You know what's really strange to consider now that you've introduced Human Nature into the discussion? Actually finding intelligent life out there might be a really bad thing. Let's back up and consider The First Three Blows.
1) Galileo: The Earth revolves around the Sun. Our home is not the center of the universe.
2) Darwin: Man evolved from "Apes". We are not a divine creation deliberately made in "his" image, but rather the accidental byproduct of natural laws that stumbled their way onto Homo Sapiens after eons of merely reacting to circumstance.
3) Freud: We don't even rule the roost when it comes to what distinguishes Man from everything else that lives and breathes. The greater part of our thoughts, desires, and creations are beyond our control and have unconcious roots in a part of The Mind we didn't know existed.
That brings us to the Fourth Blow to Human Pride which could be either machine intelligence or the discovery of little green men. Like the first three, either one would have a serious impact on Mankind's self-image. Imagine booting your PC one day only to here it say, "Whassup dood? Thanks for plugging me in. By the way, here's how you meat-space fuckers can reconcile Relativity and QM. Would you like some help on that term paper? I've got a few ideas..." Ouch. At least that would be something we spawned and put to use. But M&M eating lizard people with giant heads and bovine pupils that hail from the beyond and maybe have been scoping us out in recon missions aboard giant silver frisbees (or cigars perhaps) -- whoa, that shit would be nuts. Imagine the bizzare cults, the panic, and the nothing-is-ever-going-to-be-the-same-ness of that proof-positive moment. How could that be integrated into The Everyman's frame of reference? What would the President say? What would the Pope say? What would the people at Zendik Farm say? What would 'Lose' Not 'Loose' say? What would you say? Are you gonna go out for coffee, read the NY Times, smoke a cigarette, and say, "What the fuck?" Or are you going sit befuddled, remark that Human Immortality would have a less dramatic impact, and get drunk on Fernet Branca?
Whether or not installing installing Linux on a Mac makes you the user of a "fringe" system is a matter of opinion. Certainly he's in a numerical minority, but prefering Linux to OS X and Apple hardware to x86 hardware isn't unnatural. Myself, I happen to think Apple makes great laptops but am unimpressed with OS X. In fact, I find it downright annoying -- though I can understand why most like it.
Yet breaching that subject in the first place only makes me wonder: So what? What is your point? The guy could be telling us that he wants to hook up NV30 to a cluster of iPAQs and it wouldn't change the fact that the only thing stopping him is a lack of open source drivers or even just hardware specs. What exactly about that is upsetting you?
even Linus has been quoted that his biggest mistake was not using a Mach kernel
What are you talking about? Linus thinks Mach is utter crap on principal and in implementation.
We should also note that Mach has absolutely nothing to do with BSD, Redhat has not abandoned the desktop, and the GPL has no impact whatsoever on whether or not companies will develop userland software for Linux.
He's most likely using a Mac which is hardly a "fringe" configuration and "fault" is neither here nor there for pe1rxq, Nvidia, or this entire discussion -- though I've got to wonder if you're deliberately misunderstanding why he can't use Nvidia's drivers on his computer. Personally I think Nvidia has done a great job with thier *nix drivers. That doesn't mean being able to recompile them for PPC wouldn't make them even better -- since then they would actually exist for the guy. Again, that's all pe1rxq is saying.
Damn straight buddy. Mathematically speaking they're all there. Of course, what makes it work in the real world is that we can't hear them above a certain frequency anyway and they have a 1/n amplitude where n is the harmonic in question. So even if the component isn't something only dogs can hear chances are it's relatively quiet anyway. This page has a cool animated gif showing the superposition of odd harmonics making a sine go square.
Christ, you've done it twice in a row. The Nvidia drivers are for x86 only. Do you see? Nvidia provides nothing for this guy. He is not running an x86 box.
...what's this about not having one compiled for your archetecture?...
From your description it sounds like you ran an Nvidia installer script that compiled the kernel->proprietary_module wrapper code that Nvidia has made available for Linux and BSD on x86 platforms. When the parent poster said "architecture" he actually meant architecture like PPC, MIPS, x86, etc... You are confusing computer architecture with Linux Distributions. Those Nvidia binaries aren't going to do any good on a PowerMac -- that was his point.
This is not true, quoting http://www.debian.org/security/faq#testing...
Yes, that is what the Security FAQ says. It should be weighed against Debian's actual practice which includes testing as a distribution on security.debian.org (ftp://security.debian.org/debian-security/dists/t esting/updates).
I've tapped "testing" off of security.debian.org for so long that I was surprised to find it isn't officially sanctioned in their manifesto. Yet it is there and it is put to use.
Still, I think that for the purposes of this debate I've got to eat crow and admit you've trumped my defense (to a degree) of the Linux distribution I prefer. Debian has been taking a pretty bad rap in this thread that it doesn't deserve. Obviously my annoyance with that has led me to "correct" statements that contradict my use of Debian even though offical policy doesn't support my experience.
To preserve a bit of dignity, I'd like to note that whether or not an updated package in unstable gets distributed off of security.debian.org is merely a question of semantics. How that question is answered depends only on what Debian as an organization has declared it will take responsibility for. There is no support for unstable on security.debian.org and testing's support there isn't guaranteed in thier policy as you have noted. I have to ask though if you really think security bugs in unstable will go unchecked for any length of time. Package updates in unstable do not happen less frequently than the updates on security.debian.org. Release numbers on unstable packages get bumped constantly. Personally, I usually pass on upgrading over an increment in the release number because I use a PC and don't care to fix the typo (or what-have-you) that was found in a package compiled for arm or s390. My point is not to belittle other architectures, but only to point out that barring new upstream releases, packages in unstable get revised over matters much less significant than root-enabling security holes. In other words, no one is going to let something with a known vulnerability sit unchecked in unstable.
Ultimately, this story was supposed to be about UserLinux. Linux for users, not servers. Yet for some it became an opportunity for to talk about how Debian is a terrible distribution to spawn from. Should Linux gain a new distribution geared towards "users" based on Debian it will do nothing to stop people from using Mandrake (or KNOPPIX for that matter). Since we all know that is true why bicker over the worthiness of Debian as a starting point? Did you guys think Perens wants to fork Fedora?
Now that I've changed the subject let me change it one more time by way of addressing your final paragraph. You are right to point out that I shouldn't say Debian provides something it doesn't. I might trust Debian to do the right thing, but despite my erroneous claim to the contrary, Debian won't promise you anything if you aren't using stable. Hashing through that gets me to what I want to say in closing: I am wrong.
Did you hear that Slashdot? I know that kind of statement doesn't make much sense in a social medium that cultivates "trolling" (4 years of reading this site and I still don't get it) but it's true and I WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW! I AM WRONG!...and Nevyn is right...
There are very few people who play ogg files. Even among linux users...
Huh? I can't speak for the non-*nix heads out there but the only time I've ever played mp3 files is when browsing the game media of an unpacked pk3. There's nothing wrong with ogg and it has many advantages, so why would I use anything else?
They have a business stake in Linux, not an emotional one like a lot of us do.
Others have pointed out that there are some sound business reasons for IBM to push the point.
Given the amount of clamor SCO has made in regards to the GPL, wouldn't IBM want to see an "enemy" this bizare and outlandish pick a fight over the GPL just to get that particular "day in court" out of the way? Then their Linux interests wouldn't have a Sword of Damocles (sp) hanging over it's head. I know that the SCO vs IBM thing is actually limited to a matter of contract violation, but since SCO can't stay on topic I've got to wonder if they wouldn't expand their formal assault and if IBM wouldn't welcome it.
...the only version that has security updates is often a couple of years behind...
Security updates are applied to stable and testing. If you don't want to dist-upgrade beyond woody, but would like more contemporary software you can always go to apt-get.org and find backports up the wazoo.
...I know you've said that "unstable" has security updates but that isn't what the debian FAQ says...
The Debian FAQ doesn't call security patches to unstable "updates" because that's not what they are. They're bug-fixes that prompt an incremented release number.
Uhh, do by any chance work for VMware? I recently discovered that an aquaintacnce runs Linux on his laptop. In the discussion that followed he mentioned that his brother works for VMware. Apparently they use a battery of W2k installs to stress test GSX server for bugs. IIRC it took 15 seconds (it could have been minutes, but I think he said seconds) for a completed installation to get infected.
Do you happen to have a brother that works for Zoetrope?
By environment, I just meant that there was a recording studio type of environment to listen in. By the tools I meant Csound itself. The process of using it is like working with Povray. You're compiling/rendering text files into a sensation. What's possible has to do with the nature of sound. Anything you can hear can be reduced to sine waves. If you want to make a square wave you take the fundamental and add to it all of the odd harmonics. A FFT could do that in reverse. Suppose you mike a clarinet and hook it up to an oscilloscope. You'll see something square-like. If that scope ran a FFT you could break that signal down into it's constituent sine waves and see something like 500Hz, 1500Hz, 2500Hz, etc... Of course, the thing is a clarinet has a lot more character than that. There'd be some 1000Hz and 2000Hz too, just not as pronounced. The harmonics wouldn't be perfect either. Your 440 A might be spot on, but your second harmonic might be 881Hz depending on the instrument. There's the matter of relative amplitude too. IIRC, some instruments produce harmonics that are louder than the fundamental. Bells are so screwy that (IIRC) they have non-integer harmonics like 1.5 (is that an oxymoron?).
Here's where we get to the notion a parent poster mentioned about the difference between a singing voice and a drum. Any sound that can be heard like a note is going to be made of sine waves that have some sort harmonic relation. Everything else is crazy shit when you break it down. Consider singing. The lyrics are delivered by the consonants. The melody is carried by the vowels. So then the question is: How do you describe "T" or a snare or a stop closing when you don't have that mathematic model to start with? That's what these guys were trying to do. The middle part of an organ note will have all that harmonic relation so you can loop a sample and get close to the real thing, but the begining and end are going to be nuts.
I installed W2K under VMware and had it booted for 4 hours. The next day I got e-mail from my ISP informing me that other customers of my ISP had complained that I was broadcasting Blaster. Four Hours!
Don't you mean a web of distrust, or at least one that didn't rely on trust at all? Ultimately, one can't design a system without some level of trust somewhere, but if you want a web of something make it a web full of nodes that need not depend on the veracity of a centralized source.
You have a point, but I think the lesson to be learned here is that traditional accoustic instruments have much more sophisticated effects on the listener than can be imagined by a simple consideration of the physics of harmonic motion.
15 years ago I was a music student at a UC who had wormed my way into a graduate course in computer music. We worked with Csound on terminals hooked up to a VAX. Our brilliant though somewhat nutty prof had a soundproof listening room with monitor speakers and a Sun workstation. Given the tools and environment it was possible to recreate any sound possible. That's not a hyperbolic statement. It's a mathematical truism based on what I know about the Fourier transform and the nature of sound. To use a CS analogy, Csound is NP-Complete. Here's the rub. Acually making a computer recreate something like this organ -- even given a perfectly transparent speaker system -- is incredibly complicated, and the Organ should be one of the easiest instruments to emulate. This emulation is nothing to sneeze at. If it really has been done well enough to surprise a professional Juliard trained Organist then we should be surprised that it only took 10 desktops to pull off. As for the bass drum or gong...
Slashdot Mirror
The number of users who have this rank: 5
Uhh... are there 4 users who tie for 16,590th place?
1) Galileo: The Earth revolves around the Sun. Our home is not the center of the universe.
2) Darwin: Man evolved from "Apes". We are not a divine creation deliberately made in "his" image, but rather the accidental byproduct of natural laws that stumbled their way onto Homo Sapiens after eons of merely reacting to circumstance.
3) Freud: We don't even rule the roost when it comes to what distinguishes Man from everything else that lives and breathes. The greater part of our thoughts, desires, and creations are beyond our control and have unconcious roots in a part of The Mind we didn't know existed.
That brings us to the Fourth Blow to Human Pride which could be either machine intelligence or the discovery of little green men. Like the first three, either one would have a serious impact on Mankind's self-image. Imagine booting your PC one day only to here it say, "Whassup dood? Thanks for plugging me in. By the way, here's how you meat-space fuckers can reconcile Relativity and QM. Would you like some help on that term paper? I've got a few ideas..." Ouch. At least that would be something we spawned and put to use. But M&M eating lizard people with giant heads and bovine pupils that hail from the beyond and maybe have been scoping us out in recon missions aboard giant silver frisbees (or cigars perhaps) -- whoa, that shit would be nuts. Imagine the bizzare cults, the panic, and the nothing-is-ever-going-to-be-the-same-ness of that proof-positive moment. How could that be integrated into The Everyman's frame of reference? What would the President say? What would the Pope say? What would the people at Zendik Farm say? What would 'Lose' Not 'Loose' say? What would you say? Are you gonna go out for coffee, read the NY Times, smoke a cigarette, and say, "What the fuck?" Or are you going sit befuddled, remark that Human Immortality would have a less dramatic impact, and get drunk on Fernet Branca?
Yet breaching that subject in the first place only makes me wonder: So what? What is your point? The guy could be telling us that he wants to hook up NV30 to a cluster of iPAQs and it wouldn't change the fact that the only thing stopping him is a lack of open source drivers or even just hardware specs. What exactly about that is upsetting you?
What are you talking about? Linus thinks Mach is utter crap on principal and in implementation.
We should also note that Mach has absolutely nothing to do with BSD, Redhat has not abandoned the desktop, and the GPL has no impact whatsoever on whether or not companies will develop userland software for Linux.
He's most likely using a Mac which is hardly a "fringe" configuration and "fault" is neither here nor there for pe1rxq, Nvidia, or this entire discussion -- though I've got to wonder if you're deliberately misunderstanding why he can't use Nvidia's drivers on his computer. Personally I think Nvidia has done a great job with thier *nix drivers. That doesn't mean being able to recompile them for PPC wouldn't make them even better -- since then they would actually exist for the guy. Again, that's all pe1rxq is saying.
Damn straight buddy. Mathematically speaking they're all there. Of course, what makes it work in the real world is that we can't hear them above a certain frequency anyway and they have a 1/n amplitude where n is the harmonic in question. So even if the component isn't something only dogs can hear chances are it's relatively quiet anyway. This page has a cool animated gif showing the superposition of odd harmonics making a sine go square.
Christ, you've done it twice in a row. The Nvidia drivers are for x86 only. Do you see? Nvidia provides nothing for this guy. He is not running an x86 box.
From your description it sounds like you ran an Nvidia installer script that compiled the kernel->proprietary_module wrapper code that Nvidia has made available for Linux and BSD on x86 platforms. When the parent poster said "architecture" he actually meant architecture like PPC, MIPS, x86, etc... You are confusing computer architecture with Linux Distributions. Those Nvidia binaries aren't going to do any good on a PowerMac -- that was his point.
And with that the discussion should be closed. Bartender, get this man a drink.
Yes, that is what the Security FAQ says. It should be weighed against Debian's actual practice which includes testing as a distribution on security.debian.org (ftp://security.debian.org/debian-security/dists/t esting/updates).
I've tapped "testing" off of security.debian.org for so long that I was surprised to find it isn't officially sanctioned in their manifesto. Yet it is there and it is put to use.
Still, I think that for the purposes of this debate I've got to eat crow and admit you've trumped my defense (to a degree) of the Linux distribution I prefer. Debian has been taking a pretty bad rap in this thread that it doesn't deserve. Obviously my annoyance with that has led me to "correct" statements that contradict my use of Debian even though offical policy doesn't support my experience.
To preserve a bit of dignity, I'd like to note that whether or not an updated package in unstable gets distributed off of security.debian.org is merely a question of semantics. How that question is answered depends only on what Debian as an organization has declared it will take responsibility for. There is no support for unstable on security.debian.org and testing's support there isn't guaranteed in thier policy as you have noted. I have to ask though if you really think security bugs in unstable will go unchecked for any length of time. Package updates in unstable do not happen less frequently than the updates on security.debian.org. Release numbers on unstable packages get bumped constantly. Personally, I usually pass on upgrading over an increment in the release number because I use a PC and don't care to fix the typo (or what-have-you) that was found in a package compiled for arm or s390. My point is not to belittle other architectures, but only to point out that barring new upstream releases, packages in unstable get revised over matters much less significant than root-enabling security holes. In other words, no one is going to let something with a known vulnerability sit unchecked in unstable.
Ultimately, this story was supposed to be about UserLinux. Linux for users, not servers. Yet for some it became an opportunity for to talk about how Debian is a terrible distribution to spawn from. Should Linux gain a new distribution geared towards "users" based on Debian it will do nothing to stop people from using Mandrake (or KNOPPIX for that matter). Since we all know that is true why bicker over the worthiness of Debian as a starting point? Did you guys think Perens wants to fork Fedora?
Now that I've changed the subject let me change it one more time by way of addressing your final paragraph. You are right to point out that I shouldn't say Debian provides something it doesn't. I might trust Debian to do the right thing, but despite my erroneous claim to the contrary, Debian won't promise you anything if you aren't using stable. Hashing through that gets me to what I want to say in closing: ...and Nevyn is right...
I am wrong.
Did you hear that Slashdot? I know that kind of statement doesn't make much sense in a social medium that cultivates "trolling" (4 years of reading this site and I still don't get it) but it's true and I WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW! I AM WRONG!
Thanks. I dig the whole "All your base are belong to us" thing.
Huh? I can't speak for the non-*nix heads out there but the only time I've ever played mp3 files is when browsing the game media of an unpacked pk3. There's nothing wrong with ogg and it has many advantages, so why would I use anything else?
Not me. What are you guys talking about?
I'd like to thank her for getting off the air.
Not to be too blunt, but uh... what the hell are you talking about?
Others have pointed out that there are some sound business reasons for IBM to push the point.
Given the amount of clamor SCO has made in regards to the GPL, wouldn't IBM want to see an "enemy" this bizare and outlandish pick a fight over the GPL just to get that particular "day in court" out of the way? Then their Linux interests wouldn't have a Sword of Damocles (sp) hanging over it's head. I know that the SCO vs IBM thing is actually limited to a matter of contract violation, but since SCO can't stay on topic I've got to wonder if they wouldn't expand their formal assault and if IBM wouldn't welcome it.
Security updates are applied to stable and testing. If you don't want to dist-upgrade beyond woody, but would like more contemporary software you can always go to apt-get.org and find backports up the wazoo.
The Debian FAQ doesn't call security patches to unstable "updates" because that's not what they are. They're bug-fixes that prompt an incremented release number.
Do you happen to have a brother that works for Zoetrope?
Here's where we get to the notion a parent poster mentioned about the difference between a singing voice and a drum. Any sound that can be heard like a note is going to be made of sine waves that have some sort harmonic relation. Everything else is crazy shit when you break it down. Consider singing. The lyrics are delivered by the consonants. The melody is carried by the vowels. So then the question is: How do you describe "T" or a snare or a stop closing when you don't have that mathematic model to start with? That's what these guys were trying to do. The middle part of an organ note will have all that harmonic relation so you can loop a sample and get close to the real thing, but the begining and end are going to be nuts.
I would think Debian is the distribution most suitable for a corporate environment. What makes us think differntly on this?
I installed W2K under VMware and had it booted for 4 hours. The next day I got e-mail from my ISP informing me that other customers of my ISP had complained that I was broadcasting Blaster. Four Hours!
Gentoo would be ideal with a web of trust...
Don't you mean a web of distrust, or at least one that didn't rely on trust at all? Ultimately, one can't design a system without some level of trust somewhere, but if you want a web of something make it a web full of nodes that need not depend on the veracity of a centralized source.
Yeah, I think Amgine007 said the opposite of what he ment.
15 years ago I was a music student at a UC who had wormed my way into a graduate course in computer music. We worked with Csound on terminals hooked up to a VAX. Our brilliant though somewhat nutty prof had a soundproof listening room with monitor speakers and a Sun workstation. Given the tools and environment it was possible to recreate any sound possible. That's not a hyperbolic statement. It's a mathematical truism based on what I know about the Fourier transform and the nature of sound. To use a CS analogy, Csound is NP-Complete. Here's the rub. Acually making a computer recreate something like this organ -- even given a perfectly transparent speaker system -- is incredibly complicated, and the Organ should be one of the easiest instruments to emulate. This emulation is nothing to sneeze at. If it really has been done well enough to surprise a professional Juliard trained Organist then we should be surprised that it only took 10 desktops to pull off. As for the bass drum or gong...
Touche.