What do you think could keep Apple from muscling in right there?
The lawsuit by Apple records in the 60s.
Doesn't apply any more. After the latest legal wranglings Apple Inc (computers) now owns all rights to the Apple name. They licence back the name to Apple records to allow them to continue trading under their old name.
I don't think it's ever come out how much this cost Apple Inc, but you can bet it wasn't cheap!
A way to recover gracefully from a misconfigured X is highly overdue. On the other hand, these days it would be simpler to just not specify any resolutions at all, and let the autodetect handle it.
I've just been reading a thread on the Fedora devel list about this. Seems that the basis for the new Ubuntu tool may not be as bulletproof as they were hoping. They appear to be using code from RHEL which is now being abandoned as it caused more problems than it solved.
A misconfigured X-org.conf invariably happens when the Fedora Core Package Updater has to update the kernel packages (I dread seeing those "reload current page" type arrows on the dialog window, which means nothing else can be updated until the kernel is updated).
Then the kernel gets updated, all the linkages to the Nvidia driver get fried. Xorg.conf still thinks the driver is there, can't find it and panics - although it does try several times to find a suitable resolution.
..or you could just install the Livna Nvidia package which will handle all of this for you automatically. You get separate versions of the nvidia binary with each new kernel so you can use whichever one you want and everything keeps working.
Probably about once every three times I get updates for Ubuntu or Fedora, I have to do a reboot.
I suppose that depends on how often you're getting your updates, but here:
$ wc -l/var/log/yum.log 140/var/log/yum.log
$ grep kernel.i686/var/log/yum.log | wc -l 1
So since Fedora 7 came out I've had 140 updates, of which precisely 1 has been a kernel update (which is the only one which would require a reboot). Maybe if you're tracking rawhide they'd be more frequent, but normally they're pretty rare.
Well I had my first experience of Vista last night, setting up a 2GHz Celeron laptop a friend had just bought which came with Home basic.
Whilst everything worked OK and actually looked pretty good I was hugely unimpressed with how slow it was. Opening an application like firefox took 20-30 seconds and logging a user in or out seemed to take forever. Also, even though vista came pre installed it went through innumerable setup routines when first booted (including at least 2 reboots) such that I could have done a linux install in the same amount of time it took me to get to a desktop.
Were it not for my friend wanting to use a load of kids CDROMS on this machine I'd have swapped it over to linux in a heartbeat and they'd have had a much more usable machine.
I've lived in both Germany and Russia. I am now under the impression that the whole "simlock" thing is a US only stupidity and just waiting for a class action lawsuit before it's finally abated.
Actually it's not just the US. All of the phones I've purchased in the UK have been simlocked to the network I got them from. This really isn't an issue though. Any town centre will have a market stall or small shop who will unlock your phone for about 5 pounds. It beats me why the networks still bother with these kinds of ineffective protections.
You're looking in the wrong place. Since the merger of Core and Extras the Fedora 7 release is in a slightly different place on the ftp site to the previous Fedora Core releases.
Have a look in/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/ in whichever mirror you choose. All of the ISOs for the different spins are under there for F7.
Oh come on. I'm 6'3" and I've got an 800cc Daewoo Matiz which has enough headroom that I could sit in it wearning a top hat if I wanted. It's also got 4 doors and carries my family of 4 to school/work easily. I don't use it for long motorway journeys, but for most day to day use it's absolutely fine.
Hey, I like Fedora. I'd like to know that it was popular. That's why I wish we had numbers that meant something more.
Well if you can wait until Fedora 7 then this will include Smolt which is a hardware profiler which collects not only information about how many systems are running fedora, but also what hardware they are using. This should hopefully give a better picture of the usage of Fedora and may also help with pressuring harware manufacturers for better linux support.
Of course sending your details to Smolt is stictly optional so reported numbers are guaranteed to be an underestimate, but hopefully most users will participate.
C'mon, give it a fair chance! Let's say that the researchers surround the message in a contiguous block of text meant simply as a marker. Then future researchers could, by analyzing the degree of degradation of the marker, figure out at what point the message was written. A statistical analysis of a population of bacteria could preesumably provide enough information to reassemble the message. Besides, it is possible in principle to write the same message fifty times on one of these things. The more times you write it, the more resilient it is to degradation, since a statistical analysis (on just one individual) will allow you to reassemble the message. Do these ideas provide even a glimmer of hope for this technique? What do you think?
I'd say that given any significant number of generations (which can be as short as 20mins in a bacterium) that you don't have a hope of keeping any number of functionally useless DNA sequences in tact. Evolution can be scarily efficient at getting rid of anything which is even mildly detrimental to its host, and even if the message is neutral in terms of its survival it still stands a good chance of getting chewed up. Remember it doesn't have to degrade through single mutations, big insertions and deletions can and do happen.
Even if you're introducing DNA into an organism in a fairly small way then you normally have to link it to an antibiotic resistance gene and then feed that antibiotic to the bacteria to give them an incentive to keep hold of it. Bacteria don't have nearly as much junk DNA as higher eukaryotes and there is a lot of competition in a bacterial colony.
DNA as a storage mechanism, sure it could work. DNA storage just by putting it into a bacterial genome and hoping it'll stay there - forget it. As a final nail in its coffin, the B subtilis genome is only 4.2Mb(ases) long, and that includes all the stuff it can't survive without. That probably leaves you about a floppies worth of usable storage - and that's without having redundant copies.
I never quite understood this; can't you compile FF2 on your Fedora? Is it just the issue of the fact that it can't be installed using a package manager?
I shouldn't *have* to compile an application which is commonly used by a metric boatload of people. It should be in the packages repository. As I understand it the reason for not upgrading firefox in FC6 is that a "metric boatload" of other packages compile against it and updating all of those mid-release is going to cause more pain than gain.
For FC7 XULRunner should be ready which should avoid this and provide an abstraction of the Firefox application from the rendering engine.
I don't really see the downside of compiling rpm statically -- it's a trivial fix, and it *does* help the user in a few scenarios.
Actually it isn't (trivial). This was also covered in the fedora devel thread quoted in the first reply. Michael Schrooeder, one of the SUSE devels, mentioned that they used to do this and now don't:
That doesn't help. We (SUSE) had a statically linked rpm for years
and switched to a dynamically linked one. Statically linked doesn't
work because rpm needs to lookup passwd entries when installing
packages and the nss code in the passwd lookup uses dynamically
loaded plugins. You get lots of unpleasant effects if the
statically linked glibc code can't work with plugins from a
glibc update.
Of course what you do have is a rescue environment on the install media which you can use to reinstall the package you messed up, either by doing a chroot into your install, or by passing --root to rpm to get it to install onto the hard disk. I've done this several times and its a simple and quick way to get yourself out of the hole you dug.
Microsoft does not charge Dell $139 for a copy of Windows (and never has). In fact, it's closer to $29 than $139. With Windows Vista for $50, with Novell Linux for $29. I know what most people would choose.
Probably true. But how about:
$50 for windows
$50 for office
$50 for photoshop
$50 for some antivirus software
etc. etc.
vs $30 for linux which comes with a big pile of applications. There's a lot more to a linux distibution than just the OS. This is one of the big selling points of Macs too with iLife being bundled and iWork usually being included for much less than the cost of office.
There are a few places out there with scripts that will build a distro from FC.
I belive that the intention is to use Pungi to build the isos for the newly merged fedora releases. Since this tool will be public then interested groups will be able to build their own images containing a custom set of packages.
In general a tRNA set is unique to a given species although most species have similar tRNAs. But if the organisms in question were to have different ones, then their version of the same poison would have a different base sequence, as it would be translated differently from mRNA by RNA polymerase II.
Cobblers! With a few minor exceptions in some of the more obscure microorganisms the genetic code used by all living things is universal. It is completely routine to perform genetic experiments on human DNA in bacteria, yeasts and other higher organisms. Also the basic biochemistry is pretty similar across species (at least across all animals) such that lethal sequences are likely to affect more than one species.
Oh, and RNA polymerase doesn't translate RNA, it creates mRNA from a DNA template. Ribosomes are the ones which do the translation.
Perhaps I should have said "the RPM experience" instead of just RPM. I realize it's just a package, like.deb, but that doesn't change how hard it used to be to work with them, even with websites dedicated to hosting every dependancy you could find. I was just curious to know how the overall experience has improved.
In Fedora at least things are much better than they used to be. A lot of the user maintained packages which used to be spread over lots of repositories are now mostly collected in Fedora Extras, which has a proper review process to make sure that it's consistent both with Core and the rest of itself.
There are still other 3rd party repositories containing either packages which redhat can't host for legal reasons (patents, licenses etc), or packages which haven't gone into extras for some other reason. Some of these make efforts to stay compatible with core/extras, but you still occasionally get version conflicts when using multiple 3rd party repositories. In these cases there is now the Smart Package Manager which does a much better job than yum of figuring out the best way to resolve these conflicts.
I've had apps hammering hard on MySQL since 2000. I've never seen any data corruption. Give an example or go home.
I suspect the parent was talking about stuff like this (slightly reformatted because of the bloody lameness filter!):
mysql> describe test;
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra | | text | varchar(10) | YES | | NULL | | | date | date | YES | | NULL | |
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> insert into test values ('This text is too long','10000-01-01'); Query OK, 1 row affected, 2 warnings (0.00 sec)
mysql> select * from test;
| text | date | | This text | 0000-00-00 |
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
Sure there are ways to mitigate this, but I've been bitten by this in applications. Having said that I still use MySQL for pretty much all of our database needs.
PS: Go on - ask me why I needed to store dates beyond the year 10,000...
Re:Is it any faster for client-side apps?
on
Java SE 6 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
A big problem with this was that their Swing toolkit is goddamn slow
You know, every time a java story appears here this line gets trotted out, but I'm really not sure that it's anywhere near as valid as it once might have been. From what I understand Sun have made a lot of efforts in the last few releases (1.3+) to speed up swing. I've written quite a few java applications in the last couple of years, all swing based, and none of them has caused me to have any concerns over the speed of the GUI toolkit.
Sure swing still has some other issues issues (eg proper native look and feel), but I'm sure that a lot of the complaints people have about the toolkit's speed are either very old prejudices or stem from poor coding within the application rather than from swing itself.
Other than perhaps Library Science, what science is affected at all by the DMCA?
Not an exact answer to your question, but if you include software patents in the same mentality which created the DMCA then I'd say a lot of science could be affected. I work in science and I write a lot of software. I'm pretty sure that loads of the stuff I've written infringes on God knows how many software patents, but since I'm in Eurpoe I don't have to worry about this (yet!). The thought of having to work in a legal framework where I'd have to do due diligence on all my software is just too depressing to consider. I'm sure that most researchers in the US don't worry too much about this at the moment, but it will only take one good sized software patents spat to have a big crackdown on this, and then see how much productive work you get done.
What branch of science is affected by the Patriot Act?
I'd have to say that most of them are to some extent. As the GP said, I and many of my colleagues, are shying away from meetings/conferences in the US because of how much of a pain it is to get there at the moment. The age of my passport means I'd need to get a visa for the US and spend ages getting through customs there. Frankly it's not worth the hassle when there are equally good meetings in the EU. I'd also not be tempted to take a job in the US in the current political climate. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
On the flip side there were a lot of happy people over here when Bush announced the end of federal funding for stem cell research. If you want to drive medical research out of the US then be my guest. There are plenty of us in the EU who'd be happy to take the lead instead.
How 'bout dem oceans instead of deserts? Floating Beowulf clusters of these (just had to say it that way) wouldn't harm the environment.
You really wouldn't want to do that. Oceans are already hugely productive with respect to the light which falls on them. It might be a bad idea to shade the source of ~80% of net global oxygen production!
Actually the developers have said that Firefox 2.x will be a FC7 target and won't be released for FC6. Their reasoning was that there are too many other packages which depend on firefox to release a major update within a release.
There are however a couple of people working on Firefox 2 rpms for FC6 (and 5) which will install into/usr/local and will work alongside v1.5 so everyone's happy.
I've tried a couple of versions of this system, and it's not as good as it sounds. Firstly you need to have a monitor capable of at least 120Hz refresh (60Hz per eye), which most monitors can't do and even at that the image flickers. Also the glasses are big and heavy and will give you one heck of a headache if used for any length of time.
A flat 2 image screen would be a lot more comfortable to use for 3D work.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't apply any more. After the latest legal wranglings Apple Inc (computers) now owns all rights to the Apple name. They licence back the name to Apple records to allow them to continue trading under their old name.
I don't think it's ever come out how much this cost Apple Inc, but you can bet it wasn't cheap!
Are you kidding. There's at least one person whose career is based on trying to do exactly that!
Only $10.99 to get your data back. Bargain!
I've just been reading a thread on the Fedora devel list about this. Seems that the basis for the new Ubuntu tool may not be as bulletproof as they were hoping. They appear to be using code from RHEL which is now being abandoned as it caused more problems than it solved.
Here are the Instructions for how to enable this.
I suppose that depends on how often you're getting your updates, but here:
So since Fedora 7 came out I've had 140 updates, of which precisely 1 has been a kernel update (which is the only one which would require a reboot). Maybe if you're tracking rawhide they'd be more frequent, but normally they're pretty rare.
Well I had my first experience of Vista last night, setting up a 2GHz Celeron laptop a friend had just bought which came with Home basic.
Whilst everything worked OK and actually looked pretty good I was hugely unimpressed with how slow it was. Opening an application like firefox took 20-30 seconds and logging a user in or out seemed to take forever. Also, even though vista came pre installed it went through innumerable setup routines when first booted (including at least 2 reboots) such that I could have done a linux install in the same amount of time it took me to get to a desktop.
Were it not for my friend wanting to use a load of kids CDROMS on this machine I'd have swapped it over to linux in a heartbeat and they'd have had a much more usable machine.
You're looking in the wrong place. Since the merger of Core and Extras the Fedora 7 release is in a slightly different place on the ftp site to the previous Fedora Core releases.
/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/ in whichever mirror you choose. All of the ISOs for the different spins are under there for F7.
Have a look in
Oh come on. I'm 6'3" and I've got an 800cc Daewoo Matiz which has enough headroom that I could sit in it wearning a top hat if I wanted. It's also got 4 doors and carries my family of 4 to school/work easily. I don't use it for long motorway journeys, but for most day to day use it's absolutely fine.
Well if you can wait until Fedora 7 then this will include Smolt which is a hardware profiler which collects not only information about how many systems are running fedora, but also what hardware they are using. This should hopefully give a better picture of the usage of Fedora and may also help with pressuring harware manufacturers for better linux support.
Of course sending your details to Smolt is stictly optional so reported numbers are guaranteed to be an underestimate, but hopefully most users will participate.
I'd say that given any significant number of generations (which can be as short as 20mins in a bacterium) that you don't have a hope of keeping any number of functionally useless DNA sequences in tact. Evolution can be scarily efficient at getting rid of anything which is even mildly detrimental to its host, and even if the message is neutral in terms of its survival it still stands a good chance of getting chewed up. Remember it doesn't have to degrade through single mutations, big insertions and deletions can and do happen.
Even if you're introducing DNA into an organism in a fairly small way then you normally have to link it to an antibiotic resistance gene and then feed that antibiotic to the bacteria to give them an incentive to keep hold of it. Bacteria don't have nearly as much junk DNA as higher eukaryotes and there is a lot of competition in a bacterial colony.
DNA as a storage mechanism, sure it could work. DNA storage just by putting it into a bacterial genome and hoping it'll stay there - forget it. As a final nail in its coffin, the B subtilis genome is only 4.2Mb(ases) long, and that includes all the stuff it can't survive without. That probably leaves you about a floppies worth of usable storage - and that's without having redundant copies.
For FC7 XULRunner should be ready which should avoid this and provide an abstraction of the Firefox application from the rendering engine.
Actually it isn't (trivial). This was also covered in the fedora devel thread quoted in the first reply. Michael Schrooeder, one of the SUSE devels, mentioned that they used to do this and now don't:
Of course what you do have is a rescue environment on the install media which you can use to reinstall the package you messed up, either by doing a chroot into your install, or by passing --root to rpm to get it to install onto the hard disk. I've done this several times and its a simple and quick way to get yourself out of the hole you dug.
Probably true. But how about:
vs $30 for linux which comes with a big pile of applications. There's a lot more to a linux distibution than just the OS. This is one of the big selling points of Macs too with iLife being bundled and iWork usually being included for much less than the cost of office.
I belive that the intention is to use Pungi to build the isos for the newly merged fedora releases. Since this tool will be public then interested groups will be able to build their own images containing a custom set of packages.
Cobblers! With a few minor exceptions in some of the more obscure microorganisms the genetic code used by all living things is universal. It is completely routine to perform genetic experiments on human DNA in bacteria, yeasts and other higher organisms. Also the basic biochemistry is pretty similar across species (at least across all animals) such that lethal sequences are likely to affect more than one species.
Oh, and RNA polymerase doesn't translate RNA, it creates mRNA from a DNA template. Ribosomes are the ones which do the translation.
In Fedora at least things are much better than they used to be. A lot of the user maintained packages which used to be spread over lots of repositories are now mostly collected in Fedora Extras, which has a proper review process to make sure that it's consistent both with Core and the rest of itself.
There are still other 3rd party repositories containing either packages which redhat can't host for legal reasons (patents, licenses etc), or packages which haven't gone into extras for some other reason. Some of these make efforts to stay compatible with core/extras, but you still occasionally get version conflicts when using multiple 3rd party repositories. In these cases there is now the Smart Package Manager which does a much better job than yum of figuring out the best way to resolve these conflicts.
Things have improved a lot since the RH7.x days.
I suspect the parent was talking about stuff like this (slightly reformatted because of the bloody lameness filter!):
Sure there are ways to mitigate this, but I've been bitten by this in applications. Having said that I still use MySQL for pretty much all of our database needs.
PS: Go on - ask me why I needed to store dates beyond the year 10,000...
You know, every time a java story appears here this line gets trotted out, but I'm really not sure that it's anywhere near as valid as it once might have been. From what I understand Sun have made a lot of efforts in the last few releases (1.3+) to speed up swing. I've written quite a few java applications in the last couple of years, all swing based, and none of them has caused me to have any concerns over the speed of the GUI toolkit.
Sure swing still has some other issues issues (eg proper native look and feel), but I'm sure that a lot of the complaints people have about the toolkit's speed are either very old prejudices or stem from poor coding within the application rather than from swing itself.
Not an exact answer to your question, but if you include software patents in the same mentality which created the DMCA then I'd say a lot of science could be affected. I work in science and I write a lot of software. I'm pretty sure that loads of the stuff I've written infringes on God knows how many software patents, but since I'm in Eurpoe I don't have to worry about this (yet!). The thought of having to work in a legal framework where I'd have to do due diligence on all my software is just too depressing to consider. I'm sure that most researchers in the US don't worry too much about this at the moment, but it will only take one good sized software patents spat to have a big crackdown on this, and then see how much productive work you get done.
I'd have to say that most of them are to some extent. As the GP said, I and many of my colleagues, are shying away from meetings/conferences in the US because of how much of a pain it is to get there at the moment. The age of my passport means I'd need to get a visa for the US and spend ages getting through customs there. Frankly it's not worth the hassle when there are equally good meetings in the EU. I'd also not be tempted to take a job in the US in the current political climate. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
On the flip side there were a lot of happy people over here when Bush announced the end of federal funding for stem cell research. If you want to drive medical research out of the US then be my guest. There are plenty of us in the EU who'd be happy to take the lead instead.
Actually the developers have said that Firefox 2.x will be a FC7 target and won't be released for FC6. Their reasoning was that there are too many other packages which depend on firefox to release a major update within a release.
There are however a couple of people working on Firefox 2 rpms for FC6 (and 5) which will install into /usr/local and will work alongside v1.5 so everyone's happy.
I like to use root@mouse-potato.com (look it up)
I've tried a couple of versions of this system, and it's not as good as it sounds. Firstly you need to have a monitor capable of at least 120Hz refresh (60Hz per eye), which most monitors can't do and even at that the image flickers. Also the glasses are big and heavy and will give you one heck of a headache if used for any length of time.
A flat 2 image screen would be a lot more comfortable to use for 3D work.