Fact is that you're dependent on the benevolence of the company that sold you the DRM crippled music in the first place. If they don't want, or are no longer around, you're out of luck. When you bought a record/CD, there was the same problem: physical (total) loss however is much less likely for records/CD's than for data stored on a hard disk.
Hmm, I'm not sure if this is due to the lack of preemption. Years ago, long before FreeBSD had kernel preemption and Linux already had some crude form (maybe 5 years ago), there was already a huge advantage of FreeBSD over Linux w.r.t. responsiveness while under high load (CPU and/or disk). To this day this has remained the case. 5.3 has its problems, but still the scheduling is one of the strong points.
This is not an extraordinary claim at all, in fact it is to be expected. Given all information on the voting machines (e.g. this, just google for "diebold voting machines" and you'll get numerous sites with similar information) it is not an extraordinary claim.
I have the impression that many americans, even democrats, were more afraid for loosing face again to the world as in the 2000 elections than for not having fair elections. Many were so relieved when the 2004 election seemed to have gone by without major incidents this time. Now people suppress and don't want to know the truth, to keep up the appearance of being a civilized country.
Our bodies were made to live about 50 years, maybe up to 100 when we have easy lives.
I do believe one can stop and even reverse the general aging mechanisms, whoever there are so many very complex parts in our bodies (such as the brain) that are still badly understood and were not "made" to function much beyond 100 years. I'm pretty sure that all kind of strange and new "defects" would pop up all over in our bodies if they would live much longer without aging.
This apart from cumulative effects that cannot be avoided causing cancer in the long run (natural radiation, chemicals, waste products, toxins). Already, due to increasing average age, cancer is increasing a lot. I guess almost 100% of people would develop cancer not much after 120 years.
To state that without the normal aging process our bodies would suddenly hold out for 100's of years seems very optimistic and naive to me.
Once you've entered groups-beta, the advanced search no longer includes search by date. The old google groups advanced search still includes search by date.
It doesn't need to be scaring, depending on how the remaining work and wealth is distributed.
100 years ago people worked 60-80 hours a week. Today with lot of automation we can live well working 40 hours a week. Why not continue an live comfortably with only 20 hours a week work? That would be a good solution.
The bad and illogical solution would be to keep 50% of the population working 40 hours, and the other half being out of job and starving.
I have had 7 permanent jobs which each lasted a 1-1.5 years. Because I needed a change so often I kept quitting and in the end thought being a contractor (even though having a wife and 2 kids) would be better fitting to me.
So I became a contractor 5 years ago while moving to another country too (with my family) and for the last 5 years have been at one single customer (a large bank), with 2000 billable hours a year.
So I would say, being a contractor is much more stable:):). OK maybe this is not a typical case... Anyway, being a contractor has removed the political pressure and drive for promotions etc. from me, made me much more relaxed and thus much more content in my "long term" job. Now I'm only concerned with doing a good job and all company politics and pressure is irrelevant to me. Plus having triple salary also helps to ease your mind.
What is this, is it an obligation to be proud to be a citizen of whatever country? I am dutch, and I am not proud because of that. In fact noone IMHO has the right to be proud because of whatever citizenship. Citizenship is something you get because of birth, so there is no merit whatsoever to be proud of.
This kind of illogical pride generates nationalism, which in turn generates war and conflicts.
That is not true! Their business model was mainly based on selling hardware. The operating system (in those days common) was seen as naturally belonging to the hardware, not as a product that could be marketed on itself. That is also the reason that so many of Suns contributions to UNIX were freely given away.
Sun has given away more (important) source code than any other company. They contributed to BSD Unix, defined many of the later UNIX sysv standards and gave them away. They created RPC's, NIS, NFS, xview. All of it was given away under a very liberal licence. UNIX and thus Linux would have been dead without Sun. Many Linux users are scandalously ungrateful and have no sense for UNIX tradition and history.
Also, Solaris is a pure and clean UNIX. I can imagine that it must hurt the engineers of such a beauty that they are surpassed by a "bastard" UNIX. However that is a reality they shall have to live with. But I can understand their hesitance.
While I agree that exit polls may be unreliable, you missed the point: The exit polls were published first, after they had been carried out. The result of the exit poll, accurate or not, has no reason to change afterwards.
However, as it became apparent that there was a remarkable discrepancy between the exit polls and the "real poll", the reported result of the exit polls was modified.
Hmm, try putting a web server implemented in shell script on the internet and see what happens:). Shell scripts are interpreted, but have so many "tricks" such as backtick expansion, variable expansion etc. that it is virtuall impossible to write a safe program with it.
I don't see how program safety has something to do with being compiled or not. It is just a different class of security holes that you get depending on the language.
You shall always have evolution on a certain scale. Maybe you may "revolutionize" a single program but you cannot rewrite an operating system from scratch (meaning not even borrowing existing code and libraries as OpenBSD did heavily, such as many libraries, gcc, binutils etc). If you do, it will take years to "mature" which is also a kind of evolution.
On a somewhat larger scale, within companies you may replace one box with another (running another OS), but you cannot change your complete infrastructure overnight, i.e. replace all network protocols at once. Such changes take years and are a slow and evolutionary process.
Sometimes you have to take a step back and throw away some old cruft and make it fresh and new. However a certain degree of both evolution and also monoculture is unavoidable. If you have a 10000 employee company throwing in new technologies all the time, allowing for too much heterogenity, you shall have a maintenance and system-management nightmare very soon, leading to collapse of your IT infrastructure.
There are wiki's that deal with this. We use JSPWiki on our intranet; it is a std. servlet webapp. The next version should support authorization, but even without it: I put the webapp behind a mandatory browser client certificate authentication (you can only access it through https, and everyone on the intranet has a certificate). Then with a one-line modification the Edit.jsp is only accessible to people that have a certain role (i.e. a small group of people responsible for the content), but everyone can read.
Versions are tracked in RCS, so any mistakes can be reversed. Also the client IP addresses are logged, and internally it is known who has which IP address. So any of your questions can be answered satisfactorily.
Also it has templates to apply some corporate style. Your mission critical internal product/project, in a large bank, uses it for all important documentation.
All true, but it can be very useful for existing code. I would not put it in the core of the kernel, but especially in the case of device drivers it is imaginable that existing drivers can be adapted for use into linux much more easily (i.e. much less porting to do) if they can be kept in c++ if that is the language the existing driver was written in.
It would not destabilize the rest of the system, but those who actually use the device driver should know that it might bare certain risks for the overall system. But that may be better than nothing in those cases where a full port from c++ into c would be too much work (e.g. for niche devices where not many developers may be interested to invest a lot of time).
#1 is shared between 8 countries
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
please read the article, switzerland is not alone on #1, so are Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway and (to my surprise) Slovakia.
The netherlands is not so neutral, nor is it mountainous, reputing the reasons some have given to explain the swiss #1 place.
Slovakia really is a surprise to me: it is a former communist country that has been critisized more than once for its authoritarian leadership; it seceded from checkia some years ago. Apparently they have greatly improved, and has surpassed some of the former communist countries such as slovenia and hungary that were much earlier 'westernized'.
Are you serious? War on poverty, while the US as one of the richest countries has a relatively large population of really poor people (compared to, say, western europe) and no improvement in sight?
War on some diseases: yes, but only for those who can afford the expensive medicines and treatment. It is not the US as state that is funding new treatments, but commercial companies. The US OTOH opposes to make these available cheaply to those countries that simply cannot afford the high prices. How can you call that a war on AIDS?
I have tried out 5.3 beta7 on my thinkpad (r50) laptop and I was very impressed. On my desktop I run linux latest 2.6 kernel (gentoo), and a true suspend and resume (acpi S3) does not work at all. ACPI S4 (hibernation) with software-suspend2 patches does not resume properly. However in this FBSD release it works flawlessly, even when running X (xorg 6.7), with connected internal laptop mouse and usb mouse. Everything just works without tweaking and patching: set correct options in/etc/rc.conf, that's all.
I have really pounded the installation by installing ports while playing DVD's and xdiv files using mplayer and ogle on the background, using emacs for newsgroup reading: everything runs smoothly, sound just works (snd_ich module).
The complete install of OS and ports (after cvsup) and rebuilding world and kernel was really painless. It took only a few hours in total to get a "cpu optimized" install similar to gentoo.
If it were not for vmware I would move my desktop immediately to FBSD 5.3. It's ease of use from an admin perspective is unmatched by anything I know.
Hmm, I think it is not very fair to change ones view and respect IP only when one has enough money.
I have never respected IP, and still do not even though I could easily afford anything that I need (earn about $150k a year). It is a matter of principle to me:
First, the current "IP" companies are mostly immoral entities that want to retain their business models and priviledges at any price, even if that involves changing/buying laws and by that destroying our democracy.
More importantly and philosophically, the concept of Intellectual Property is a perversion to me that is contrary to human nature and civilization. Civilization and art was built by copying and impoving on ideas (only really seldomly by revolutionary novelties). Imagine the classical composers having been forbidden to "borrow" each others themes and ideas, or painters to get sewed when joining a new style such as impressionism.
The concept is absurd and sickening.
Up till 1900 the lack of IP has never prevented progress and inventions. After 1900: we don't know. IP proponents keep brainwashing us that without IP there would be no innovation, but who is to tell? I simply don't believe it when looking at 2000 years of civilization before 1900.
Also the software industry itself has been highly succesful and profitable even without patents and with quite weak copyright protection. One might even argue that only now, where IP is being introduced in the software industry, things have deteriorated.
But if they really re-elect the current criminal (mind you this is from a dutch who used to be pro US and rather favour republicans over democrats) I think the former allies won't be so forgiving anymore.
At the moment I think many in europe (also in countries such as england and holland, traditional allies of the US) feel that many US citizens really can't be blamed: they didn't exactly know who they were putting in power 4 years ago, and also the election result was exactly 50-50.
However, reelecting the same man with todays knowledge, that will really be seen as a crime, as willingly choosing isolation, aggression, disdain for former allies and insulting the rest of the world. It would be a sign that the US and the majority of its inhabitants does not care for the former good ties between them and the former allies, and thinks it can rule the world alone.
Hmm, I have been using linux for 10 years as server, and recently tried to use it as my desktop. For me there is one show stopper: font rendering. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I can't make the fonts (especially in firefox) to look 100% the same quality as in winxp+cleartype on my LCD screen. I have tried all described options for xorg, font.conf, and in about:config in firefox itself. Have installed and uninstalled various truetype fonts etc.
Am I overlooking something obivous, can font rendering really be that great, or is it still not on par with winxp?
I hate windows and would love to get freed from it, but I cannot stand bad font rendering hurting my eyes.
Btw I don't use gnome or KDE (and don't want to, too much bloat and unknown stuff going on behind the screens). So I would be greatful for suggestions as to what config files to edit, but not for suggestions telling what gnome or kde control panel to use.
Slashdot Mirror
Fact is that you're dependent on the benevolence of the company that sold you the DRM crippled music in the first place. If they don't want, or are no longer around, you're out of luck. When you bought a record/CD, there was the same problem: physical (total) loss however is much less likely for records/CD's than for data stored on a hard disk.
Hmm, I'm not sure if this is due to the lack of preemption. Years ago, long before FreeBSD had kernel preemption and Linux already had some crude form (maybe 5 years ago), there was already a huge advantage of FreeBSD over Linux w.r.t. responsiveness while under high load (CPU and/or disk). To this day this has remained the case. 5.3 has its problems, but still the scheduling is one of the strong points.
This is not an extraordinary claim at all, in fact it is to be expected. Given all information on the voting machines (e.g. this, just google for "diebold voting machines" and you'll get numerous sites with similar information) it is not an extraordinary claim.
I have the impression that many americans, even democrats, were more afraid for loosing face again to the world as in the 2000 elections than for not having fair elections. Many were so relieved when the 2004 election seemed to have gone by without major incidents this time. Now people suppress and don't want to know the truth, to keep up the appearance of being a civilized country.
Our bodies were made to live about 50 years, maybe up to 100 when we have easy lives.
I do believe one can stop and even reverse the general aging mechanisms, whoever there are so many very complex parts in our bodies (such as the brain) that are still badly understood and were not "made" to function much beyond 100 years. I'm pretty sure that all kind of strange and new "defects" would pop up all over in our bodies if they would live much longer without aging.
This apart from cumulative effects that cannot be avoided causing cancer in the long run (natural radiation, chemicals, waste products, toxins). Already, due to increasing average age, cancer is increasing a lot. I guess almost 100% of people would develop cancer not much after 120 years.
To state that without the normal aging process our bodies would suddenly hold out for 100's of years seems very optimistic and naive to me.
Once you've entered groups-beta, the advanced search no longer includes search by date. The old google groups advanced search still includes search by date.
It doesn't need to be scaring, depending on how the remaining work and wealth is distributed.
100 years ago people worked 60-80 hours a week. Today with lot of automation we can live well working 40 hours a week. Why not continue an live comfortably with only 20 hours a week work? That would be a good solution.
The bad and illogical solution would be to keep 50% of the population working 40 hours, and the other half being out of job and starving.
I have had 7 permanent jobs which each lasted a 1-1.5 years. Because I needed a change so often I kept quitting and in the end thought being a contractor (even though having a wife and 2 kids) would be better fitting to me.
:) :). OK maybe this is not a typical case... Anyway, being a contractor has removed the political pressure and drive for promotions etc. from me, made me much more relaxed and thus much more content in my "long term" job. Now I'm only concerned with doing a good job and all company politics and pressure is irrelevant to me. Plus having triple salary also helps to ease your mind.
So I became a contractor 5 years ago while moving to another country too (with my family) and for the last 5 years have been at one single customer (a large bank), with 2000 billable hours a year.
So I would say, being a contractor is much more stable
please elaborate
What is this, is it an obligation to be proud to be a citizen of whatever country? I am dutch, and I am not proud because of that. In fact noone IMHO has the right to be proud because of whatever citizenship. Citizenship is something you get because of birth, so there is no merit whatsoever to be proud of.
This kind of illogical pride generates nationalism, which in turn generates war and conflicts.
That is not true! Their business model was mainly based on selling hardware. The operating system (in those days common) was seen as naturally belonging to the hardware, not as a product that could be marketed on itself. That is also the reason that so many of Suns contributions to UNIX were freely given away.
Sun has given away more (important) source code than any other company. They contributed to BSD Unix, defined many of the later UNIX sysv standards and gave them away. They created RPC's, NIS, NFS, xview. All of it was given away under a very liberal licence. UNIX and thus Linux would have been dead without Sun. Many Linux users are scandalously ungrateful and have no sense for UNIX tradition and history.
Also, Solaris is a pure and clean UNIX. I can imagine that it must hurt the engineers of such a beauty that they are surpassed by a "bastard" UNIX. However that is a reality they shall have to live with. But I can understand their hesitance.
While I agree that exit polls may be unreliable, you missed the point: The exit polls were published first, after they had been carried out. The result of the exit poll, accurate or not, has no reason to change afterwards.
However, as it became apparent that there was a remarkable discrepancy between the exit polls and the "real poll", the reported result of the exit polls was modified.
Hmm, try putting a web server implemented in shell script on the internet and see what happens :). Shell scripts are interpreted, but have so many "tricks" such as backtick expansion, variable expansion etc. that it is virtuall impossible to write a safe program with it.
I don't see how program safety has something to do with being compiled or not. It is just a different class of security holes that you get depending on the language.
You shall always have evolution on a certain scale. Maybe you may "revolutionize" a single program but you cannot rewrite an operating system from scratch (meaning not even borrowing existing code and libraries as OpenBSD did heavily, such as many libraries, gcc, binutils etc). If you do, it will take years to "mature" which is also a kind of evolution.
On a somewhat larger scale, within companies you may replace one box with another (running another OS), but you cannot change your complete infrastructure overnight, i.e. replace all network protocols at once. Such changes take years and are a slow and evolutionary process.
Sometimes you have to take a step back and throw away some old cruft and make it fresh and new. However a certain degree of both evolution and also monoculture is unavoidable. If you have a 10000 employee company throwing in new technologies all the time, allowing for too much heterogenity, you shall have a maintenance and system-management nightmare very soon, leading to collapse of your IT infrastructure.
He would not have, as could be seen 4 years ago.
There are wiki's that deal with this. We use JSPWiki on our intranet; it is a std. servlet webapp. The next version should support authorization, but even without it: I put the webapp behind a mandatory browser client certificate authentication (you can only access it through https, and everyone on the intranet has a certificate). Then with a one-line modification the Edit.jsp is only accessible to people that have a certain role (i.e. a small group of people responsible for the content), but everyone can read.
Versions are tracked in RCS, so any mistakes can be reversed. Also the client IP addresses are logged, and internally it is known who has which IP address. So any of your questions can be answered satisfactorily.
Also it has templates to apply some corporate style. Your mission critical internal product/project, in a large bank, uses it for all important documentation.
All true, but it can be very useful for existing code. I would not put it in the core of the kernel, but especially in the case of device drivers it is imaginable that existing drivers can be adapted for use into linux much more easily (i.e. much less porting to do) if they can be kept in c++ if that is the language the existing driver was written in.
It would not destabilize the rest of the system, but those who actually use the device driver should know that it might bare certain risks for the overall system. But that may be better than nothing in those cases where a full port from c++ into c would be too much work (e.g. for niche devices where not many developers may be interested to invest a lot of time).
please read the article, switzerland is not alone on #1, so are Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway and (to my surprise) Slovakia.
The netherlands is not so neutral, nor is it mountainous, reputing the reasons some have given to explain the swiss #1 place.
Slovakia really is a surprise to me: it is a former communist country that has been critisized more than once for its authoritarian leadership; it seceded from checkia some years ago. Apparently they have greatly improved, and has surpassed some of the former communist countries such as slovenia and hungary that were much earlier 'westernized'.
Did you recompile the kernel without WITNESS option?
The beta GENERIC kernels have lots of debugging which slows down a lot.
Are you serious? War on poverty, while the US as one of the richest countries has a relatively large population of really poor people (compared to, say, western europe) and no improvement in sight?
War on some diseases: yes, but only for those who can afford the expensive medicines and treatment. It is not the US as state that is funding new treatments, but commercial companies. The US OTOH opposes to make these available cheaply to those countries that simply cannot afford the high prices. How can you call that a war on AIDS?
I have tried out 5.3 beta7 on my thinkpad (r50) laptop and I was very impressed. On my desktop I run linux latest 2.6 kernel (gentoo), and a true suspend and resume (acpi S3) does not work at all. ACPI S4 (hibernation) with software-suspend2 patches does not resume properly. However in this FBSD release it works flawlessly, even when running X (xorg 6.7), with connected internal laptop mouse and usb mouse. Everything just works without tweaking and patching: set correct options in /etc/rc.conf, that's all.
I have really pounded the installation by installing ports while playing DVD's and xdiv files using mplayer and ogle on the background, using emacs for newsgroup reading: everything runs smoothly, sound just works (snd_ich module).
The complete install of OS and ports (after cvsup) and rebuilding world and kernel was really painless. It took only a few hours in total to get a "cpu optimized" install similar to gentoo.
If it were not for vmware I would move my desktop immediately to FBSD 5.3. It's ease of use from an admin perspective is unmatched by anything I know.
Hmm, I think it is not very fair to change ones view and respect IP only when one has enough money.
I have never respected IP, and still do not even though I could easily afford anything that I need (earn about $150k a year). It is a matter of principle to me:
First, the current "IP" companies are mostly immoral entities that want to retain their business models and priviledges at any price, even if that involves changing/buying laws and by that destroying our democracy.
More importantly and philosophically, the concept of Intellectual Property is a perversion to me that is contrary to human nature and civilization. Civilization and art was built by copying and impoving on ideas (only really seldomly by revolutionary novelties). Imagine the classical composers having been forbidden to "borrow" each others themes and ideas, or painters to get sewed when joining a new style such as impressionism.
The concept is absurd and sickening.
Up till 1900 the lack of IP has never prevented progress and inventions. After 1900: we don't know. IP proponents keep brainwashing us that without IP there would be no innovation, but who is to tell? I simply don't believe it when looking at 2000 years of civilization before 1900.
Also the software industry itself has been highly succesful and profitable even without patents and with quite weak copyright protection. One might even argue that only now, where IP is being introduced in the software industry, things have deteriorated.
assuming this concerns music collection stored on my computer:
1-5: divide by zero error
But if they really re-elect the current criminal (mind you this is from a dutch who used to be pro US and rather favour republicans over democrats) I think the former allies won't be so forgiving anymore.
At the moment I think many in europe (also in countries such as england and holland, traditional allies of the US) feel that many US citizens really can't be blamed: they didn't exactly know who they were putting in power 4 years ago, and also the election result was exactly 50-50.
However, reelecting the same man with todays knowledge, that will really be seen as a crime, as willingly choosing isolation, aggression, disdain for former allies and insulting the rest of the world. It would be a sign that the US and the majority of its inhabitants does not care for the former good ties between them and the former allies, and thinks it can rule the world alone.
Hmm, I have been using linux for 10 years as server, and recently tried to use it as my desktop. For me there is one show stopper: font rendering. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I can't make the fonts (especially in firefox) to look 100% the same quality as in winxp+cleartype on my LCD screen. I have tried all described options for xorg, font.conf, and in about:config in firefox itself. Have installed and uninstalled various truetype fonts etc.
Am I overlooking something obivous, can font rendering really be that great, or is it still not on par with winxp?
I hate windows and would love to get freed from it, but I cannot stand bad font rendering hurting my eyes.
Btw I don't use gnome or KDE (and don't want to, too much bloat and unknown stuff going on behind the screens). So I would be greatful for suggestions as to what config files to edit, but not for suggestions telling what gnome or kde control panel to use.