usb keys do support multiple partitions just like any other block device
Depends on the key.
I know that mine can't be partitioned (at least, my efforts thus far have failed).
Is it possible to partition a floppy? If so, does it make sense? Then you might be able to partition every USB key. Otherwise, it will depend on whether the manufacturer put a partition table in the key.
I have not been able to repartition my disk. I haven't tried manually fdisking it, but I doubt it can be done. It seems that some flash drives emulate a fixed disk with a partition table, e.g., my dad's flash drive, which comes with multiple partitions to manage its security software. Others, e.g., mine, seem to only emulate a removable disk and a single partition.
Is it possible to use fdisk to "partition" a CD or a floppy - has anyone tried this? If it is, then what you suggest should be workable.
As far as my suggestion, I would suggest letting ISOLINUX switch between multiple kernels. If you need an MS partition, I think I remember a FreeDos kernel that can be loaded into ISOLINUX, and then the MS software can be bootstrapped thence. Within the drive, you can definitely store disk image files as opposed to multiple partitions, and let the kernel you boot mount the image as root instead of/dev/whatever.
So...anybody who trims the crust off of their own bread is doing an illegal sandwich mod?
No. Read the patent. It's actually a pretty clever design (though probably not original). The bread is crimped around the edge so the sandwich can stay for some time without danger of leaking. The jelly is surrounded by the sticky peanut butter, which both prevents jelly leaks and helps hold the edges of the bread together.
It looks like this (with bread slices at the top): /PBPBPBPBPB\ <PBJJJJJJPB> \PBPBPBPBPB/
and frankly, I don't feel like getting up from my computer.
As a classmate said recently:
"Gifted students could take over the world if only we'd stop procrastinating. We'd say, Oh, I can take over that country later...I'll do it on the bus tomorrow morning...."
I'm not willing to say the gifted/procrastinating correlation is intentional, but it does remind me of the OCD geniuses on Orson Scott Card's planet of Path. The government that colonized Path made two gene changes, intelligence and OCD, to keep the "godspoken" in check, and the changes were only inherited simultaneously.
Programmers are artist just like "real" artist and in the end they both contribute their own time and talent to the project so they should at least be treated equally.
Ideally, this would be true. However, in the real world, nobody knows/cares who wrote this patch or who designed this library, as long as it works with your code - and most likely, nobody will care that you wrote this code, as long as it works with theirs. The best analogue would be commercial artists/graphic designers, such as people who create the art for advertisements, product covers, etc. These are rarely signed by the artist, since they focus more on getting an idea across visually than demonstrating the artist's abilities
If Planeshift wanted a generic dragon and a generic mage, they could've found one publicly on Internet stock sites, from clipart, from copyright-expired sources from last century, etc. I think they wanted unique and styled art, which is incompatible with the Free mindset.
Programmers who do write amazing, involved, or unique software are indeed identified. Richard Stallman comes to mind as the author of GCC and Emacs. John Carmack is another example. The guy who wrote my mouse's driver or some random Flash game isn't quite as memorable.
Note that Christopher Diggins is both the author of the language and the article submitter. This may affect your perception on whether a new C++like language is really newsworthy.
yes, as in Freedom, who cares otherwise Heh. Apparently the submitter cared enough otherwise, seeing as it isn't actually Free.:-) --
graphics artists find the concept of free licenses scary and foreign
This is understandable: most visual art is unique and based on your own talent, where programming is more about efficiency and the end result. Programming classes tend to ask students to create a "black box" that gives this exact output on these exact inputs. Art classes generally say draw something nice, based on this theme, using this style.
Thus, programs can be easily shared and modified, rarely can any but the best programmers lay individual claim to code, and the author's style is not evident to the user. Art is individual work, created once and not updated, that even amateurs will sign as their own, and the artist's style is often as important as the subject. It is quite understandable that artists refuse to Free-license their works; it's not necessarily because it's "foreign", but the concepts of free access and changeability simply don't apply to art.
Someone might mention Creative Commons, but that's for making artwork publicly available, which isn't quite what you're doing here. What you want is something with the essence:
"This artwork may be freely distributed and used with the Software, and any Derivative Works that retain both the spirit of the Software and the same manner of use of the artwork, provided that a) the artists are credited, b) the artistic aspects, such as subject and style, remain unchanged, and c) any additions to or removals from the set of artwork do not disparage or misportray the original art or its creators. Nothing in this section should be construed to prevent changes to the underlying programming algorithms so long as the visual output remains the same or nearly so."
IANA-licence-writer, but something like that should allow you to Freely distribute the art with Planeshift, allow Planeshift to be forked X.Org-style along with the art, and convert the art to different formats, yet it would allow the artist to retain control over the work, in the sense that it would only be used with Planeshift or its derivatives. I would guess that you'll have to use a special section for licensing the art, and make that technically non-Free, since you can't derive it at will or change the art itself.
That cartoon says "VCR's" is wrong. This is debatable. Although personally I feel that multiletter acronyms should be written without an apostrophe ("VCRs"), it is acceptable to write it both ways. This is more important for single letters: Ys is a mythical city, but "Y's" means "more than one Y".
I needed a free spreadsheet for Windows this Tuesday for a teacher's computer (Excel was broken, and it's a statistics class, so...). I couldn't see any Windows build of Gnumeric.
Now I see a release candidate. That's a good step, but why weren't there Windows builds earlier? I haven't seen any reasonable price-free spreadsheet for Windows - other than OpenOffice.org, which takes more time to download than I had available. I ended up trying some random Win3.1 freeware.
Incidentally, why can't you just download the OOo spreadsheet (or any component) apart from the whole suite?
Blockbuster doesn't help the MPAA. Other than possibly falling through the loophole of only renting it to one person at a time, they don't give any more sales to the MPAA than illegal downloading. Most good-quality illegal downloads come from a once-purchased copy of the movie; Blockbuster rents once-purchased copies of the movies and makes $5 per rental.
If I remember correctly, the Halo 2 disc had something about no public rental. I was still able to rent Halo 2. I'm not sure that Blockbuster's renting is any more legal than the leak.
It does get annoying sometimes, but for normal use, I right click about once every hundred to thousand left clicks. You can Ctrl-click to get the same effect as a right-click. And if you're playing games, you're better off getting a mouse; USB mice with a right button work well with the Mac.
But how can anyone play a first person shooter on a gamepad? Absolute motion axis suck for aiming. Anyone who says otherwise is a console system apologist, and in denial.
It is harder to hit a specific target. However, I'll offer these two counterarguments: 1) the screen, not the reticle changes as you move the mouse, so your brain works more like "keep scrolling...stop", as with a gamepad, than "move to there" as with a normal mouse cursor, and 2) derivative joysticks are a lot better for panning at a constant rate or quickly moving than carefully sliding your mouse or picking it up every time it runs past the edge of your desk.
Besides, how do you use keys for walking? It makes it hard to vary the rate at which you walk. Especially on Halo, there's a value to walking slowly such that you don't show up on the motion sensor, and changing walking speed can be useful for confusing people to snipe ahead.
And the buttons are better; dual-wielding is almost subconscious due to good use of the button layout, and having two joysticks of the same kind allow you to correlate your walking and your moving.
I've played using both, and I see them both as equal in strengths and weaknesses. Position controls have as many drawbacks as velocity controls.
Every balloon would have to pop or come detached in order for the you to count as "free fall". You'd presumably attach the balloons to several different points, so that even if half of the balloons fail, you only accelerate at half gravity. You have a lot more time before descent, so you can safely use a parachute.
Although you may not even need to; the balloons are already allowing you to go pretty slowly. If half the balloons fell off, you'd land at about 70% the speed you would if you were in freefall from that height. If only a reasonable number fail, you may be okay.
Yes. FAR 91.113, "Right-of-way rules: Except water operations," subsection (d)(1): "(1) A balloon has the right-of-way over any other category of aircraft." Generally, the craft that is hardest to maneuver has the right-of-way.
Just overclock the computer enough that the CPU heat will bring it to room temperature. After all, you've got the original cooling system working for you....
Call me old-fashioned, but what business does the government have using proprietary aircraft anyway? I prefer to not have my government's bombs held hostage by a single company, thank you!
The Cathedral and the Bomber, anyone?
-
In other words, sometimes things are supremely impractical, even though they're logically right. I'm sure the government has a large existing investment in MS Word and a large number of documents in.doc format, and (to them) it seems better to keep using MS Word than to switch everything to XML, OpenOffice.org, or whatnot. True, had they started using an open format, it probably would have been better. They didn't. They probably used several formats before Word established dominance, and then slowly switched to Word, because the majority of their contractors and constituents used it.
Besides, can't OOo Writer, AbiWord, and antiword recover the data from any Word file between the three of them?
Slashdot Mirror
usb keys do support multiple partitions just like any other block device
Depends on the key.
I know that mine can't be partitioned (at least, my efforts thus far have failed).
Is it possible to partition a floppy? If so, does it make sense? Then you might be able to partition every USB key. Otherwise, it will depend on whether the manufacturer put a partition table in the key.
I have not been able to repartition my disk. I haven't tried manually fdisking it, but I doubt it can be done. It seems that some flash drives emulate a fixed disk with a partition table, e.g., my dad's flash drive, which comes with multiple partitions to manage its security software. Others, e.g., mine, seem to only emulate a removable disk and a single partition.
/dev/whatever.
Is it possible to use fdisk to "partition" a CD or a floppy - has anyone tried this? If it is, then what you suggest should be workable.
As far as my suggestion, I would suggest letting ISOLINUX switch between multiple kernels. If you need an MS partition, I think I remember a FreeDos kernel that can be loaded into ISOLINUX, and then the MS software can be bootstrapped thence. Within the drive, you can definitely store disk image files as opposed to multiple partitions, and let the kernel you boot mount the image as root instead of
So...anybody who trims the crust off of their own bread is doing an illegal sandwich mod?
/PBPBPBPBPB\
No. Read the patent. It's actually a pretty clever design (though probably not original). The bread is crimped around the edge so the sandwich can stay for some time without danger of leaking. The jelly is surrounded by the sticky peanut butter, which both prevents jelly leaks and helps hold the edges of the bread together.
It looks like this (with bread slices at the top):
<PBJJJJJJPB>
\PBPBPBPBPB/
Free SCO?
Is that like Free Tibet, or free drinks? I'm not sure I'd like it either way....
and frankly, I don't feel like getting up from my computer.
As a classmate said recently:
"Gifted students could take over the world if only we'd stop procrastinating. We'd say, Oh, I can take over that country later...I'll do it on the bus tomorrow morning...."
I'm not willing to say the gifted/procrastinating correlation is intentional, but it does remind me of the OCD geniuses on Orson Scott Card's planet of Path. The government that colonized Path made two gene changes, intelligence and OCD, to keep the "godspoken" in check, and the changes were only inherited simultaneously.
Programmers are artist just like "real" artist and in the end they both contribute their own time and talent to the project so they should at least be treated equally.
Ideally, this would be true. However, in the real world, nobody knows/cares who wrote this patch or who designed this library, as long as it works with your code - and most likely, nobody will care that you wrote this code, as long as it works with theirs. The best analogue would be commercial artists/graphic designers, such as people who create the art for advertisements, product covers, etc. These are rarely signed by the artist, since they focus more on getting an idea across visually than demonstrating the artist's abilities
If Planeshift wanted a generic dragon and a generic mage, they could've found one publicly on Internet stock sites, from clipart, from copyright-expired sources from last century, etc. I think they wanted unique and styled art, which is incompatible with the Free mindset.
Programmers who do write amazing, involved, or unique software are indeed identified. Richard Stallman comes to mind as the author of GCC and Emacs. John Carmack is another example. The guy who wrote my mouse's driver or some random Flash game isn't quite as memorable.
Don't banck on people spelling your name correctly.
O Sifuni Mungu!
I think it's in Swahili. It's kinda scary to not be sure of the language that something's in, but to know the words and what they mean....
If you're not part of the solution, you're the precipitate.
Note that Christopher Diggins is both the author of the language and the article submitter. This may affect your perception on whether a new C++like language is really newsworthy.
yes, as in Freedom, who cares otherwise :-)
Heh. Apparently the submitter cared enough otherwise, seeing as it isn't actually Free.
--
graphics artists find the concept of free licenses scary and foreign
This is understandable: most visual art is unique and based on your own talent, where programming is more about efficiency and the end result. Programming classes tend to ask students to create a "black box" that gives this exact output on these exact inputs. Art classes generally say draw something nice, based on this theme, using this style.
Thus, programs can be easily shared and modified, rarely can any but the best programmers lay individual claim to code, and the author's style is not evident to the user. Art is individual work, created once and not updated, that even amateurs will sign as their own, and the artist's style is often as important as the subject. It is quite understandable that artists refuse to Free-license their works; it's not necessarily because it's "foreign", but the concepts of free access and changeability simply don't apply to art.
Someone might mention Creative Commons, but that's for making artwork publicly available, which isn't quite what you're doing here. What you want is something with the essence:
"This artwork may be freely distributed and used with the Software, and any Derivative Works that retain both the spirit of the Software and the same manner of use of the artwork, provided that a) the artists are credited, b) the artistic aspects, such as subject and style, remain unchanged, and c) any additions to or removals from the set of artwork do not disparage or misportray the original art or its creators. Nothing in this section should be construed to prevent changes to the underlying programming algorithms so long as the visual output remains the same or nearly so."
IANA-licence-writer, but something like that should allow you to Freely distribute the art with Planeshift, allow Planeshift to be forked X.Org-style along with the art, and convert the art to different formats, yet it would allow the artist to retain control over the work, in the sense that it would only be used with Planeshift or its derivatives. I would guess that you'll have to use a special section for licensing the art, and make that technically non-Free, since you can't derive it at will or change the art itself.
That cartoon says "VCR's" is wrong. This is debatable. Although personally I feel that multiletter acronyms should be written without an apostrophe ("VCRs"), it is acceptable to write it both ways. This is more important for single letters: Ys is a mythical city, but "Y's" means "more than one Y".
And he missed the word "musical"!?
An IT musical!?
On the topic of Democrats and Republicans and Iraq, I'd like to mention some UserFriendly cartoons from 1998:
30 December 1998: Obliteration of Iraq: "Clinton is bad man!"
22 February 1998: It's this Iraq thing. "Clinton might just go ahead with an attack. The last thing we need is another war on this planet."
America has always had problems with Iraq. It's not just Bush's personal vendetta or the Republican "neocon"s' way to take over the world.
OK, yeah, this is offtopic here; I might repost these links next time Slashdot posts an article about the ongoing war.
Gnumeric changed their page within the past week.
I needed a free spreadsheet for Windows this Tuesday for a teacher's computer (Excel was broken, and it's a statistics class, so...). I couldn't see any Windows build of Gnumeric.
Now I see a release candidate. That's a good step, but why weren't there Windows builds earlier? I haven't seen any reasonable price-free spreadsheet for Windows - other than OpenOffice.org, which takes more time to download than I had available. I ended up trying some random Win3.1 freeware.
Incidentally, why can't you just download the OOo spreadsheet (or any component) apart from the whole suite?
And here I was thinking Slashdot was the place for people to yell "USAian." Now we've got people implicitly including US/America as "English"? Cool.
Blockbuster doesn't help the MPAA. Other than possibly falling through the loophole of only renting it to one person at a time, they don't give any more sales to the MPAA than illegal downloading. Most good-quality illegal downloads come from a once-purchased copy of the movie; Blockbuster rents once-purchased copies of the movies and makes $5 per rental.
If I remember correctly, the Halo 2 disc had something about no public rental. I was still able to rent Halo 2. I'm not sure that Blockbuster's renting is any more legal than the leak.
stupid 1-button touchpad on apple laptops.....
It does get annoying sometimes, but for normal use, I right click about once every hundred to thousand left clicks. You can Ctrl-click to get the same effect as a right-click. And if you're playing games, you're better off getting a mouse; USB mice with a right button work well with the Mac.
But how can anyone play a first person shooter on a gamepad? Absolute motion axis suck for aiming. Anyone who says otherwise is a console system apologist, and in denial.
It is harder to hit a specific target. However, I'll offer these two counterarguments: 1) the screen, not the reticle changes as you move the mouse, so your brain works more like "keep scrolling...stop", as with a gamepad, than "move to there" as with a normal mouse cursor, and 2) derivative joysticks are a lot better for panning at a constant rate or quickly moving than carefully sliding your mouse or picking it up every time it runs past the edge of your desk.
Besides, how do you use keys for walking? It makes it hard to vary the rate at which you walk. Especially on Halo, there's a value to walking slowly such that you don't show up on the motion sensor, and changing walking speed can be useful for confusing people to snipe ahead.
And the buttons are better; dual-wielding is almost subconscious due to good use of the button layout, and having two joysticks of the same kind allow you to correlate your walking and your moving.
I've played using both, and I see them both as equal in strengths and weaknesses. Position controls have as many drawbacks as velocity controls.
So.. what kind of processing power do you get from a 42 balloon cluster?
Really high performance. Your productivity rates will balloon! And you won't even be full of hot air (unlike your chase balloon).
Every balloon would have to pop or come detached in order for the you to count as "free fall". You'd presumably attach the balloons to several different points, so that even if half of the balloons fail, you only accelerate at half gravity. You have a lot more time before descent, so you can safely use a parachute.
Although you may not even need to; the balloons are already allowing you to go pretty slowly. If half the balloons fell off, you'd land at about 70% the speed you would if you were in freefall from that height. If only a reasonable number fail, you may be okay.
Yes. FAR 91.113, "Right-of-way rules: Except water operations," subsection (d)(1): "(1) A balloon has the right-of-way over any other category of aircraft." Generally, the craft that is hardest to maneuver has the right-of-way.
I'd stare at it for a second and then say, "Hwaet the heck?"
Just overclock the computer enough that the CPU heat will bring it to room temperature. After all, you've got the original cooling system working for you....
Call me old-fashioned, but what business does the government have using proprietary aircraft anyway? I prefer to not have my government's bombs held hostage by a single company, thank you!
.doc format, and (to them) it seems better to keep using MS Word than to switch everything to XML, OpenOffice.org, or whatnot. True, had they started using an open format, it probably would have been better. They didn't. They probably used several formats before Word established dominance, and then slowly switched to Word, because the majority of their contractors and constituents used it.
The Cathedral and the Bomber, anyone?
-
In other words, sometimes things are supremely impractical, even though they're logically right. I'm sure the government has a large existing investment in MS Word and a large number of documents in
Besides, can't OOo Writer, AbiWord, and antiword recover the data from any Word file between the three of them?
Mario is more recognized among kids than Mickey Mouse.
:-)
Hey Disney! You listening? There's an easy way to fix that. Release Mickey Mouse to the public domain.