# Update distribution center for given distro will resolve dependencies and fetch everything necessary for proper package installation (not compilation!).
I'd go further than this. I'm increasingly concerned by the proliferation of "distribution centres" for software.
Before I start, let me declare myself as being a long-term Linux newbie. I've fiddled with it, infrequently, for many years (starting, IIRC, with Slackware 2.2). I know roughly how I might be able to fix most things, but I generally can't be bothered. So I retreat back to That Other Operating System. In some ways, my lack of clue is beneficial in pointing to some of the things that need fixing...because 90% of "Joe Average" users out there have even less clue than me.
Please excuse my Debian-centric examples - my most recent fiddling has been with "inflated Knoppix" debian installs. Prior to that, I fiddled lamely with LinDosh (or whatever they call it this week) and RH9...and I'm finding Debian to be much more useable than either.
In part, I'm concerned about the centralisiation aspect of the "distribution centre". If a piece of software isn't endorsed by the keepers of the operating system (eg if.deb packages aren't available on the servers in the unmodified default sources lists), then it automatically becomes second-rate. Sure, I can still install it - hack my sources list or compile from source - but these are more difficult and outside of the "normal" installation method. By the way, are applications installed in this way included in the system's regular patch/maintenance system? I suspect not.
Internet access is not yet universal and entrenched enough to use the "distribution centre" style of distribution by default. It's a complete disaster for people on dial-up, and it's still a big issue for those of us with volume-limited broadband accounts.
I'm sure what I'm about to suggest is possible, but it's not obvious or easy.
Firstly, if I blow my monthly limit downloading a new app to run on my Linux box, I want to keep a backup copy of it.
Since I don't know much, I often find that it's easier to re-install Linux than to work out exactly what I've b0rked, and how to de-b0rk it. If I re-install the OS, I don't want to blow my next month's download limit getting the same software again.
By the same token, I have a few PCs networked at home...and I don't want to install software on each of them over the Internet. I want to download it once, burn it to CD-R (much cheaper than bandwidth - I currently pay about A$50 for ~1GB/month, against A$0.50 for ~800MB/CD), so I can install it several times.
That leads to my next concern - how do I install software from a CD? It's not intuitive in any of the Linuces I've fiddled with lately. It is intuitive in Windows.
As a clueless newbie, I want software installation to take the form of a "wizard"-style GUI script.
Menu - Install software
Do you want to install from CD, mounted directory (ie local or network), or download from the internet? Download from the internet
Do you want to keep a copy of the installation files to use again later? Yes please.
Burn installation files to CD, or store in a local or network directory?
etc. etc.. Dial-up users can insert their blank CD, click the "go" button, and go to bed - expecting to wake up to a burnt CD and functioning software - or at very least, a burnt CD and a software configuration script. Or a locally-stored install package, a few error messages, and an option of burning or the package to a location of their choice...so at least they won't have to download the whole thing again tomorrow night after they've fixed whatever needed fixing.
Obviously, you can dumb the language down even further for Joe Average who doesn't know (and doesn't need to know) what a mounted directory is.
I'm sure one day bandwidth will be cheap and fast enough that we wouldn't even think of keeping a local copy. Bu
This goes right next to the cases of people who get fired for bringing their new cell phone to work because their office is a security-tight "no camera zone" and their new phone just happens to be a cameraphone model.
That's no joke.
In my job (automotive industry) I often go on to sites where cameras are banned outright - whether it's an antique view-camera or a camera-equipped mobile phone. There's commercial concerns, and big incentives at stake...the car magazines would love a spread of grainy pixelated photos of a year-after-next model whizzing around a test track (to say nothing of the styling department at competitor companies), and unscrupulous photographers have made big money by providing such pictures.
On entering these sites, we're told in no uncertain terms that if we're found to have any kind of camera, we'll be removed, and banned for life from any company site.
I recently bought a new mobile phone. I had to turn down a very attractive package deal because the phone happened to have a camera built in. I need to have my phone with me at customer sites, and I can't afford to be blacklisted.
I don't know how they'd cope with somebody who had a photographic memory and some artistic talent...
I installed an early beta of Win95, to see if I liked it.
After a productive evening of pumping floppies, my DOS6.2/Win3.1 system was fully upgraded.
Half an hour was enough for me to decide that I didn't really care for all the new eye-candy, so I went to uninstall new Windows, and reboot back to old Windows...
After a few productive evenings of formatting hard discs and pumping floppies, I had my machine working again...but my data didn't make it...
Someone here, a while back, posted a way to "tag" your email addresses, so they'd still be deliverable, but you could tell who was responsible if you started getting spam.
It wasn't me - I've never mentioned it on here - but customised email addressing is something I've done ever since I bought myself a vanity-domain.
I run a catch-all email policy, so whatever gets sent to any_address@my_vanity_domain.com lands in my inbox.
Any organisation who asks for my email address gets their_own_name@my_vanity_domain.com. The idea is that I can identify the source of any spam, take whatever measures I can, and shut down the address that it comes in on. For that matter, my/. account is registered under slashdot@my_vanity_domain.com. Not because I expect/. to be the origin of any spam - I'm just consistent.
Interestingly, the only addresses I've ever had serious spam problems on have been webmaster@ (which I used to have scattered liberally around my personal website - obviously harvested by 'bots), a couple of addresses that I have used to post on usenet (no surprise), and one that I used to have publically displayed on a car forum (running phpBB2, for what it's worth). I also got a bit of spam on sales@, administrator@, info@, and other obvious spam-server-side inventions...before I blocked them.
I look after my (technophobic) sister's business domain, using a similar policy. She had a persistent pr0n spammer, using an invented address (hhy@, iirc). It turns out that she was opening their html-formatted messages through a webmail interface, which was downloading and displaying uniquely-named images - so identifying hhy@ as a live address. Sneaky. Not a problem after I blocked all mail to hhy@;-)
Unfortunately, my catch-all email policy has become a problem with all the recent address-spoofing Outlook worms, which send themselve to and from spoofed_address@my_vanity_domain.com from every infected winbox that has ever had contact with any_address@my_vanitydomain.com. They fill my inbox with worm-laden junk (as well as auto-generated courtesy messages from various postmasters, informing me that spoofed_address@ needs to run an antivirus program). But I guess this is not news to most/.ers who manage mail servers.
If nothing else, tracking spam sources is a harmless hobby. Worth the price of admission ($20/year, or whatever a domain costs these days) alone.
Another factor not mentioned in the article is that carbon fibre (and other polymer composites) is often used in millitary vessels to avoid detonating mines. Sea mines often use magnetic means in deciding when to go "kaboom".
However, all the radar and magnetic stealth in the world won't help if Outlook is spraying MyDoom worms out from their "state of the art" NT system to anybody who cares to listen, and an unsecured SMTP server is relaying spam to the enemy...
...angry as a anything about this piss-ant tyrant making Australia an agressor in an illegal war and about to vote Labour for the first time
I'm right with you as far as being furious about being dragged into Iraq - but now we're there and have helped to royally fsck the place up, bailing out is a pretty poor option.
Either way, I'll still be voting the way I always have:
- Good minors and independents
- Major parties, in order of merit
- Racists, loonies, ultra-conservatives and christians (four sets with a large intersection)
This time, merit puts Labor well ahead of Republican^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HLiberal (if ever a party has been so mis-named...). Which is also typical (but not universal) voting behaviour for me.
Voting "1" for a major party is a waste of a perfectly good protest vote. Your ballot paper in one of the smaller piles is about the most powerful political voice you have. Your vote will almost certainly get preferenced off into one of the piles starting with "L" anyway, so it only really matters which order you put them in. If one of your chosen minor or independent candidates get up - congratulations, you now control the country. Well, you have much more control than if you were represented by an anonymous back-bench "yes" man, on whichever side of the floor your neighbours put him.
The FTA hasn't changed my vote. It was way too late for that, after a few disagreements I've had with Howard's actions over the last decade or so (including, but not limited to, the invasion of Iraq, and his unilateral apointment of the national head of his own church as Governor General). The FTA has only reinforced my vote.
It seems to me we could clearcut every old growth and rainforest on earth, and still not have enough landmass to produce enough of this fuel.
We could clearcut every old growth, rainforest, crop, pasture, garden and lawn on earth and bury it for a few million years, and it wouldn't produce enough fossil fuel to keep up with current demands. Even if we had the time to sit around and wait for it to brew.
We need to get over this attitude of "it's not possible to use renewable fuels for 100% of our consumption, therefore we should continue to use non-renewable fuel for 100% of our consumption". If we use 10% renewable fuel, that's 10% less non-renewable fuel.
If our current fuel consumption isn't sustainable without dipping into the "reserves" that were stored a few million years ago - then it seems quite obvious that we need to reduce fuel consumption...as well as our dependence on the reserves.
The fact that so many great ideas start off in this country and are killed before they can get the success they deserve is what's driving america down the drain
No wonder this component failed - it was made in Japan!
From my limited internation experience, Australians are absolutely spoilt for radio. JJJ (as mentioned on a few other posts) is a great success story.
People will carry on about the good old days of JJJ (or 2JJ when it was an under-ground local Sydney station), before it sold out. Those people need to spend some time in the UK listening to the 5-song-rotation playlist of Radio 1 to understand how bad things could be...
For those who are curious, JJJ streams over the 'net. It should be easy enough to locate from their site, along with a sample playlist.
JJJ is not greatly different to a good college station in the US, but it's national. I'm in a small city (80,000 people) just beyond reliable radio-listening range of Melbourne...but we have our own JJJ transmitter. Without it, things would be very grim.
The normal sequence of events is:
Really new or left-of-field music gets an airing on Melbourne's community stations (RRR and PBS). I haven't spent much time in Sydney lately, but FBI may have gone some way toward filling the vacuum in that niche.
A lot of it gets a run on special interest segments on JJJ.
Some of it makes the JJJ daytime playlist, and gets enough airtime that those with a long attention span get sick of it.
The same music gets an airing on the more progressive commercial stations, and is touted as "brand new".
With good listener feedback, some new songs get mixed up with the other dross that the commercial stations call a playlist. This is, typically, about 3 months after it started playing on JJJ.
6 months later, the bubblegum pop stations (similar playlists to top40-style stations worldwide) will pick up one or two songs that has been popular enough to pop up on the sales charts without record company assistance. These songs are touted as "brand new", and are played hourly for the next couple of months. By this stage, JJJ listeners will have hidden the CD and will deny ever having listened to such crap;-)
Sales would indicate that most record buying must be done by bubblegum radio listeners, because it's the bubblegum that sells the best.
Anecdotally, I think most kids are more into copying CDs and passing them around than they are into downloading. But that's no different to the age-old technique of copying tapes...
This software contains code which will identify and restrict you from doing what the RIAA deems is bad. Please do not spend the additional 20 seconds it would take to find and download the crack that removes all such restrictions. Thank you.
Due to the fact that these cracks are not copyrighted, you can download them using the un-cracked software.
Please do not keep a copy of the crack in your "Shared" folder, as this is in breech of RIAA policy and will allow others to use the crack. Thankyou.
tdmp
compare them to a copyright database and stop them from being traded if a match is found
There is such better use for this technology!
As we will all agree, the recording industry needs to accept that music downloading is here to stay, and they need to work with the fileshareing community, not against it. But few will disagree that artists deserves to be paid for their music.
There have been several models proposed to make (allow?) users to pay for music downloads. Some have been tried and failed, others are having more success.
Personally, I think the most workable model is the concept of a downloading license, which could be similar to the radio and TV license systems in the United Kingdom.
I don't know the details, because I'm not Brittish. By my understanding, nobody is required to pay for a TV (or music download) license. If they are found to be watching TV (or downloading music) without a license, they can be penalised. A license is not expensive, so most people pay their annual fee.
I suspect most users would be happy to pay, say, $10/year on top of their ISP costs, to allow them to legally download as little or as much music as they want to. If you don't want to download, or if you want to risk a fine, don't pay the fee.
Obviously, license fees should be channelled back to the artist, to compensate them for creating the music. Realistically, recording companies and management would take their cut en route.
A flaw in this proposal is that nobody knows what proportion of the revenue is due to which artists, because fileswapping is unregulated.
And that's where this monitoring technology could be best applied. As a rating system, to determine which artist is owed what proportion of the license fee pool.
Music fileswappers would be much less hostile to a monitoring system that channels money to their favourite artists than they would be to a monitoring system that tries to shut down fileswapping.
The monitoring/banning system as it is proposed ("evil, pure evil") will be worked around. A monitoring/rating system as I have suggested may be embraced.
Slashdot Mirror
You've obviously never met the QA manager at my workplace.
He was anal long before he went into QA. It just took him a few years to find his true calling :-)
I'd go further than this. I'm increasingly concerned by the proliferation of "distribution centres" for software.
Before I start, let me declare myself as being a long-term Linux newbie. I've fiddled with it, infrequently, for many years (starting, IIRC, with Slackware 2.2). I know roughly how I might be able to fix most things, but I generally can't be bothered. So I retreat back to That Other Operating System. In some ways, my lack of clue is beneficial in pointing to some of the things that need fixing...because 90% of "Joe Average" users out there have even less clue than me.
Please excuse my Debian-centric examples - my most recent fiddling has been with "inflated Knoppix" debian installs. Prior to that, I fiddled lamely with LinDosh (or whatever they call it this week) and RH9...and I'm finding Debian to be much more useable than either.
In part, I'm concerned about the centralisiation aspect of the "distribution centre". If a piece of software isn't endorsed by the keepers of the operating system (eg if .deb packages aren't available on the servers in the unmodified default sources lists), then it automatically becomes second-rate. Sure, I can still install it - hack my sources list or compile from source - but these are more difficult and outside of the "normal" installation method. By the way, are applications installed in this way included in the system's regular patch/maintenance system? I suspect not.
Internet access is not yet universal and entrenched enough to use the "distribution centre" style of distribution by default. It's a complete disaster for people on dial-up, and it's still a big issue for those of us with volume-limited broadband accounts.
I'm sure what I'm about to suggest is possible, but it's not obvious or easy.
Firstly, if I blow my monthly limit downloading a new app to run on my Linux box, I want to keep a backup copy of it.
Since I don't know much, I often find that it's easier to re-install Linux than to work out exactly what I've b0rked, and how to de-b0rk it. If I re-install the OS, I don't want to blow my next month's download limit getting the same software again.
By the same token, I have a few PCs networked at home...and I don't want to install software on each of them over the Internet. I want to download it once, burn it to CD-R (much cheaper than bandwidth - I currently pay about A$50 for ~1GB/month, against A$0.50 for ~800MB/CD), so I can install it several times.
That leads to my next concern - how do I install software from a CD? It's not intuitive in any of the Linuces I've fiddled with lately. It is intuitive in Windows.
As a clueless newbie, I want software installation to take the form of a "wizard"-style GUI script.
Menu - Install software
Do you want to install from CD, mounted directory (ie local or network), or download from the internet?
Download from the internet
Do you want to keep a copy of the installation files to use again later?
Yes please.
Burn installation files to CD, or store in a local or network directory?
etc. etc.. Dial-up users can insert their blank CD, click the "go" button, and go to bed - expecting to wake up to a burnt CD and functioning software - or at very least, a burnt CD and a software configuration script. Or a locally-stored install package, a few error messages, and an option of burning or the package to a location of their choice...so at least they won't have to download the whole thing again tomorrow night after they've fixed whatever needed fixing.
Obviously, you can dumb the language down even further for Joe Average who doesn't know (and doesn't need to know) what a mounted directory is.
I'm sure one day bandwidth will be cheap and fast enough that we wouldn't even think of keeping a local copy. Bu
That's no joke.
In my job (automotive industry) I often go on to sites where cameras are banned outright - whether it's an antique view-camera or a camera-equipped mobile phone. There's commercial concerns, and big incentives at stake...the car magazines would love a spread of grainy pixelated photos of a year-after-next model whizzing around a test track (to say nothing of the styling department at competitor companies), and unscrupulous photographers have made big money by providing such pictures.
On entering these sites, we're told in no uncertain terms that if we're found to have any kind of camera, we'll be removed, and banned for life from any company site.
I recently bought a new mobile phone. I had to turn down a very attractive package deal because the phone happened to have a camera built in. I need to have my phone with me at customer sites, and I can't afford to be blacklisted.
I don't know how they'd cope with somebody who had a photographic memory and some artistic talent...
I installed an early beta of Win95, to see if I liked it.
After a productive evening of pumping floppies, my DOS6.2/Win3.1 system was fully upgraded.
Half an hour was enough for me to decide that I didn't really care for all the new eye-candy, so I went to uninstall new Windows, and reboot back to old Windows...
After a few productive evenings of formatting hard discs and pumping floppies, I had my machine working again...but my data didn't make it...
No great loss - I wasn't planning to use microsoft_FUD@mydomain.com anywhere else ;-)
You mean "other companies" like Microsoft? ;-)
You're right - they tend not to be so vocal about their use of Linux servers...
Of course they have a strong privacy policy. They keep their list of subscriber addresses very secure.
After all, if the list was publically available, it wouldn't be worth anything when they wanted to sell it!
It wasn't me - I've never mentioned it on here - but customised email addressing is something I've done ever since I bought myself a vanity-domain.
I run a catch-all email policy, so whatever gets sent to any_address@my_vanity_domain.com lands in my inbox.
Any organisation who asks for my email address gets their_own_name@my_vanity_domain.com. The idea is that I can identify the source of any spam, take whatever measures I can, and shut down the address that it comes in on. For that matter, my /. account is registered under slashdot@my_vanity_domain.com. Not because I expect /. to be the origin of any spam - I'm just consistent.
Interestingly, the only addresses I've ever had serious spam problems on have been webmaster@ (which I used to have scattered liberally around my personal website - obviously harvested by 'bots), a couple of addresses that I have used to post on usenet (no surprise), and one that I used to have publically displayed on a car forum (running phpBB2, for what it's worth). I also got a bit of spam on sales@, administrator@, info@, and other obvious spam-server-side inventions...before I blocked them.
I look after my (technophobic) sister's business domain, using a similar policy. She had a persistent pr0n spammer, using an invented address (hhy@, iirc). It turns out that she was opening their html-formatted messages through a webmail interface, which was downloading and displaying uniquely-named images - so identifying hhy@ as a live address. Sneaky. Not a problem after I blocked all mail to hhy@ ;-)
Unfortunately, my catch-all email policy has become a problem with all the recent address-spoofing Outlook worms, which send themselve to and from spoofed_address@my_vanity_domain.com from every infected winbox that has ever had contact with any_address@my_vanitydomain.com. They fill my inbox with worm-laden junk (as well as auto-generated courtesy messages from various postmasters, informing me that spoofed_address@ needs to run an antivirus program). But I guess this is not news to most /.ers who manage mail servers.
If nothing else, tracking spam sources is a harmless hobby. Worth the price of admission ($20/year, or whatever a domain costs these days) alone.
However, all the radar and magnetic stealth in the world won't help if Outlook is spraying MyDoom worms out from their "state of the art" NT system to anybody who cares to listen, and an unsecured SMTP server is relaying spam to the enemy...
I'm right with you as far as being furious about being dragged into Iraq - but now we're there and have helped to royally fsck the place up, bailing out is a pretty poor option.
Either way, I'll still be voting the way I always have:
- Good minors and independents
- Major parties, in order of merit
- Racists, loonies, ultra-conservatives and christians (four sets with a large intersection)
This time, merit puts Labor well ahead of Republican^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HLiberal (if ever a party has been so mis-named...). Which is also typical (but not universal) voting behaviour for me.
Voting "1" for a major party is a waste of a perfectly good protest vote. Your ballot paper in one of the smaller piles is about the most powerful political voice you have. Your vote will almost certainly get preferenced off into one of the piles starting with "L" anyway, so it only really matters which order you put them in. If one of your chosen minor or independent candidates get up - congratulations, you now control the country. Well, you have much more control than if you were represented by an anonymous back-bench "yes" man, on whichever side of the floor your neighbours put him.
The FTA hasn't changed my vote. It was way too late for that, after a few disagreements I've had with Howard's actions over the last decade or so (including, but not limited to, the invasion of Iraq, and his unilateral apointment of the national head of his own church as Governor General). The FTA has only reinforced my vote.
That's okay, Australia already claims all the worthwhile parts/produce of New Zealand.
:-P
The Kiwis be included as part of Australia's star. Whether they like it or not
We could clearcut every old growth, rainforest, crop, pasture, garden and lawn on earth and bury it for a few million years, and it wouldn't produce enough fossil fuel to keep up with current demands. Even if we had the time to sit around and wait for it to brew.
We need to get over this attitude of "it's not possible to use renewable fuels for 100% of our consumption, therefore we should continue to use non-renewable fuel for 100% of our consumption". If we use 10% renewable fuel, that's 10% less non-renewable fuel.
If our current fuel consumption isn't sustainable without dipping into the "reserves" that were stored a few million years ago - then it seems quite obvious that we need to reduce fuel consumption...as well as our dependence on the reserves.
t
No wonder this component failed - it was made in Japan!
What if we could build a beowulf cluster of them? Would it still be lame then?
People will carry on about the good old days of JJJ (or 2JJ when it was an under-ground local Sydney station), before it sold out. Those people need to spend some time in the UK listening to the 5-song-rotation playlist of Radio 1 to understand how bad things could be...
For those who are curious, JJJ streams over the 'net. It should be easy enough to locate from their site, along with a sample playlist.
JJJ is not greatly different to a good college station in the US, but it's national. I'm in a small city (80,000 people) just beyond reliable radio-listening range of Melbourne...but we have our own JJJ transmitter. Without it, things would be very grim.
The normal sequence of events is:
Sales would indicate that most record buying must be done by bubblegum radio listeners, because it's the bubblegum that sells the best.
Anecdotally, I think most kids are more into copying CDs and passing them around than they are into downloading. But that's no different to the age-old technique of copying tapes...
/tp
Due to the fact that these cracks are not copyrighted, you can download them using the un-cracked software.
Please do not keep a copy of the crack in your "Shared" folder, as this is in breech of RIAA policy and will allow others to use the crack. Thankyou. tdmp
There is such better use for this technology!
As we will all agree, the recording industry needs to accept that music downloading is here to stay, and they need to work with the fileshareing community, not against it. But few will disagree that artists deserves to be paid for their music.
There have been several models proposed to make (allow?) users to pay for music downloads. Some have been tried and failed, others are having more success.
Personally, I think the most workable model is the concept of a downloading license, which could be similar to the radio and TV license systems in the United Kingdom.
I don't know the details, because I'm not Brittish. By my understanding, nobody is required to pay for a TV (or music download) license. If they are found to be watching TV (or downloading music) without a license, they can be penalised. A license is not expensive, so most people pay their annual fee.
I suspect most users would be happy to pay, say, $10/year on top of their ISP costs, to allow them to legally download as little or as much music as they want to. If you don't want to download, or if you want to risk a fine, don't pay the fee.
Obviously, license fees should be channelled back to the artist, to compensate them for creating the music. Realistically, recording companies and management would take their cut en route.
A flaw in this proposal is that nobody knows what proportion of the revenue is due to which artists, because fileswapping is unregulated.
And that's where this monitoring technology could be best applied. As a rating system, to determine which artist is owed what proportion of the license fee pool.
Music fileswappers would be much less hostile to a monitoring system that channels money to their favourite artists than they would be to a monitoring system that tries to shut down fileswapping.
The monitoring/banning system as it is proposed ("evil, pure evil") will be worked around. A monitoring/rating system as I have suggested may be embraced.
tdmp
Would MS claim copyright infringement if Lin---s forked into Linblows ?