However, backing up 1TB to paper is a little daunting/expensive/wasteful. Storing the resulting backup would take a pretty big building for just a single backup (if you need monthly backups, you're talking about an ever growing complex of buildings). I shudder to imagine the restore proceedure.
Raduf asks: why do you not consider MS Office to be great software?
I know you didn't address me, but I share similar views to the person you are querying, so I thought I'd take a crack at answering.
Too slow: Office drags; it takes forever to load for something that's supposed to be useful for, say, writing a quick letter.
Forced obsolescence: The moment a new version comes out, the file format changes in incompatible ways. Next thing, someone is sending you documents in the new.doc format, and it's your fault you can't read them.
Too large: Office is huge, it demands tremendous requirements for both hard drive space and memory space.
Too inflexible: Office is designed around a certain way of doing things. If you don't like that way, you need to learn to adapt. Good software adapts to my needs, not the other way around.
Too WSYWYG: Very often I deal with a set of content (eg. a book manuscript) that needs to be presented in a variety of ways (eg. manuscript form, a more readable form, an illustrated mockup). This content needs to be maintained and updated as well, then presented again in the variety of ways. Word is horrible at this; you need to either seperately maintain a file for each presentation, or maintain one file and go through all the convolutions to produce each presentation each time. I need tools that keep content separate from presentation.
I could continue (eg. its word count algorithm doesn't accomodate professions where they have to count words in specific ways), but I think you get the point. Word is great if you want Word, Excel is great if you want Excel. Neither of them are good if you want a tool for crafting words or data in a professional manner.
Anonymous Coward asserts: Essentially great software is the one that solves customer's problem.
I disagree. Satisfactory software is the one that solves the customer's problem. Good software solves the customer's problems without causing new ones.
For software to be Great, it needs to be solving problems that the customer has yet to encounter, while not imposing its own problems on the customer.
Microsoft is good at it as each product that goes out the door can generally be qualified to solve at least one problem.
Microsoft can consistently churn out satisfactory software surprisingly regularly. Unfortunately, Microsoft software frequently burdens the customer with additional problems (UI constraints, data instability, security issues), so it fails to even become good software, much less great.
In addition to making the sandbox harder to find, it also means that spamming that sandbox will be less valuable, since the spam link won't enter into the ranking.
Since Wiki Sandboxes are for people who want to use that Wiki, having the sandboxes not show up on searches hurts nobody. That is, nobody except for the Wiki admin, who has the initial nuisance of having to reconfigure apache, set up robots.txt, etc.
OK, the comments here, and some other reading I did on the side, certainly make it clear to me that the situation is more complex than my original understanding. From what I remember, water flows from the Mediteranean out into the Black Sea. You say water flows out from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic Ocean as well. The Suez canal shouldn't make an appreciable difference, and certainly had no effect before it was built.
If evaporation is faster than the influx of fresh water (rain+rivers), and the only two seawater connections are net outgoing, where's the water coming from?
Also, my understanding that the Mediterranean water level is rising is based on what archaeologists told me verbally. Since they need to know what land and water are doing as part of their job, I took that as pretty sound. This was further backed up by the sheer number of archaeological sites that are cities submerged just off the coast, most of the ones I know about are in the eastern mediterranean. This was even further backed up by reading discussions of Venice's problems, where they often mention the rising level of the Mediterranean as a given.
Anonymous Coward suggests: This sounds like something I'd like to see Perens' "Open Source Risk Management" take on.
I'd rather see Daniel Egger's Open Source Risk Management take such issues on. If Perens had his own OSRM, that would confuse things. He'd potentially confuse himself, since he already accepted a position on the Board of Directors for Egger's OSRM.;-)
Anonymous wrote: AFAIK, Venice (Italia) is suffering from that kind of floods, but not because of Mediterranean rising but the city itself sinking:_( To my knowledge Venice has both problems, and the sinking ground problem is slower than the rising water problem. Here is an article about Venice's issues, including their solution to beef up their existing lagoon to give protection from sea level.
About the Metric thing... yeah, we do use Metric System, but many people here in/. don't (tired of reading posts with mph here and feet and inches there and so on), so - if you go to Rome, do like the Romans:) But the Romans use metric now;-) I highly recommend using Metric here, even if others aren't. Americans won't be helped by coddling them.:-)
In the US, we do use some metric: many bottled beverages are sold using metric units, so are most illegal drugs. I expect, any day now, gas stations to realise that selling gasoline by the liter will mean customers will have less sticker shock about the rising gas prices.
You're not from USA, are you? Nope, from New York City.
Ah, Historic Cartagena, staging area for Hannibals invasion of Rome. Haven't been there, but it sounds lovely. The rise in waters is slow, and the city was built up a little bit (unlike less well planned ones like Venice), so there's at least a thousand years before the water level will really hit the city, possibly more like two or three thousand. The people there who are worrying most appear to be the ones maintaining the beaches.
Water doesn't have to be over your head to get a submerged city. If the streets are flooded with a few centimeters of sea water on a regular basis, it gets pretty uncomfortable to live. People move, buildings get abandoned, and fall down. Erosion takes care of as much as the rising water.
PS: If you are Spanish, why are you talking in feet? I thought Spain went Metric way back in 1849.
Roughly six million years ago, tectonic forces isolated what Geologists call the Tethys Sea. The area has more evaporation than precipitation, so it dried out, with occasional floods. Roughly 4.5 million years ago, a slight increase in sea level allowed the Atlantic to flow in through the Straits of Gibraltar.
It's been filling ever since. Evaporation is fierce, and the higher it gets, the less pressure is on the Straits, so it's filling pretty slowly now. Still, in some areas the water level goes up roughtly a meter every 500 years, and that adds up when you're talking about a 2500 year old port town. There are dozens of underwater ancient cities along the coasts of the Mediterranean.
The Mediteranean Sea has been rising for as long as it's existed (it's essentially a big basin that's filling from the other water sources around it). Cities have been built on the coast of the Mediteranean for millenia.
If we call any sunken city in the Mediteranean "Atlantis", we'll never get any work done. There are just too many of them.
kmudrick wrote: First off, it's fairly impossible to avoid coming in contact with non-vegan stuff in most people's lives.. A good 99.9% of the vegans I know realize this, and strive to to the best they can, to minimize the most amount of suffering as they possibly can.
That is a very noble cause. Although I think it naive to put that goal in front of all others, it's certainly a goal that should be a higher priority in most people's minds.
That being said, how do you get from that cause to "no products originating from animals", which is the definition of Vegan that I get from most sources. Mother's milk is certainly an animal product, and although mothers of early teethers might disagree, its extraction is generally not considered to be suffering.
Similarly, I can see how you would want to avoid the products of the big chicken and dairy farms, those animals are suffering. On the other hand, how is harvesting eggs from a free range chicken with plenty of space and food suffering? How is milking the family's pampered pet goat suffering?
Anyhow, back to the off-topic-ness at hand.. B12 - it can be from a source most vegans feel comfortable with, for instance, nutritional yeast. Nutritional yeast does not generate B12. The best it can do is gather it from the medium it grows in. So again you're back to where the B12 comes from.
Would a Catholic not consider themselves religious anymore if, for instance, they had to miss church on Sunday because they were hurling their guts up do to illness? Would they give up completely because of something like that? I'm not Catholic, but I would hope not. That, however is not a good parallel to the question that was in my mind initially. We're not talking about an occasional lapse or accident, we're talking about a diet/philosophy that, by some interpretations, prevents its practitioners from getting what they need to survive.
A much more extreme example, but more in line with my question, would be the Breatharians, who encourage their practioners to not eat at all. They disagree, but to my eyes, this philosophy directly endangers the lives of its practitioners. If you eat, you are insufficiently enlightened in the eyes of the Breatharians.
Yes, the Vegan/B12 issue is much much more minor, but still troubling to me in the exact same way. If, in order to be a "good Vegan", you must deprive yourself of a nutrient essential to life, then, in my opinion, being a Vegan is unhealthy. I'm not convinced that this is or isn't the case, but much of what has been discussed here and elsewhere makes me wary.
Lodragandraoidh asserts: An egg is an embyonic chicken - so in essence by consuming the egg you are killing the chicken.
You are mistaken, an egg is not an embryonic chicken. The chicken eggs you buy in a store are unfertilized. They are not embryos and, since they had already left the chicken before collection, have absolutely no chance of turning into a chicken no matter what is done with them.
On rare occasions, a quality control error occurs, and you actually do get a fertilized egg, which is an embryonic chicken. I have observed this twice in over three decades. I've seen more car accidents than fertilized eggs sold for food.
I never argued that bacteria was sentient, just that B12 was an animal product. If the B12 supplement you get is produced by bacteria, then the question remains "is bacteria animal". Clearly, your opinion is no.
Where on earth did you pull "sentient being" from?!?
What's USDEGP? A typo. I wrote, "USD<->EGP trade" and the tag system ate the <->
If you refer to EQ plats, it would be a simple commodity. It would only be a currency if it had backing. Ah, you have cleared my fog. Thank you. So, to restate, the fact that the US Government guarantees the value of the USD makes it a currency. The fact that nobody guarantees anything regarding the value of the EQP makes it not a currency.
So if I were to mint up a bunch of coins, and claim they were each worth a dollar, that's a commodity. If I were to guarantee that I would give anyone one dollar if they redeemed the coin, then it would be a non-convertable currency, although a marginal and almost certainly untrusted one.
If I were to mint up a bunch of coins, and then set up a bank to encourage trade in them, and have the bank guarantee by force of its existance that it will maintain the value of these coins as a medium for trade, then it would be a currency along similar lines to the USD (although again, less trusted and probably far less valuable). With neither the bank nor my guarantee to trade the coins for something else, then it's not a currency, just pieces of metal.
Just like gold in bullion is only a currency, but minted was currency. I assume that this, too was a typo, and you meant "gold in bullion is only a commodity..."
B12 is available in eggs and milk. You can obtain both of these products without killing a single animal.
The big B12 problem is for Vegans, who will not eat any animal product, including eggs and milk. Vegans with a self-preservation streak generally make sure that some ingredient they regularly eat (often their bread) is fortified with B12. They conveniently ignore the fact that the B12 fortification is, itself, an animal product.
OK, so the USD is a real, convertable currency. AGP is a real currency, but it's not convertable. It's not convertable because any official trade in it is regulated by a Currency Board controlled by the Argentine government (although I assume there's a black market at a different exchange rate).
By this measure, all USDEGP trade is unregulated, so wouldn't this make it a convertable currency? Granted it's a horribly unstable convertable currency, which the people running EverQuest can devalue or eliminate at will, but convertable.
Some countries have currency boards (eg. Argentena), which align their currency to a fixed rate of another currency (eg. USD).
Some countries don't (eg. United States).
Are you saying that the Argentine Peso (AGP) isn't a real currency because of the currency board? If that's what you are saying, it's not a good example here, because they don't match the EverQuest Platinum in either qualitative measure we've discussed in the thread.
EQP isn't traded at currency exchanges, AGP is. EQP has no currency board, AGP does.
> How is that not conversible? Try to buy any other currency or commodity with it. You can't. The only way is first selling it.
I fail to see the distinction you're making between "converting" currency and "selling" it. The way I see it, they're the same thing. Yeah, you can't walk into the tourist currency exchange and swap USD for EQP, but there are other currencies that have the same problem.
It seems from your post that you do know of a real distinction, but I don't, and I was hoping you'd share.
I consider the right to examine and explore the world around you, a fundamental right. The right to learn how things work is a part of this. This is a natural right that was not enumerated in the constitution because it was not in jeopardy at the time.
Reverse Engineering is merely a more technically rigorous expression of this right. I certainly don't see how it is "simply legal". In fact, in DMCA cases, it's technically illegal, but it's still a fundamental right that the constitution does not give the government authority to restrict.
Free download was never a GPL requirement to begin with. Legend has it that RMS used to sell Emacs at $150 per tape, you can currently pay $345 for a pair of CDs full of GPL source code from the FSF.
If you are really interested, I suggest you read the GPL. To speed things up, Sections 2 and 3 answer your question (note, 2b "no charge for the license" doesn't preclude charging for the download, the CD, or whatever method of giving the person the software you care to do, it's the license that is Free, not the media).
That, and as a prior poster indicated, the Media Player stuff isn't GPL'ed by a long shot.
Among the first things I do after an install is generally tasksel -s -n, which installs far more than ten programs. Either that or I edit the apt configuration files to select the Sarge distribution and an apt-get dist-upgrade which, again, installs far more than ten programs.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, paper shouldn't be discounted.
However, backing up 1TB to paper is a little daunting/expensive/wasteful. Storing the resulting backup would take a pretty big building for just a single backup (if you need monthly backups, you're talking about an ever growing complex of buildings). I shudder to imagine the restore proceedure.
Arget asserts:
Apple has followed Microsoft into he "merge the desktop and the browser" trap.
I wouldn't exactly say "followed", Mac Finder has been bluring that line since the 80's.
why do you not consider MS Office to be great software?
I know you didn't address me, but I share similar views to the person you are querying, so I thought I'd take a crack at answering.
I could continue (eg. its word count algorithm doesn't accomodate professions where they have to count words in specific ways), but I think you get the point. Word is great if you want Word, Excel is great if you want Excel. Neither of them are good if you want a tool for crafting words or data in a professional manner.
Anonymous Coward asserts:
Essentially great software is the one that solves customer's problem.
I disagree. Satisfactory software is the one that solves the customer's problem. Good software solves the customer's problems without causing new ones.
For software to be Great, it needs to be solving problems that the customer has yet to encounter, while not imposing its own problems on the customer.
Microsoft is good at it as each product that goes out the door can generally be qualified to solve at least one problem.
Microsoft can consistently churn out satisfactory software surprisingly regularly. Unfortunately, Microsoft software frequently burdens the customer with additional problems (UI constraints, data instability, security issues), so it fails to even become good software, much less great.
In addition to making the sandbox harder to find, it also means that spamming that sandbox will be less valuable, since the spam link won't enter into the ranking.
Since Wiki Sandboxes are for people who want to use that Wiki, having the sandboxes not show up on searches hurts nobody. That is, nobody except for the Wiki admin, who has the initial nuisance of having to reconfigure apache, set up robots.txt, etc.
My magic word is "fdisk" :-)
OK, the comments here, and some other reading I did on the side, certainly make it clear to me that the situation is more complex than my original understanding. From what I remember, water flows from the Mediteranean out into the Black Sea. You say water flows out from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic Ocean as well. The Suez canal shouldn't make an appreciable difference, and certainly had no effect before it was built.
If evaporation is faster than the influx of fresh water (rain+rivers), and the only two seawater connections are net outgoing, where's the water coming from?
Also, my understanding that the Mediterranean water level is rising is based on what archaeologists told me verbally. Since they need to know what land and water are doing as part of their job, I took that as pretty sound. This was further backed up by the sheer number of archaeological sites that are cities submerged just off the coast, most of the ones I know about are in the eastern mediterranean. This was even further backed up by reading discussions of Venice's problems, where they often mention the rising level of the Mediterranean as a given.
Anonymous Coward suggests:
;-)
This sounds like something I'd like to see Perens' "Open Source Risk Management" take on.
I'd rather see Daniel Egger's Open Source Risk Management take such issues on. If Perens had his own OSRM, that would confuse things. He'd potentially confuse himself, since he already accepted a position on the Board of Directors for Egger's OSRM.
Anonymous wrote: :_(
/. don't (tired of reading posts with mph here and feet and inches there and so on), so - if you go to Rome, do like the Romans :) ;-) I highly recommend using Metric here, even if others aren't. Americans won't be helped by coddling them. :-)
AFAIK, Venice (Italia) is suffering from that kind of floods, but not because of Mediterranean rising but the city itself sinking
To my knowledge Venice has both problems, and the sinking ground problem is slower than the rising water problem. Here is an article about Venice's issues, including their solution to beef up their existing lagoon to give protection from sea level.
About the Metric thing... yeah, we do use Metric System, but many people here in
But the Romans use metric now
In the US, we do use some metric: many bottled beverages are sold using metric units, so are most illegal drugs. I expect, any day now, gas stations to realise that selling gasoline by the liter will mean customers will have less sticker shock about the rising gas prices.
You're not from USA, are you?
Nope, from New York City.
Ah, Historic Cartagena, staging area for Hannibals invasion of Rome. Haven't been there, but it sounds lovely. The rise in waters is slow, and the city was built up a little bit (unlike less well planned ones like Venice), so there's at least a thousand years before the water level will really hit the city, possibly more like two or three thousand. The people there who are worrying most appear to be the ones maintaining the beaches.
Water doesn't have to be over your head to get a submerged city. If the streets are flooded with a few centimeters of sea water on a regular basis, it gets pretty uncomfortable to live. People move, buildings get abandoned, and fall down. Erosion takes care of as much as the rising water.
PS: If you are Spanish, why are you talking in feet? I thought Spain went Metric way back in 1849.
Roughly six million years ago, tectonic forces isolated what Geologists call the Tethys Sea. The area has more evaporation than precipitation, so it dried out, with occasional floods. Roughly 4.5 million years ago, a slight increase in sea level allowed the Atlantic to flow in through the Straits of Gibraltar.
It's been filling ever since. Evaporation is fierce, and the higher it gets, the less pressure is on the Straits, so it's filling pretty slowly now. Still, in some areas the water level goes up roughtly a meter every 500 years, and that adds up when you're talking about a 2500 year old port town. There are dozens of underwater ancient cities along the coasts of the Mediterranean.
The Mediteranean Sea has been rising for as long as it's existed (it's essentially a big basin that's filling from the other water sources around it). Cities have been built on the coast of the Mediteranean for millenia.
If we call any sunken city in the Mediteranean "Atlantis", we'll never get any work done. There are just too many of them.
kmudrick wrote:
First off, it's fairly impossible to avoid coming in contact with non-vegan stuff in most people's lives.. A good 99.9% of the vegans I know realize this, and strive to to the best they can, to minimize the most amount of suffering as they possibly can.
That is a very noble cause. Although I think it naive to put that goal in front of all others, it's certainly a goal that should be a higher priority in most people's minds.
That being said, how do you get from that cause to "no products originating from animals", which is the definition of Vegan that I get from most sources. Mother's milk is certainly an animal product, and although mothers of early teethers might disagree, its extraction is generally not considered to be suffering.
Similarly, I can see how you would want to avoid the products of the big chicken and dairy farms, those animals are suffering. On the other hand, how is harvesting eggs from a free range chicken with plenty of space and food suffering? How is milking the family's pampered pet goat suffering?
Anyhow, back to the off-topic-ness at hand.. B12 - it can be from a source most vegans feel comfortable with, for instance, nutritional yeast.
Nutritional yeast does not generate B12. The best it can do is gather it from the medium it grows in. So again you're back to where the B12 comes from.
Would a Catholic not consider themselves religious anymore if, for instance, they had to miss church on Sunday because they were hurling their guts up do to illness? Would they give up completely because of something like that?
I'm not Catholic, but I would hope not. That, however is not a good parallel to the question that was in my mind initially. We're not talking about an occasional lapse or accident, we're talking about a diet/philosophy that, by some interpretations, prevents its practitioners from getting what they need to survive.
A much more extreme example, but more in line with my question, would be the Breatharians, who encourage their practioners to not eat at all. They disagree, but to my eyes, this philosophy directly endangers the lives of its practitioners. If you eat, you are insufficiently enlightened in the eyes of the Breatharians.
Yes, the Vegan/B12 issue is much much more minor, but still troubling to me in the exact same way. If, in order to be a "good Vegan", you must deprive yourself of a nutrient essential to life, then, in my opinion, being a Vegan is unhealthy. I'm not convinced that this is or isn't the case, but much of what has been discussed here and elsewhere makes me wary.
Lodragandraoidh asserts:
An egg is an embyonic chicken - so in essence by consuming the egg you are killing the chicken.
You are mistaken, an egg is not an embryonic chicken. The chicken eggs you buy in a store are unfertilized. They are not embryos and, since they had already left the chicken before collection, have absolutely no chance of turning into a chicken no matter what is done with them.
On rare occasions, a quality control error occurs, and you actually do get a fertilized egg, which is an embryonic chicken. I have observed this twice in over three decades. I've seen more car accidents than fertilized eggs sold for food.
I never argued that bacteria was sentient, just that B12 was an animal product. If the B12 supplement you get is produced by bacteria, then the question remains "is bacteria animal". Clearly, your opinion is no.
Where on earth did you pull "sentient being" from?!?
What's USDEGP?
A typo. I wrote, "USD<->EGP trade" and the tag system ate the <->
If you refer to EQ plats, it would be a simple commodity. It would only be a currency if it had backing.
Ah, you have cleared my fog. Thank you. So, to restate, the fact that the US Government guarantees the value of the USD makes it a currency. The fact that nobody guarantees anything regarding the value of the EQP makes it not a currency.
So if I were to mint up a bunch of coins, and claim they were each worth a dollar, that's a commodity. If I were to guarantee that I would give anyone one dollar if they redeemed the coin, then it would be a non-convertable currency, although a marginal and almost certainly untrusted one.
If I were to mint up a bunch of coins, and then set up a bank to encourage trade in them, and have the bank guarantee by force of its existance that it will maintain the value of these coins as a medium for trade, then it would be a currency along similar lines to the USD (although again, less trusted and probably far less valuable). With neither the bank nor my guarantee to trade the coins for something else, then it's not a currency, just pieces of metal.
Just like gold in bullion is only a currency, but minted was currency.
I assume that this, too was a typo, and you meant "gold in bullion is only a commodity..."
B12 is available in eggs and milk. You can obtain both of these products without killing a single animal.
The big B12 problem is for Vegans, who will not eat any animal product, including eggs and milk. Vegans with a self-preservation streak generally make sure that some ingredient they regularly eat (often their bread) is fortified with B12. They conveniently ignore the fact that the B12 fortification is, itself, an animal product.
OK, so the USD is a real, convertable currency. AGP is a real currency, but it's not convertable. It's not convertable because any official trade in it is regulated by a Currency Board controlled by the Argentine government (although I assume there's a black market at a different exchange rate).
By this measure, all USDEGP trade is unregulated, so wouldn't this make it a convertable currency? Granted it's a horribly unstable convertable currency, which the people running EverQuest can devalue or eliminate at will, but convertable.
Now I'm really confused.
Some countries have currency boards (eg. Argentena), which align their currency to a fixed rate of another currency (eg. USD).
Some countries don't (eg. United States).
Are you saying that the Argentine Peso (AGP) isn't a real currency because of the currency board? If that's what you are saying, it's not a good example here, because they don't match the EverQuest Platinum in either qualitative measure we've discussed in the thread.
EQP isn't traded at currency exchanges, AGP is. EQP has no currency board, AGP does.
> How is that not conversible?
Try to buy any other currency or commodity with it. You can't. The only way is first selling it.
I fail to see the distinction you're making between "converting" currency and "selling" it. The way I see it, they're the same thing. Yeah, you can't walk into the tourist currency exchange and swap USD for EQP, but there are other currencies that have the same problem.
It seems from your post that you do know of a real distinction, but I don't, and I was hoping you'd share.
"I don't know" is an important answer, if it is followed by a clear understandng of how to clear up the gap in knowledge and get things done.
I consider the right to examine and explore the world around you, a fundamental right. The right to learn how things work is a part of this. This is a natural right that was not enumerated in the constitution because it was not in jeopardy at the time.
Reverse Engineering is merely a more technically rigorous expression of this right. I certainly don't see how it is "simply legal". In fact, in DMCA cases, it's technically illegal, but it's still a fundamental right that the constitution does not give the government authority to restrict.
Free download was never a GPL requirement to begin with. Legend has it that RMS used to sell Emacs at $150 per tape, you can currently pay $345 for a pair of CDs full of GPL source code from the FSF.
If you are really interested, I suggest you read the GPL. To speed things up, Sections 2 and 3 answer your question (note, 2b "no charge for the license" doesn't preclude charging for the download, the CD, or whatever method of giving the person the software you care to do, it's the license that is Free, not the media).
That, and as a prior poster indicated, the Media Player stuff isn't GPL'ed by a long shot.
Among the first things I do after an install is generally tasksel -s -n, which installs far more than ten programs. Either that or I edit the apt configuration files to select the Sarge distribution and an apt-get dist-upgrade which, again, installs far more than ten programs.
My understanding is that Samba 3.0 is supposed to solve that issue. Haven't tried it tho.