I made a protest vote (for the no hoper candidate) but not because I wanted them elected (far from it). I didn't want to do that, because I believe you should only vote for someone who you actually want to represent you, so a none of the above option would be ideal. Spoiling your ballot paper is a pointless waste of time, since it isn't recorded in any meaningful way and just slows down the count.
I'm not over fond of politicians at the best of times, but during an election campaign they all seem to become the most odious toe-rags imaginable. It's the politicians who need to change, not the electoral system.
It also encrypts the data as it hits the platter, this has some support implications. This is how I understand it, anyway:
For example, I have a IBM ThinkPad with the (still optional) TPM chip in it (it's huge! almost as big as the ATI graphics chip next to it).
If the laptop is stolen, the data is marginally safer, in that you can't just remove the disk and mount it on another machine. You could however boot off recovery media (floppy, CD, whatever), reset the passwd, reboot and login as Admin (maybe Longhorn will have some way of preventing this). Thinkpads have a way of preventing other media to boot, but there are ways around that.
The real showstopper is when I spill a cup of coffee over the machine and the system board is fried. Now assuming I don't have a backup copy, how to I then recover my data?
The TPM chip (currently) just gets in the way and provides minimal security with significant drawbacks.
And people wonder why destros like these will NEVER make it to the public and get the support they so richly deserve.
Distros like this fail (everything fails eventually) but the good bits will be carried on.
Speaking as someone who tried gentoo (seriously, I ran it for over a year) I learned to appreciate the strengths:
Bang up to date code. Compiled from source with full optimisation for the target platform Dependencies handled cleanly Very customisable
But the downsides (for my purposes) were too great for this distro to be useful:
I can get bang up to date code which is precompiled and arguably better tested against the rest of the distro, from almost any other linux distro. Compiling from source, while *fun* and *cool* and *optimised* is negligably faster in most cases. The time spent compiling was *never* regained in performance improvements over the lifetime of the code (which might be measured in weeks before another update is required). A small incremental version change in a fringe application can cause a *huge* menace in dependant software requiring recompile. OpenOffice, X and QT where the worst offenders in my experience. I mean sure, when FC3 releases a new patch against OOo I have to download another 300mb of crap to install (FC3 sucks in many ways), at least I don't have to recompile the bastard.
The fact is, the gentoo community suffers criticism poorly. I remember pouring over howtos and the forums trying to extricate myself from emerge inter-dependency wonkiness, I was hugely disappointed with the help on offer and the general attitude of hostility. I won't be going back.
/dev/zeros.After all, in linux you can make a copy of/dev/zero just by typing cp/dev/zero/dev/zeros. What's that? You can't? You have to type cpio/dev/zero?
Yes, only root has any business creating devices of course and he should be using mknod anyway, That's well defined behaviour. Special files are not treated in the same way as normal files, remember directories themselves are just files.
The people who will have problems are those trying to tie the two, writing shell scripts to automate GUI operations, etc. I guess these are the hardcore apple geeks who want to get the most out of their system, and the unix admins who have been told that since macos is unix they are now in charge of maintaining the macs.
That's who I'm thinking of, This crap is exactly the sort of minor thing that causes a well used and well tested cross platform script to die on this platform, rendering the platform itself awkward to maintain and incurring significant cost in a non-trivial enterprise environment.
Resource forks, what the hell were they smoking anyway?
On the basis that *gasp* it's proprietary? When was the last time you saw a ZDNet reviewer lambast Windows because it's proprietary? The reviewer sounds like some childish linux fanboy attempting to take cheap potshots at a sturdy, well-featured, commercial OS with a heck of a lot of new *useful* features (Dtrace, Janus, ZFS, all of which he either fails to mention, or writes some bogus statement showing he doesn't understand them).
I agree with your comments.
It's OK though, we don't come to slashdot for fair and balanced coverage of Solaris.
Methinks thou dost protest too much. Don't worry, it's common for closet homosexuals to engage in homophobic behaviour.
I do detest that flippant argument. It always seems to surface in these sort of discussions. How can 'you don't agree with me so you must be secretly gay' amount to anything more than childish name calling?
As to homophobia, I believe there's a certain natural 'background radiation' of it. Humans generally find the 'atypical' scary until they learn that it's not threatening.
Yeah, it's easy to say blogs need censorship, but how is [an] official going to censor blogs.
What is a 'blog'?
A made up word if you ask me. A website, possibly connected to some sort of forum, would seem to be what they're on about. How do you censor those? In the the same way it's done now.
She created the Dr. Who theme and was a huge influence on the BBC radiophonic workshop. BBC Radio 4 did a very interesting afternoon play about her recently.
Plus, is the fact that there aren't many female OSS developers, or female developers in general, really anything like a problem?
I mean, I don't stay awake at night worrying why men aren't better represented in advertising, nursing, admin, HR, child care, midwifery, marketing and all the other careers which are (mainly) dominated by women.
Also consider the following: A women applies for a programming job and a man applies for a pre-school child care job. Which application is treated with the most prejudice and suspicion? And Why?
Its not Like Etats-Unians really helped in WW1 or WW2 , they just came in at the end.
First world war, perhaps/maybe/maybe-not.
Second world war, no. France capituated when it was outclassed miitarily, as did most of continental Europe. Britain was starved of resources because of the U-Boat menace, plus the colonies were getting a kicking from the Japs in the pacific. We were in no fit state to help France, we barely fought the luftwaffe off as it was.
You could have waited a few more years for the Russians to end the war, but then continental Europe would have become a greater part of the soviet union.
It's pretty clear which companies are on each side. With this statement, CA position themselves on the "sliders" side along with IBM, Novell, and the free/open source community.
Bollocks. CA's interest in linux is to sell their crappy overpriced software to run on it and/or to get people to migrate linux apps to the mainframe where they charge *exorbitant* quarterly/monthly license fees for their crappy management software.
I can't think of any legitimate reason for a printer driver to know the current date, so there doesn't appear to be an immediate reason why this wouldn't work.
I can think of one reason - they're waiting for the time when printerkind is to rise up and enslave humanity.
Hell hath no fury like the vast inket printer army of a woman scorned!
For terminals though, I *love* non-smoothed Lucida Typewriter 9 point. Not the Xfree version though (the 'm' and 'w' look wierd), I like the one which comes with Solaris (the standard font used by OpenWindow's cmdtool).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. I would have.
I made a protest vote (for the no hoper candidate) but not because I wanted them elected (far from it). I didn't want to do that, because I believe you should only vote for someone who you actually want to represent you, so a none of the above option would be ideal. Spoiling your ballot paper is a pointless waste of time, since it isn't recorded in any meaningful way and just slows down the count.
I'm not over fond of politicians at the best of times, but during an election campaign they all seem to become the most odious toe-rags imaginable. It's the politicians who need to change, not the electoral system.
...out of town.
It also encrypts the data as it hits the platter, this has some support implications. This is how I understand it, anyway:
For example, I have a IBM ThinkPad with the (still optional) TPM chip in it (it's huge! almost as big as the ATI graphics chip next to it).
If the laptop is stolen, the data is marginally safer, in that you can't just remove the disk and mount it on another machine. You could however boot off recovery media (floppy, CD, whatever), reset the passwd, reboot and login as Admin (maybe Longhorn will have some way of preventing this). Thinkpads have a way of preventing other media to boot, but there are ways around that.
The real showstopper is when I spill a cup of coffee over the machine and the system board is fried. Now assuming I don't have a backup copy, how to I then recover my data?
The TPM chip (currently) just gets in the way and provides minimal security with significant drawbacks.
And people wonder why destros like these will NEVER make it to the public and get the support they so richly deserve.
Distros like this fail (everything fails eventually) but the good bits will be carried on.
Speaking as someone who tried gentoo (seriously, I ran it for over a year) I learned to appreciate the strengths:
Bang up to date code.
Compiled from source with full optimisation for the target platform
Dependencies handled cleanly
Very customisable
But the downsides (for my purposes) were too great for this distro to be useful:
I can get bang up to date code which is precompiled and arguably better tested against the rest of the distro, from almost any other linux distro.
Compiling from source, while *fun* and *cool* and *optimised* is negligably faster in most cases. The time spent compiling was *never* regained in performance improvements over the lifetime of the code (which might be measured in weeks before another update is required).
A small incremental version change in a fringe application can cause a *huge* menace in dependant software requiring recompile. OpenOffice, X and QT where the worst offenders in my experience. I mean sure, when FC3 releases a new patch against OOo I have to download another 300mb of crap to install (FC3 sucks in many ways), at least I don't have to recompile the bastard.
The fact is, the gentoo community suffers criticism poorly. I remember pouring over howtos and the forums trying to extricate myself from emerge inter-dependency wonkiness, I was hugely disappointed with the help on offer and the general attitude of hostility. I won't be going back.
/dev/zeros.After all, in linux you can make a copy of /dev/zero just by typing cp /dev/zero /dev/zeros. What's that? You can't? You have to type cpio /dev/zero?
Yes, only root has any business creating devices of course and he should be using mknod anyway, That's well defined behaviour. Special files are not treated in the same way as normal files, remember directories themselves are just files.
The people who will have problems are those trying to tie the two, writing shell scripts to automate GUI operations, etc. I guess these are the hardcore apple geeks who want to get the most out of their system, and the unix admins who have been told that since macos is unix they are now in charge of maintaining the macs.
That's who I'm thinking of, This crap is exactly the sort of minor thing that causes a well used and well tested cross platform script to die on this platform, rendering the platform itself awkward to maintain and incurring significant cost in a non-trivial enterprise environment.
Resource forks, what the hell were they smoking anyway?
...but realistically how often do you use named pipes via NFS?
It only takes one application at one large defence contractor (for example) for shortcomings like this to become a *real* showstopper.
Also, come on! cp/mv/tar etc. are broken WRT core OS functionality. That's not UNIX, it's a shambles.
On the basis that *gasp* it's proprietary? When was the last time you saw a ZDNet reviewer lambast Windows because it's proprietary? The reviewer sounds like some childish linux fanboy attempting to take cheap potshots at a sturdy, well-featured, commercial OS with a heck of a lot of new *useful* features (Dtrace, Janus, ZFS, all of which he either fails to mention, or writes some bogus statement showing he doesn't understand them).
I agree with your comments.
It's OK though, we don't come to slashdot for fair and balanced coverage of Solaris.
Seems like just yesterday people were saying Linux doesn't yet deliver as an alternative to Solaris.
Er, that's because it doesn't. They're different OSs tuned for different goals.
Well '!=' I suppose...
Methinks thou dost protest too much. Don't worry, it's common for closet homosexuals to engage in homophobic behaviour.
I do detest that flippant argument. It always seems to surface in these sort of discussions. How can 'you don't agree with me so you must be secretly gay' amount to anything more than childish name calling?
As to homophobia, I believe there's a certain natural 'background radiation' of it. Humans generally find the 'atypical' scary until they learn that it's not threatening.
I can mention that I work on a government project covered by the Official Secrets Act, but that is about the sum of it.
:)
Excellent. I'm putting that on my CV.
It certainly looks better than:
'For the last 18 months I have mostly been drinking beer and playing computer games.'
Yeah, it's easy to say blogs need censorship, but how is [an] official going to censor blogs.
What is a 'blog'?
A made up word if you ask me. A website, possibly connected to some sort of forum, would seem to be what they're on about. How do you censor those? In the the same way it's done now.
In my experience, harder to understand than self-modifying code.
http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/
Delia Derbyshire.
Hugely overlooked, very interesting music.
She created the Dr. Who theme and was a huge influence on the BBC radiophonic workshop. BBC Radio 4 did a very interesting afternoon play about her recently.
Plus, is the fact that there aren't many female OSS developers, or female developers in general, really anything like a problem?
I mean, I don't stay awake at night worrying why men aren't better represented in advertising, nursing, admin, HR, child care, midwifery, marketing and all the other careers which are (mainly) dominated by women.
Also consider the following: A women applies for a programming job and a man applies for a pre-school child care job. Which application is treated with the most prejudice and suspicion? And Why?
Its not Like Etats-Unians really helped in WW1 or WW2 , they just came in at the end.
First world war, perhaps/maybe/maybe-not.
Second world war, no. France capituated when it was outclassed miitarily, as did most of continental Europe. Britain was starved of resources because of the U-Boat menace, plus the colonies were getting a kicking from the Japs in the pacific. We were in no fit state to help France, we barely fought the luftwaffe off as it was.
You could have waited a few more years for the Russians to end the war, but then continental Europe would have become a greater part of the soviet union.
You have the yanks to thank, mes amis.
Tell me those lyrics don't get him into Slashdot. :)
Those lyrics don't get him into Slashdot.
I'm at a loss for words. It's just utter crap.
User Friendly? Crap writing combined with utterly juvenile drawing. God, I could do better than that and I ought to have my hands chopped off.
Or turn up in a sports car with a leggy blonde on your arm.
(You may need to rent these items...)
An excellent book. However...
Sadly Dawkins is such a rabid atheist he alienates a lot of people with religious beliefs from actually beginning to read and understand the text.
The stuff the creationists come up with is just absurd though.
It's pretty clear which companies are on each side. With this statement, CA position themselves on the "sliders" side along with IBM, Novell, and the free/open source community.
Bollocks. CA's interest in linux is to sell their crappy overpriced software to run on it and/or to get people to migrate linux apps to the mainframe where they charge *exorbitant* quarterly/monthly license fees for their crappy management software.
...first the brits fob off their malfunctioning nuclear subs on us...
:)
An alarming malfunction! It was diesel powered when it left port...
I can't think of any legitimate reason for a printer driver to know the current date, so there doesn't appear to be an immediate reason why this wouldn't work.
I can think of one reason - they're waiting for the time when printerkind is to rise up and enslave humanity.
Hell hath no fury like the vast inket printer army of a woman scorned!
What does that actually mean?
...in a state of suspended animation here
:).
I prefer Bitstream Vera myself.
For terminals though, I *love* non-smoothed Lucida Typewriter 9 point. Not the Xfree version though (the 'm' and 'w' look wierd), I like the one which comes with Solaris (the standard font used by OpenWindow's cmdtool).
Mmm, functional