Re:Sensationalist Journalism?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Agreed. Ditto for West Nile. Media made a huge to-do about it a few years back, but for the most part, the only people it ever claimed were the very young and very old: in other words, those that pnumonia probably would have gotten as well. It was usually in the web news or newspapers where the victims' ages would be listed, the TV and radio hardly ever mentioned the ages of the victims because they wanted to generate a stir, causing everyone to think, "wow, that could have been me!"
Case in point: my sister in law had been sick for the better part of a week. Headache, coughing, slight nausea. She's one part each of hygiene freak and worry wart. She went to the doctor to find out what was wrong and the doctor said, "You have the West Nile virus." She turned pale. The doc resumed, "Take some Nyquil tonight, keep up on the vitamins, and you should be fine in a few days."
Now, this is a family who believes everything they see on TV, especially if it's on the news. She had a lot of fun phoning up relatives and telling them that she had West Nile. (Hell, wouldn't you?) Almost everyone she talked to hesitated and/or stuttered when she did that. Comical, yes, but it goes to show how much power the media has when exaggerating the deadliness of, well, damn near everything. I expect no different of this new flu "pandemic".
Sorry, but if you're using the same network and infrastructure as the rest of us then those connections can be monitored, your endpoints mapped, and your packets and traffic patterns analyzed.
Yes, but in order for all that to happen, they pretty much have to already know something about the darknet or a member of it, or figure out how to differentiate "darknet traffic" from normal network traffic. If you don't, it's usually going to be very difficult to find it. That was the point that I was trying to make.
If a darknet wants to hide itself further, they can use can use software that will encrypt data, talk on standard ports, even utilize stenography. Then it's going to be nearly impossible to spot darknet traffic without some sort of detailed and expensive analysis.
Why is everybody acting like these "darknets" are some new and dangerous threat? Christ, the Lockheed Martin guy sounds like he's angling for a job in the Bush administration.
Just because some random article suddenly applied a new word to a private invitation-only network of individuals doesn't make them new. In the mid-90's when I first went online, I would (try to) hang out with the hacker/phreaker/warez types. Because a lot of what they did was illegal (and btw, they got punished back them just as they do now), they tended to form close tight-knit, invitation-only groups. The medium then was/is IRC and via it, they shared knowledge and data. Another thing that hasn't changed is that more often than not, you have to contribute to the group in some significant way in order to both gain admittance and remain part of it.
"Darknets" have always been around and always will. By their very nature, you don't see them. You can't tell how many there are, and you certainly don't know what's going on inside them because you won't get invited without proving that you're one of them first.
Without being able to know at least these basic things about them, they simply can't be fought against. You basically have to make sure your own networks are secure and pretend the darknets don't exist because for all purposes, they don't.
I noticed that iRiver's line of MP3 players is (mostly) absent from this listing.
I recently got an iRiver IFP-899 and absolutely love it. I don't have any particularly overwhelming urge to store my entire music collection on a portable MP3 player, so a very expensive iPod or any of its very expensive clones are pretty much overkill for me.
Simply put, the iRiver is a great middle-of-the-road MP3 player. Rather than copying and pasting the specs from the corporate web page, I'll just list a few things that I particularly like about it.
It's very small
Receives FM radio
Can record from the built-in mic, the line-in jack, or the FM radio (sheduled too, if you like)
Plays MPEG 1/2/2.5 Layer 3, WMA, ASF, OGG
Built-in EQ
Some Linux support
Can be connected as a USB mass storage device (with a firmware upgrade)
Runs for 40 hours on a single AA battery
4-line backlit LCD
With prices on the unit dropping to almost $150, even Apple would have a hard time beating that. At $50 more, the iPod nano has double the storage but still only half the features.
Sounds rather like the business model of consumer-level laser printers. A year ago, I bought a Konica Minolta printer for $500. The only major difference between it and the $800 model was that the more expensive one had a few more features. (Postscript, PDF, and a few other things.) Everything else was completely the same. That's $300 whole extra dollars for nothing more than some different bytes in the firmware.
In prinicple, there's nothing particularly wrong with DRM. The bad name that DRM gets is primarily from all existing DRM implementations that are intentionally overly restrictive, trample on fair use, and are usually trivial to break in the hands of a competent hacker.
Right now it's pure speculation whether or not "fair" DRM can even exist, so I suspect that OpenDocument's claimed support of DRM is primarily a token gesture to soothe companies who might have been steered away for lack of stated DRM support. On the bright side, any DRM included in the OpenDocument specification will, by definition, be open. Thus we'll actually have a chance to evaluate and properly its technical merits without the fear of being sued under the DMCA by litigatous bullies.
Just as importantly, the mere fact that DRM is present in the OpenDocument specification does not imply that it will be built into any particular implementation. (OpenOffice, for instance.)
Indeed. They could have just bought the name for far less than what they probably paid their lawyers to harass the guy. But it seems that Microsoft would rather be a bunch of jerks than save money.
Re:From what I have heard of FreeBSD
on
FreeBSD 6.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Is that it's hard to use.
Rubbish. It's BSD, which means it's a Unix derivative. If you're familiar with one, you're familiar with them all. There are some differences, of course, but a skilled administrator or gifted hacker could bring themselves up to speed in an afternoon. If by "hard to use", you mean "there's no pointy-clicky administrative interface" then perhaps. However, most system administrators who have to deal with production systems all day long (FreeBSD's target audience) don't want any of that anyway.
I'm not sure what kind of environment FreeBSD is deisgned for (servers, desktops?)
FreeBSD is almost entirely geared toward servers. There are various movements and projects underway to help bring FreeBSD closer to the desktop, but it's nowhere near as strong as Linux in that arena. Linux is a good general-purpose Unix-like OS, but FreeBSD is typically regarded as a more solid server.
but the fact that I don't even know that says a lot
Forgive me for being blunt, but it only says that you didn't even bother looking into it. All of what I've stated here is fairly common knowledge to those who care enough to find out for themselves. We live in the age of the Internet. If you're curious about FreeBSD or any other operating system, go read up on it, don't just sit around to hear about it.
RELEASE and STABLE are mutually exclusive. Please read up on FreeBSD release naming.
I'm pretty sure you're confusing RELEASE and CURRENT. STABLE is a CVS branch (as CURRENT is) while a RELEASE is a CVS snapshot, no matter what branch it comes from. So you can have, say, the 5.4-RELEASE snapshot from the 5-STABLE branch.
Actually, userland for OS X is primarily netbsd derived, not freebsd.
Wrong. The page you linked to mentions all 3 BSDs exactly once, never specifying which one in particular the userland was primarily derived from.
I'm more inclined to believe the following, straight from news articles and Apple's own documentation:
"Going forward, [Darwin] will track a stable version of FreeBSD, which is the more popular and traditionally x86-only version that claims about a million users worldwide..." (source)
"The Darwin kernel is based on FreeBSD and Mach 3.0 technologies..." (source)
"...the BSD portion of Mac OS X is primarily derived from FreeBSD..." source)
"Above the Mach layer, the BSD layer provides "OS personality" APIs and services. The BSD layer is based on the BSD kernel, primarily FreeBSD." (source)
"We should note, however, that apart from a few architectural differences (such as our use of the Mach kernel), we try to keep Darwin as compatible as possible with FreeBSD (our BSD reference platform)." (source)
"Integrated with Mach is a customized version of the BSD operating system (currently FreeBSD 5)." (source)
In fact, practically the only references I can find to NetBSD in Apple's Developer Connection are to the HISTORY sections in some of the man pages. Apple may have borrowed some from NetBSD, but the main BSD player in OS X is clearly FreeBSD.
My thoughts exactly. I suppose their reasoning is that the extra money you spend on downloading the movie is for the convenience of not having to go through all of the trouble to get out of the house and go see it accompanied by friends on an enormous screen with hi-definition surround sound.
Looks like Internet movie piracy will still be alive and well for the time being.
What is problematic (both with the Web indexing and Book indexing) is the Google 'cache' - where you can get the content of the web page from Googles cache if the original web page is missing or slow. That is (in my opinion) a breach of the Web page owner's copyright - and would be a breech of the book's copyright too.
No it isn't. Google doesn't modify the content of the page or claim any copyright or affiliation on the cached page. The header at the top of a cached page in fact goes to great lengths to state so and even points users to the originating page. Even the ads are intact. Notice also that Google does not list any of their OWN ads on cached pages. They have ads on Google Print, but guess what? Those are ads to BUY THE VERY BOOKS that people are viewing. How is this not a win for all involved?
Comparing Google's web cache to Google Print for this argument gets you nowhere because while the cache shows you the whole work, Google Print only shows you a very small excerpt. It's clear to me that most people who criticize Google Print are those who haven't bothered to use it. If they had used it, they'd notice right away that it's impossible to read more than a few pages of any one book. Google makes it abundantly clear that their intention is to provide your search results with a little bit of context. Not the whole book. Providing short excerpts relevant to search results is what makes this fair use in terms of copyright law.
Let's think carefully about the 'Google cache' thing though - that's dubious because it allows people access to content without going through the content provider's access mechanisms. That's the thing that deprives the author of value.
I don't see the validity of this argument. It is well known that if you make something available on the web, it is then assumed that you WANT the widest dissemination possible. If it's on a public web server, then it's fair game for viewing, downloading, indexing, caching, archiving, and mirroring. If this is NOT what you want, then it's your responsibility to secure your content in some way or find an alternate medium.
If your goal is to restrict access to your content, there are well-documented ways to do it. You can place your data behind an authentication system, a clever script, or even just add a few <meta> tags to your site. Yes, this involves doing some work, but remember that the original intent of the web was to freely share information. If you don't want your information quite so free, you're going to have to put some effort into it.
Also, let's entertain the hypothetical situation that some court finds Google caching "morally dubious" and orders them to remove the feature. What about those of us who WANT their web content cached by the largest search engine in the world? Many (including myself) maintain websites and post content that we'd like to see spread as far and wide as possible. We measure value in terms of readership rather than money. Google's cache is a Good Thing for us. If it were made illegal, then that deprives OUR work of value because its exposure to the Internet audience at large is then artificially reduced.
These complaints aren't really valid. Symlinks on Unix are intentionally simple and lacking in features. Remember, the Unix philosophy is that you make a facility as simple and small as possible and then build around it later for increased functionality. Symlinks are a shining example of this, and I'd be more than happy to demonstrate why.
When you move a destination object, symlinks don't follow the target
This is by design. For proper conceptual view, imagine a symlink as a file containing a free-form path to another file. This path is never verified against the actual file system because it is assumed that the user knows what she is doing. A good thing, because a huge amount of software and self-imposed admin routines (like backups) depend on this behavior.
Why doesn't the mv command move these too?
Because mv would then have to scan the entire filesystem looking for symlinks which point to the target. And it would have to do this on EVERY FILE. You have any idea what kind of performance hit that would cause? The purpose of mv is to move files and that's ALL it should ever do. If you want more functionality, build something on top of it.
When you symlink a symlinked folder, the root symlink is ignored.
Again, this has to do with a symlink storing a plain old unvalidated string. An easy and simple workaround to this "problem" is to just symlink to the real path of the file rather than the symlinked path.
Symlinks cause all kinds of weirds around chrooted file systems
The cause of this is that you either are not using symlinks properly or you are not using chroot properly. I can't imagine symlinks causing much more confusion within a chroot than they do on a native filesystem if you use them right.
All of the complaints that you have against modern symlinks can be addressed either by managing your symlinks in an intelligent manner (including knowing when and when not to use them) or by creating some program that utilizes the current functionality and builds on top of it.
For example, there's nothing preventing you from writing a utility that keeps symlinks recorded in a small database so that you can move a file and any symlink paths that point to it at the same time without a performance hit. This is a much better solution than complaining that symlinks (and the other Unix utilities) are broken because they don't incorporate some functionality that you happen to want.
It's not like Linux never copied an idea from another OS, yet it seems MS is not allowed to add a feature unless they thought of it themselves.
I don't complain so much that Microsoft is taking ideas from Unix or other operating systems, but rather that they took so bloody long to finally copy the essential stuff like symlinks and a real command line.
I have to concur. My first sci-fi con was Penguicon, an Open Source/Sci-Fi con. I was amazed how the gender ratio was fairly well balanced. It did seem that most of the women there were either geeks or sci-fi fans, though. I didn't enounter many who were both.
I know that this is like swatting a fly with a nuclear weapon...
Not at all. As long as PostgreSQL enables you faster and easier access to your inventory, then that's reason enough to be using it for that purpose. A lot of people are under the assumption that a full-fledged database is only appropriate for large or complex data sets. This is wrong. I use PostgreSQL on my home server to hold contact information for a "friends and family" addressbook as well as a few other teeny-tiny datasets because it was simple to set up, is trivial to back up and maintain, and can be easily exported in practically any way. You're not alone in using a database for what most consider relatively minor tasks.:)
I switched to Linux back in my teenage years because I had done just about every geeky thing that I could think of in Windows 95. When I heard about Linux being a Unix-like OS that can run on practically any old x86, I jumped. It wasn't about hating Microsoft (though I certainly did not favor them), it wasn't even that much about open source or free software, the switch to Linux for me was about trying to find something new and interesting to do with my computer. I didn't even realize until after I had installed Slackware 3.3 that I could endlessly tinker with and recompile the whole OS from source code if I wanted to.
Everybody always speculates that there will be shortages for an upcoming console launch and it rarely ever happens. So just... cut it out, for cripe's sake.
Video game manufacturers announcing possible shortages of their new-fangled system on launch is nothing more than a marketing ploy. The rule these days, not the exception.
What data is not considered information, and vice-versa?
Data is a set of raw facts. (A stream of bits, for example.) After you apply some sort of algorithm to it, it becomes information. (A digitized image, for example.) After you mentally process the information and consider it within the context of the situation, it becomes knowledge. (Goatse.cx, for example.)
Of course, there are some kinds of knowledge most people would rather not have.
It's amazing to me that real piracy, where huge profits are made, is ignored while file sharing between friends is hammered.
Oh no it isn't. The **AA are very keen to stop wide-scale piracy and probably put far more effort into combatting it than the peer-to-peer piracy. The reason we never hear about wide-scale piracy, though, is that they don't want us to hear about it. For at least two reasons:
1) They don't want to make it known that you can buy a copy of a pirated movie/album at a fraction of the cost of the real thing. Remember, a lot of people don't care about the quality of a movie/album, they just want to see/hear it. The **AA want to impress upon the general public that the only way to get content is to buy it at Walmart.
2) The more they can convince consumers and lawmakers that wide-scale piracy is a solved problem, the more leverage they have in convincing them that peer-to-peer piracy is the biggest threat to the stability of the movie/music industry. Which is, of course, ludicrous.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Ditto for West Nile. Media made a huge to-do about it a few years back, but for the most part, the only people it ever claimed were the very young and very old: in other words, those that pnumonia probably would have gotten as well. It was usually in the web news or newspapers where the victims' ages would be listed, the TV and radio hardly ever mentioned the ages of the victims because they wanted to generate a stir, causing everyone to think, "wow, that could have been me!"
Case in point: my sister in law had been sick for the better part of a week. Headache, coughing, slight nausea. She's one part each of hygiene freak and worry wart. She went to the doctor to find out what was wrong and the doctor said, "You have the West Nile virus." She turned pale. The doc resumed, "Take some Nyquil tonight, keep up on the vitamins, and you should be fine in a few days."
Now, this is a family who believes everything they see on TV, especially if it's on the news. She had a lot of fun phoning up relatives and telling them that she had West Nile. (Hell, wouldn't you?) Almost everyone she talked to hesitated and/or stuttered when she did that. Comical, yes, but it goes to show how much power the media has when exaggerating the deadliness of, well, damn near everything. I expect no different of this new flu "pandemic".
Sorry, but if you're using the same network and infrastructure as the rest of us then those connections can be monitored, your endpoints mapped, and your packets and traffic patterns analyzed.
Yes, but in order for all that to happen, they pretty much have to already know something about the darknet or a member of it, or figure out how to differentiate "darknet traffic" from normal network traffic. If you don't, it's usually going to be very difficult to find it. That was the point that I was trying to make.
If a darknet wants to hide itself further, they can use can use software that will encrypt data, talk on standard ports, even utilize stenography. Then it's going to be nearly impossible to spot darknet traffic without some sort of detailed and expensive analysis.
Why is everybody acting like these "darknets" are some new and dangerous threat? Christ, the Lockheed Martin guy sounds like he's angling for a job in the Bush administration.
Just because some random article suddenly applied a new word to a private invitation-only network of individuals doesn't make them new. In the mid-90's when I first went online, I would (try to) hang out with the hacker/phreaker/warez types. Because a lot of what they did was illegal (and btw, they got punished back them just as they do now), they tended to form close tight-knit, invitation-only groups. The medium then was/is IRC and via it, they shared knowledge and data. Another thing that hasn't changed is that more often than not, you have to contribute to the group in some significant way in order to both gain admittance and remain part of it.
"Darknets" have always been around and always will. By their very nature, you don't see them. You can't tell how many there are, and you certainly don't know what's going on inside them because you won't get invited without proving that you're one of them first.
Without being able to know at least these basic things about them, they simply can't be fought against. You basically have to make sure your own networks are secure and pretend the darknets don't exist because for all purposes, they don't.
I noticed that iRiver's line of MP3 players is (mostly) absent from this listing.
I recently got an iRiver IFP-899 and absolutely love it. I don't have any particularly overwhelming urge to store my entire music collection on a portable MP3 player, so a very expensive iPod or any of its very expensive clones are pretty much overkill for me.
Simply put, the iRiver is a great middle-of-the-road MP3 player. Rather than copying and pasting the specs from the corporate web page, I'll just list a few things that I particularly like about it.
With prices on the unit dropping to almost $150, even Apple would have a hard time beating that. At $50 more, the iPod nano has double the storage but still only half the features.
Sounds rather like the business model of consumer-level laser printers. A year ago, I bought a Konica Minolta printer for $500. The only major difference between it and the $800 model was that the more expensive one had a few more features. (Postscript, PDF, and a few other things.) Everything else was completely the same. That's $300 whole extra dollars for nothing more than some different bytes in the firmware.
In prinicple, there's nothing particularly wrong with DRM. The bad name that DRM gets is primarily from all existing DRM implementations that are intentionally overly restrictive, trample on fair use, and are usually trivial to break in the hands of a competent hacker.
Right now it's pure speculation whether or not "fair" DRM can even exist, so I suspect that OpenDocument's claimed support of DRM is primarily a token gesture to soothe companies who might have been steered away for lack of stated DRM support. On the bright side, any DRM included in the OpenDocument specification will, by definition, be open. Thus we'll actually have a chance to evaluate and properly its technical merits without the fear of being sued under the DMCA by litigatous bullies.
Just as importantly, the mere fact that DRM is present in the OpenDocument specification does not imply that it will be built into any particular implementation. (OpenOffice, for instance.)
Indeed. They could have just bought the name for far less than what they probably paid their lawyers to harass the guy. But it seems that Microsoft would rather be a bunch of jerks than save money.
Is that it's hard to use.
Rubbish. It's BSD, which means it's a Unix derivative. If you're familiar with one, you're familiar with them all. There are some differences, of course, but a skilled administrator or gifted hacker could bring themselves up to speed in an afternoon. If by "hard to use", you mean "there's no pointy-clicky administrative interface" then perhaps. However, most system administrators who have to deal with production systems all day long (FreeBSD's target audience) don't want any of that anyway.
I'm not sure what kind of environment FreeBSD is deisgned for (servers, desktops?)
FreeBSD is almost entirely geared toward servers. There are various movements and projects underway to help bring FreeBSD closer to the desktop, but it's nowhere near as strong as Linux in that arena. Linux is a good general-purpose Unix-like OS, but FreeBSD is typically regarded as a more solid server.
but the fact that I don't even know that says a lot
Forgive me for being blunt, but it only says that you didn't even bother looking into it. All of what I've stated here is fairly common knowledge to those who care enough to find out for themselves. We live in the age of the Internet. If you're curious about FreeBSD or any other operating system, go read up on it, don't just sit around to hear about it.
RELEASE and STABLE are mutually exclusive. Please read up on FreeBSD release naming.
I'm pretty sure you're confusing RELEASE and CURRENT. STABLE is a CVS branch (as CURRENT is) while a RELEASE is a CVS snapshot, no matter what branch it comes from. So you can have, say, the 5.4-RELEASE snapshot from the 5-STABLE branch.
Actually, userland for OS X is primarily netbsd derived, not freebsd.
Wrong. The page you linked to mentions all 3 BSDs exactly once, never specifying which one in particular the userland was primarily derived from.
I'm more inclined to believe the following, straight from news articles and Apple's own documentation:
"Going forward, [Darwin] will track a stable version of FreeBSD, which is the more popular and traditionally x86-only version that claims about a million users worldwide..." (source)
"The Darwin kernel is based on FreeBSD and Mach 3.0 technologies..." (source)
"...the BSD portion of Mac OS X is primarily derived from FreeBSD..." source)
"Above the Mach layer, the BSD layer provides "OS personality" APIs and services. The BSD layer is based on the BSD kernel, primarily FreeBSD." (source)
"We should note, however, that apart from a few architectural differences (such as our use of the Mach kernel), we try to keep Darwin as compatible as possible with FreeBSD (our BSD reference platform)." (source)
"Integrated with Mach is a customized version of the BSD operating system (currently FreeBSD 5)." (source)
In fact, practically the only references I can find to NetBSD in Apple's Developer Connection are to the HISTORY sections in some of the man pages. Apple may have borrowed some from NetBSD, but the main BSD player in OS X is clearly FreeBSD.
My thoughts exactly. I suppose their reasoning is that the extra money you spend on downloading the movie is for the convenience of not having to go through all of the trouble to get out of the house and go see it accompanied by friends on an enormous screen with hi-definition surround sound.
Looks like Internet movie piracy will still be alive and well for the time being.
What is problematic (both with the Web indexing and Book indexing) is the Google 'cache' - where you can get the content of the web page from Googles cache if the original web page is missing or slow. That is (in my opinion) a breach of the Web page owner's copyright - and would be a breech of the book's copyright too.
No it isn't. Google doesn't modify the content of the page or claim any copyright or affiliation on the cached page. The header at the top of a cached page in fact goes to great lengths to state so and even points users to the originating page. Even the ads are intact. Notice also that Google does not list any of their OWN ads on cached pages. They have ads on Google Print, but guess what? Those are ads to BUY THE VERY BOOKS that people are viewing. How is this not a win for all involved?
Comparing Google's web cache to Google Print for this argument gets you nowhere because while the cache shows you the whole work, Google Print only shows you a very small excerpt. It's clear to me that most people who criticize Google Print are those who haven't bothered to use it. If they had used it, they'd notice right away that it's impossible to read more than a few pages of any one book. Google makes it abundantly clear that their intention is to provide your search results with a little bit of context. Not the whole book. Providing short excerpts relevant to search results is what makes this fair use in terms of copyright law.
Let's think carefully about the 'Google cache' thing though - that's dubious because it allows people access to content without going through the content provider's access mechanisms. That's the thing that deprives the author of value.
I don't see the validity of this argument. It is well known that if you make something available on the web, it is then assumed that you WANT the widest dissemination possible. If it's on a public web server, then it's fair game for viewing, downloading, indexing, caching, archiving, and mirroring. If this is NOT what you want, then it's your responsibility to secure your content in some way or find an alternate medium.
If your goal is to restrict access to your content, there are well-documented ways to do it. You can place your data behind an authentication system, a clever script, or even just add a few <meta> tags to your site. Yes, this involves doing some work, but remember that the original intent of the web was to freely share information. If you don't want your information quite so free, you're going to have to put some effort into it.
Also, let's entertain the hypothetical situation that some court finds Google caching "morally dubious" and orders them to remove the feature. What about those of us who WANT their web content cached by the largest search engine in the world? Many (including myself) maintain websites and post content that we'd like to see spread as far and wide as possible. We measure value in terms of readership rather than money. Google's cache is a Good Thing for us. If it were made illegal, then that deprives OUR work of value because its exposure to the Internet audience at large is then artificially reduced.
These complaints aren't really valid. Symlinks on Unix are intentionally simple and lacking in features. Remember, the Unix philosophy is that you make a facility as simple and small as possible and then build around it later for increased functionality. Symlinks are a shining example of this, and I'd be more than happy to demonstrate why.
When you move a destination object, symlinks don't follow the target
This is by design. For proper conceptual view, imagine a symlink as a file containing a free-form path to another file. This path is never verified against the actual file system because it is assumed that the user knows what she is doing. A good thing, because a huge amount of software and self-imposed admin routines (like backups) depend on this behavior.
Why doesn't the mv command move these too?
Because mv would then have to scan the entire filesystem looking for symlinks which point to the target. And it would have to do this on EVERY FILE. You have any idea what kind of performance hit that would cause? The purpose of mv is to move files and that's ALL it should ever do. If you want more functionality, build something on top of it.
When you symlink a symlinked folder, the root symlink is ignored.
Again, this has to do with a symlink storing a plain old unvalidated string. An easy and simple workaround to this "problem" is to just symlink to the real path of the file rather than the symlinked path.
Symlinks cause all kinds of weirds around chrooted file systems
The cause of this is that you either are not using symlinks properly or you are not using chroot properly. I can't imagine symlinks causing much more confusion within a chroot than they do on a native filesystem if you use them right.
All of the complaints that you have against modern symlinks can be addressed either by managing your symlinks in an intelligent manner (including knowing when and when not to use them) or by creating some program that utilizes the current functionality and builds on top of it.
For example, there's nothing preventing you from writing a utility that keeps symlinks recorded in a small database so that you can move a file and any symlink paths that point to it at the same time without a performance hit. This is a much better solution than complaining that symlinks (and the other Unix utilities) are broken because they don't incorporate some functionality that you happen to want.
No, junctions on NTFS are much closer to mount points on Unix rather than symlinks.
It's not like Linux never copied an idea from another OS, yet it seems MS is not allowed to add a feature unless they thought of it themselves.
I don't complain so much that Microsoft is taking ideas from Unix or other operating systems, but rather that they took so bloody long to finally copy the essential stuff like symlinks and a real command line.
I have to concur. My first sci-fi con was Penguicon, an Open Source/Sci-Fi con. I was amazed how the gender ratio was fairly well balanced. It did seem that most of the women there were either geeks or sci-fi fans, though. I didn't enounter many who were both.
I know that this is like swatting a fly with a nuclear weapon...
Not at all. As long as PostgreSQL enables you faster and easier access to your inventory, then that's reason enough to be using it for that purpose. A lot of people are under the assumption that a full-fledged database is only appropriate for large or complex data sets. This is wrong. I use PostgreSQL on my home server to hold contact information for a "friends and family" addressbook as well as a few other teeny-tiny datasets because it was simple to set up, is trivial to back up and maintain, and can be easily exported in practically any way. You're not alone in using a database for what most consider relatively minor tasks.
No one switches for just the operating system.
Er, I did.
I switched to Linux back in my teenage years because I had done just about every geeky thing that I could think of in Windows 95. When I heard about Linux being a Unix-like OS that can run on practically any old x86, I jumped. It wasn't about hating Microsoft (though I certainly did not favor them), it wasn't even that much about open source or free software, the switch to Linux for me was about trying to find something new and interesting to do with my computer. I didn't even realize until after I had installed Slackware 3.3 that I could endlessly tinker with and recompile the whole OS from source code if I wanted to.
I haven't been bored since.
Everybody always speculates that there will be shortages for an upcoming console launch and it rarely ever happens. So just... cut it out, for cripe's sake.
Video game manufacturers announcing possible shortages of their new-fangled system on launch is nothing more than a marketing ploy. The rule these days, not the exception.
Why do you think folks switch?
To look cool on Slashdot.
What data is not considered information, and vice-versa?
Data is a set of raw facts. (A stream of bits, for example.) After you apply some sort of algorithm to it, it becomes information. (A digitized image, for example.) After you mentally process the information and consider it within the context of the situation, it becomes knowledge. (Goatse.cx, for example.)
Of course, there are some kinds of knowledge most people would rather not have.
It's amazing to me that real piracy, where huge profits are made, is ignored while file sharing between friends is hammered.
Oh no it isn't. The **AA are very keen to stop wide-scale piracy and probably put far more effort into combatting it than the peer-to-peer piracy. The reason we never hear about wide-scale piracy, though, is that they don't want us to hear about it. For at least two reasons:
1) They don't want to make it known that you can buy a copy of a pirated movie/album at a fraction of the cost of the real thing. Remember, a lot of people don't care about the quality of a movie/album, they just want to see/hear it. The **AA want to impress upon the general public that the only way to get content is to buy it at Walmart.
2) The more they can convince consumers and lawmakers that wide-scale piracy is a solved problem, the more leverage they have in convincing them that peer-to-peer piracy is the biggest threat to the stability of the movie/music industry. Which is, of course, ludicrous.
Blast it, must have typo'd the URL:
Questions Frequently Asked by NSTTF Visitors About Solar Energy
Next time, please properly quote and cite your material. I'll do it for you just this once:
A little off-topic, but based on the headline, I thought at first that this story was going to be about how my home town got its name.