What is exactly that you fear it will break in your distribution by installing a 2.4 kernel?
NPTL and maybe ALSA.
You can have both 2.4 and 2.6 installed in a system anyway. Compile your kernel and configure lilo/grub, what's stoping you?
I keep a 2.4 kernel around for emergencies, but it's missing things like up to date svgalib and alsa modules, and I don't know if it would work with my new glibc. It's just much more hassle to deal with a kernel that isn't at/usr/src/linux.
You said that your 2.6 kernel is unstable, but didn't mention the symptom. Why is it unstable? it hangs up and reboots? X just freezes? filesystem data corruption?
The system hangs. It isn't just X because I've tried sshing in when it happens, no good. I've tried enabling the software watchdog and running the userspace program that goes with it, to no effect. (It doesn't reboot within a minute of locking up like it should).
Are you sure it's something that can't be fixed?
No, but I can't isolate anything that causes it. I've tried running the same applications that I was when it locked up, doing as far as possible the same things in them - no good. I wouldn't know where to start, and I know bugreporting such "random" occurrences doesn't seem to help anyone, it's just left and marked CANTFIX.
Have you found others with the very same exact problem?
No, not as such. Plenty of people have system lockups like mine, but the fixes I've seen haven't worked or just haven't made sense on my system, and I haven't found anyone else for whom 2.6.11 but no other 2.6 versions work.
Are you sure it isn't something you did wrong?
Pretty sure. I configure all my kernels the same way, as far as possible, so a config error, or pretty much any error, would show up on 2.4 and certainly 2.6.11.
I'm surprised. The web developers have a standard to work from, which all browsers are supposed to implement, wheras there's no standard for how you store cookies, history etc.
Not sure if it's the same story but an Australian man certainly did manage to patent the wheel. He did it to show that the patent system there is in need of reform.
It's treated like any other debt, if you'd failed to pay an unsecured loan or credit card. You can agree with them to a payback plan taking it out of your wages to pay back a certain amount, or you can just declare bankruptcy and they'll take what assets you have.
No. But the person who you downloaded from has - they've distributed copies of something to a random stranger, when they don't have the copyright to the thing, and don't know that the stranger (you) has any right to it.
How do they know that I didn't buy it,
They don't. Nor does the person you download from. I don't think it would matter if they did though, you have no right to distribute copies of a copyrighted work to other people, full stop, regardless of whether they have a copy of it.
how do they know that I don't have rights to make copies or download copies of something I have purchased
You can make copies for yourself of something you can purchase. You cannot make copies of it for other people. That's basic copyright law.
It seems like a hard thing to prove in court. Isn't the threshold "beyond a reasonable doubt" for a crime, and "preponderance of the evidence" for civil cases?
Maybe it is time to chance the threshold for guilt from preponderance to "highly likely".
The thing is a civil case can be either way - it can be you going after a tenant because they didn't pay their rent, or after your landlord because your house is in disrepair. Quite often it's a "little guy" going up against a bigger defendant, like if a shop has sold you faulty goods. There's really no sense in placing the burden of proof anywhere other than 50/50.
What does need to be done is to put a limit on maximum fines in civil cases. You can't be sent to prison in a civil case - we feel that that needs more proof, and you should have a right to a jury if there's a possibility of that happening. But the fines threatened by the RIAA in this kind of case are equal to that in their life-destroying capability. We shouldn't let people be fined that much without it being a criminal trial.
That's why I'm willing to use it. Looks a bit blocky, but compresses incredibly well - I have a wmv music video that's smaller than an mp3 of the song in question. Also, I've found it the easiest of the main video formats (windows media, real, and quicktime - ogg theora and dirac just aren't ready for primetime yet) to get working in linux - just dump the dlls in the right format and both xine and mplayer can play them flawlessly, even as streams from websites (just install gxine or kaffeine). Real is harder, at least if you don't want to use their OSS-only official client, and quicktime is an absolute nightmare. So I'm all in favour of requiring windows media player to view videos, because the alternatives are worse.
As long as people are out there sharing ideas freely, it'll survive. It may not get as much attention as it does right now (i.e. all the attention open source gets right now), but as a concept, it cannot die.
Of course it can - when people stop sharing ideas freely. When people don't even think of sharing an idea freely. When the media conglomerates control the education system I can see that happening.
That is amazing isn't it? Back in the days when it took years to publish and distribute a work artists were given fourteen years of protection. Today, despite near instantaneous communication, they are protected for a hundred years or better.
It could be argued that the instantaneous communication and duplication means copies are likely to be available for longer (it costs almost nothing to keep your entire back catalogue available in digital form), wheras many books in the 14 year era would have had one print run and that would be it.
What you are suggesting is the same for digital media. Who cares how much the carpenters, painters, sets, directors, actors, etc cost? All that matters to you is that you think the movie should be available to you at a $2 or less cost since you can purchase blanks for that amount and thats really all thats involved, isn't it?
No. The companies who produce DVDs are free to sell it at whatever price they like, and I am free to choose whether or not I am willing to pay that price. However, if they are selling the DVDs for $2 in Brazil, and I go to Brazil and legally purchase it there, then I should be able to play it. If they weren't willing to sell the DVD for $2, they shouldn't offer it for sale for $2, anywhere. Furthermore if I buy 10000 DVDs in Brazil for $2 each and bring them to the US to sell them for $8 each, why shouldn't I be able to? The DVD manufacturers would have no problem with getting people in Brazil to answer their support lines for lower wages, what's the difference between these two? If you believe in globalisation for labour, you should also believe in globalisation for products.
If there was ever a necessary evil that remained evil, it's Samba. Not that I'm slagging the dedicated guys that keep trying to figure out MS's ever-changing mutilation of LANServer, but it is a sonofabitch to get working right.
It's far easier than NFS. Samba sharing, point your web browser to swat and follow the wizard. NFS sharing I have spent days trying to do before giving up.
Now that the native NT API is more or less available, would it be possible to rewrite those bits of cygwin that could benefit to use it on systems where it's available? (Remember cygwin still has to run on win98)
This is exactly what happened with NT's posix layer. The idea was that the native NT API would be completely hidden, and there would be various subsystems available - a win32 one, a posix one, and iirc a new NT-only one. Officially these were all on an even footing, and in early releases this seemed to be the case, the posix layer was actually quite decent. But then it sort of got gradually dropped, forcing application developers to port to NT if they wanted to be competitive. Here's hoping they don't do the same thing again.
Then, the point about the Microsoft POSIX implementation being useless. Last I read about it, it said that the POSIX personality and the win32 personality were basically completely isolated from one another. POSIX process ids are separate from win32 process ids, POSIX processes cannot start win32 processes, and communication between the two types of processes is difficult. In addition, large parts of POSIX were unimplemented, which means that many POSIX apps simply wouldn't work on NT.
It was approved as POSIX compliant, so unless the standard has optional parts they must have implemented it all.
And then the claim that no single application in the world can claim to be POSIX-compliant. Well, just because not everything in an application is also specified in POSIX doesn't make it not POSIX compliant. As long as everything that is in POSIX is also done the POSIX way in the application, it can be called POSIX-compliant.
The point of POSIX is that any POSIX-compliant application can run on any POSIX-compliant OS. If the application depends on non-POSIX things then it's not truly POSIX-compliant - and if it depends on non-posix because there's no way to do what it wants in POSIX, then that's a flaw in POSIX.
Finally, an interesting bit of knowledge: although POSIX is typically associated with Unix-like systems, there are other systems that are POSIX-compliant, too. IBM's MVS and VMS are two examples.
For me the most striking example (it would be hard to imagine a less unix-like system) is BeOS
That's not true though. NT was a new system, the basic architecture was deliberately inaccessible. On top of it you have the win32 layer, the public NT layer, and for a while there was a posix layer. Believe it or not it worked fine, at least from the command line. X wasn't handled so well, but cygwin/X shows that could have been done a lot better. NT could have been a better unix than unix, in the same way as OS/2 with windows.
Why would one want to maximise a file dialog? what's the use? Especialy in your hi-res display it would just be useless
It would give me more space to find the file or folder I wanted. I have larger fonts because of the high resolution so in the current file dialog (which seems to have a fixed size in pixels) I get about four lines worth to work with.
Acrobat performs poorly (7 is better than before but still quite slow) and xpdf is less friendly to use. I don't know about evince. I mention it because it's a recent rewrite and the best pdf viewer I've seen.
Huh? I used the maximum compression setting for all the archivers I tried, at least when I could figure out how to set it. My experience says rar is certainly the best of those I tried (though I didn't compare uharc, which I've often seen called the best for general binary data)
Slashdot Mirror
NPTL and maybe ALSA.
You can have both 2.4 and 2.6 installed in a system anyway. Compile your kernel and configure lilo/grub, what's stoping you?
I keep a 2.4 kernel around for emergencies, but it's missing things like up to date svgalib and alsa modules, and I don't know if it would work with my new glibc. It's just much more hassle to deal with a kernel that isn't at /usr/src/linux.
You said that your 2.6 kernel is unstable, but didn't mention the symptom. Why is it unstable? it hangs up and reboots? X just freezes? filesystem data corruption?
The system hangs. It isn't just X because I've tried sshing in when it happens, no good. I've tried enabling the software watchdog and running the userspace program that goes with it, to no effect. (It doesn't reboot within a minute of locking up like it should).
Are you sure it's something that can't be fixed?
No, but I can't isolate anything that causes it. I've tried running the same applications that I was when it locked up, doing as far as possible the same things in them - no good. I wouldn't know where to start, and I know bugreporting such "random" occurrences doesn't seem to help anyone, it's just left and marked CANTFIX.
Have you found others with the very same exact problem?
No, not as such. Plenty of people have system lockups like mine, but the fixes I've seen haven't worked or just haven't made sense on my system, and I haven't found anyone else for whom 2.6.11 but no other 2.6 versions work.
Are you sure it isn't something you did wrong?
Pretty sure. I configure all my kernels the same way, as far as possible, so a config error, or pretty much any error, would show up on 2.4 and certainly 2.6.11.
I'm surprised. The web developers have a standard to work from, which all browsers are supposed to implement, wheras there's no standard for how you store cookies, history etc.
After all, there are plenty of people here willing to defend software patents, especially when a sleazy company like Apple is involved.
Not sure if it's the same story but an Australian man certainly did manage to patent the wheel. He did it to show that the patent system there is in need of reform.
It's treated like any other debt, if you'd failed to pay an unsecured loan or credit card. You can agree with them to a payback plan taking it out of your wages to pay back a certain amount, or you can just declare bankruptcy and they'll take what assets you have.
No. But the person who you downloaded from has - they've distributed copies of something to a random stranger, when they don't have the copyright to the thing, and don't know that the stranger (you) has any right to it.
How do they know that I didn't buy it,
They don't. Nor does the person you download from. I don't think it would matter if they did though, you have no right to distribute copies of a copyrighted work to other people, full stop, regardless of whether they have a copy of it.
how do they know that I don't have rights to make copies or download copies of something I have purchased
You can make copies for yourself of something you can purchase. You cannot make copies of it for other people. That's basic copyright law.
Maybe it is time to chance the threshold for guilt from preponderance to "highly likely".
The thing is a civil case can be either way - it can be you going after a tenant because they didn't pay their rent, or after your landlord because your house is in disrepair. Quite often it's a "little guy" going up against a bigger defendant, like if a shop has sold you faulty goods. There's really no sense in placing the burden of proof anywhere other than 50/50.
What does need to be done is to put a limit on maximum fines in civil cases. You can't be sent to prison in a civil case - we feel that that needs more proof, and you should have a right to a jury if there's a possibility of that happening. But the fines threatened by the RIAA in this kind of case are equal to that in their life-destroying capability. We shouldn't let people be fined that much without it being a criminal trial.
That's why I'm willing to use it. Looks a bit blocky, but compresses incredibly well - I have a wmv music video that's smaller than an mp3 of the song in question. Also, I've found it the easiest of the main video formats (windows media, real, and quicktime - ogg theora and dirac just aren't ready for primetime yet) to get working in linux - just dump the dlls in the right format and both xine and mplayer can play them flawlessly, even as streams from websites (just install gxine or kaffeine). Real is harder, at least if you don't want to use their OSS-only official client, and quicktime is an absolute nightmare. So I'm all in favour of requiring windows media player to view videos, because the alternatives are worse.
If they are, they could save themselves a lot of money in lawyers fees and get a lighter punishment by doing just that.
Of course it can - when people stop sharing ideas freely. When people don't even think of sharing an idea freely. When the media conglomerates control the education system I can see that happening.
It could be argued that the instantaneous communication and duplication means copies are likely to be available for longer (it costs almost nothing to keep your entire back catalogue available in digital form), wheras many books in the 14 year era would have had one print run and that would be it.
No. The companies who produce DVDs are free to sell it at whatever price they like, and I am free to choose whether or not I am willing to pay that price. However, if they are selling the DVDs for $2 in Brazil, and I go to Brazil and legally purchase it there, then I should be able to play it. If they weren't willing to sell the DVD for $2, they shouldn't offer it for sale for $2, anywhere. Furthermore if I buy 10000 DVDs in Brazil for $2 each and bring them to the US to sell them for $8 each, why shouldn't I be able to? The DVD manufacturers would have no problem with getting people in Brazil to answer their support lines for lower wages, what's the difference between these two? If you believe in globalisation for labour, you should also believe in globalisation for products.
It's far easier than NFS. Samba sharing, point your web browser to swat and follow the wizard. NFS sharing I have spent days trying to do before giving up.
Now that the native NT API is more or less available, would it be possible to rewrite those bits of cygwin that could benefit to use it on systems where it's available? (Remember cygwin still has to run on win98)
This is exactly what happened with NT's posix layer. The idea was that the native NT API would be completely hidden, and there would be various subsystems available - a win32 one, a posix one, and iirc a new NT-only one. Officially these were all on an even footing, and in early releases this seemed to be the case, the posix layer was actually quite decent. But then it sort of got gradually dropped, forcing application developers to port to NT if they wanted to be competitive. Here's hoping they don't do the same thing again.
It was approved as POSIX compliant, so unless the standard has optional parts they must have implemented it all.
And then the claim that no single application in the world can claim to be POSIX-compliant. Well, just because not everything in an application is also specified in POSIX doesn't make it not POSIX compliant. As long as everything that is in POSIX is also done the POSIX way in the application, it can be called POSIX-compliant.
The point of POSIX is that any POSIX-compliant application can run on any POSIX-compliant OS. If the application depends on non-POSIX things then it's not truly POSIX-compliant - and if it depends on non-posix because there's no way to do what it wants in POSIX, then that's a flaw in POSIX.
Finally, an interesting bit of knowledge: although POSIX is typically associated with Unix-like systems, there are other systems that are POSIX-compliant, too. IBM's MVS and VMS are two examples.
For me the most striking example (it would be hard to imagine a less unix-like system) is BeOS
That's not true though. NT was a new system, the basic architecture was deliberately inaccessible. On top of it you have the win32 layer, the public NT layer, and for a while there was a posix layer. Believe it or not it worked fine, at least from the command line. X wasn't handled so well, but cygwin/X shows that could have been done a lot better. NT could have been a better unix than unix, in the same way as OS/2 with windows.
this is going to be a reason *to* use these browsers. I doubt the police will get much sympathy here.
For what it's worth
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It would give me more space to find the file or folder I wanted. I have larger fonts because of the high resolution so in the current file dialog (which seems to have a fixed size in pixels) I get about four lines worth to work with.
Acrobat performs poorly (7 is better than before but still quite slow) and xpdf is less friendly to use. I don't know about evince. I mention it because it's a recent rewrite and the best pdf viewer I've seen.
I don't have a DVD burner, just a dvd-rom drive. If you're willing to buy me a DVD burner go right ahead, I'll give you my address.
Yeah, can't believe I forgot about that. It was something like 834mb, in the same region as ace and 7z.
Wherefore?
Huh? I used the maximum compression setting for all the archivers I tried, at least when I could figure out how to set it. My experience says rar is certainly the best of those I tried (though I didn't compare uharc, which I've often seen called the best for general binary data)