerations.
Plug in the second monitor, run System->Preferences->Screen Resolution. It should let you turn the two screens on and off, adjust resolutions, and adjust their placement with respect to each other. Maximizing/full-screening windows seems to make them fill up whichever screen they're on.
I've tried it a few times, but don't use it every day. I seem to recall a few glitches (e.g. maybe desktop effects got turned off?). This is on a laptop with a GM965; support for non-Intel hardware might lag given that Intel's been contributing the most work on this sort of thing....
I'm running Intrepid. The same configuration was there in Hardy, but in practice I found it didn't work nearly as well. Given the rate of progress, I'd expect it to be pretty solid in Jaunty and Karmic, but I'm no expert on X development....
Well, we've only heard one side of the story, but: I doubt that'll be necessary. Talk to the department chair and/or dean, and they'll be as shocked as anyone else.
Stealing your students' notes is beyond the pale....
Well, even in a pure recount it's possible that machine-unreadable ballots may occur with slightly higher numbers in districts that lean one way or another. And when they're finally counted it's likely that the uncounted ballots will on average tend to be resolved to votes that lean in the same direction as the district they're in. So the difference between the original count and the recount may not just be random noise, it might give an advantage to one side or the other.
The uneven distribution of problematic ballots could be because the quality of voting machines or election workers varies somehow, or could be demographics (e.g. ballots from older voters, or younger voters, or new voters, might on average have slightly higher error rates than others).
Normally you'd expect these effects to be too small to matter, but in a race like say Minnesota, where the difference between candidates is about a hundredth of a percent, they might decide the election.
Weird. No accounting for taste, I guess; I like the current ibex-cave-painting wallpaper, and found the temporary stuff at the beginning of the beta a little dull.
And 8.04's heron wallpaper was an amazing piece of work.
A better reason for a "stripped down" configuration: to optimize for *compile* time. There it makes a huge difference--especially if, for example, you want to regularly compile and test the latest kernels. (And for a newbie interested in contributing to the kernel, the best thing they can do is test regularly and report regressions.)
You just need to do that once, after which running "make oldconfig" and accepting the defaults will normally be all you need.
Err, what's "the Protestant Church"?
Look! A nonfalsifiable hypothesis!
"Secret society" is a bit over the top! I always had the impression it had the feeling more of a running joke; from the article:
Though it wasn't *just* a joke--they wrote a lot of very serious mathematics!
b) I think working as a poll worker would be a great way to contribute to the community, and having more slashdot types with direct experience with the polls helps make us all smarter and more credible critics. (See, e.g., Avi Rubin's blog entries on his experience
So I can pretty well follow a spec, an algorithm description, or pseudo-code in C. But I'm no pro. Do I have the skills to start contributing to a top-tier open source project like the kernel, gcc, apache, etc? I'm looking at this link, what others would people recommend for how to get started?
One great thing to do is just to figure out how to download and build the latest development versions of the software, and try it out.
That's especially true for the kernel, which runs on a much wider variety of hardware than any one developer can have access to.
In the process of learning to write good bug reports, helping reproduce and debug problems, etc., you can learn a lot about the code.
What's the point of a version number THAT NEVER CHANGES?!
Exactly. Hence the feeling that maybe it's time to switch to a new version numbering system!
Right, kernels just drop in, that's why people like the Debian kernel team spend months agonizing over whether 2.6.24 or 2.6.25 will be the release kernel for Lenny. Just drag and drop, man!
It's the job of distributions to agonize over things like which software versions to include in their new version--there's a balance between the benefits of new features and the risk of new bugs.
I upgrade kernels on my machines all the time without seeing backwards-compatibility problems. But then I'm seeing a much restricted set of hardware and workloads as compared to a distro kernel maintainer.
But the point is that those *are* bugs. Some projects take the major version number to mean that they're giving themselves the freedom to break certain external interfaces. The kernel doesn't--it attempts to keep interfaces userland stable, or as close to it as is possible.
Well, "a completely new software architecture" would probably mean a completely new project with a different name.
Other changes we should be able to break down into incremental steps.
Sure, it might be a little strong to say the kernel version will "always" start with 2.6--but at least that seems true for the forseeable future.
s/no drivers/no third-party drivers, apart from nVidia, ATi, and others/
Yeah, I hate it when I boot a kernel and all my hardware just works. Why can't I while away my evenings tracking down the drivers I need from manufacturer's websites, like users of other OS's get to do?
Major and minor numbers have their place, too. They tell me something about the amount of change. I'll update from 2.6.25 to 2.6.26 without a second thought, as I expect nothing important to have changed. I'll spend a few minutes on the Changelog when I go from 2.6 to 2.7 because I expect a couple of minor things to have changed. I know that going from 2 to 3 will be a major update and might result in all kinds of incompatabilities, so I'd better make sure all my apps are ready first.
Kernel development no longer works that way--the current model is, every 2-3 months a new kernel is released, then there's a couple weeks to merge new work, then the rest of the time until the next release is spent tracking down regressions.
There's never going to be another long-lived development branch: having years where all the real development went on in a kernel that nobody actually used caused all sorts of problems: bugs would pile up because the development branch wasn't getting enough testing, and distro's had to backport a lot just to be able to distribute "stable" kernels with the features and hardware support their customers needed.
So the kernel version is *always* going to start with "2.6.". Hence the thought that maybe the version numbering doesn't explain the new process as well as something like "2008.07" might.
And as for incompatibilities, they shouldn't happen. You should be able to drop a new kernel into an old system and everything should work--if not, report it as a bug. There's a few exceptions where some interface is dropped or change, but normally the assumption is that it's something that won't cause a problem for people--so if it does, speak up, they need to hear from you.
(Of course, the above only applies to real userland interfaces, not to internal kernel interfaces. If you're trying to run a bunch of proprietary out-of-tree code (like the proprietary nVidia driver) inside the kernel, then you're on your own.)
Newsflash: when you buy cheap crap it is going to perform like cheap crap.
Unfortunately, expensive crap can also sometimes perform like crap. And when you're selling as many units as linksys or netgear probably does, the per-unit cost of the extra QA and such isn't likely to be all that much anyway (assuming it's a one-time cost for the firmware development), so in theory a stable router needn't be significantly more expensive.
And relying on price *alone* always invites the danger that someone will realize they can sell cheap crap at a higher price and people will assume it's worth it.
So, you're a consumer walking the aisles of your local (or virtual) computer shop, trying to pick a quality router. Price alone isn't a great help. What else do you have? As far as I can tell the computer magazines, for example, don't do a lot of really careful scientific testing of this kind of thing.
Figure out how to get consumers more information about the quality of alternatives, and you'll have figured out how to improve the quality of what's offered. It'd be better for everybody involved.
He's a senator, next year possibly a president. His *job* is to compromise, not to hold fast to a particular ideology. He has to work with everyone he needs to (including lots of people who are flat-out wrong--and please, anything you can help do to fix that is welcomed, but accept that when it comes time to make a real decision sometimes you're just going to have to work with them) to reach the best solution he can find that can win support.
This was a terrible bill. Voting for it may have been a mistake even given the political climate. But the position Obama's applying for requires compromise, and requires him to represent the whole of the US electorate (not just me), so it doesn't make sense to elect someone who's just going to stake out a position and refuse to budge.