not really, if you pin testing to a higher priority than unstable (or use the default-release setting which does just that) next time testing and unstable have the same version of a package apt will stop pulling updates to that package from sid.
Yes you will probablly end up running sids version of certain core libraries most of the time but new major versions of those core libraries tend to get quite a bit oef testing before they even hit sid.
2) testing is a better desktop than sid because its more stable -- this is outright false. Testing is a worse desktop than sid *BECAUSE* its more stable. That means if something breaks, it stays broken for a while. I think the policy is that a package has to sit in sid for 10 days without a change before it can move into testing. That means if a packages slips through sid without a particular problem being noticed (it happens) then it sits in testing until someone files the bug report. Then the fix has to sit in sid for at least 10 days from the time it is uploaded. You can see its very easy to be in a broken situation in testing for quite a while. So the bug hits later and gets fixed later, overall you shouldn't be exposed to it for any more time. Also RC bugfixes that aren't otherwise risky should really be getting uploaded with higher urgencies cutting down that waiting time.
The bigger problem with testing is that sometimes build issues on some obscure architecture hold up progression of packages to testing for a LONG time. There is currently such an issue with mozilla related packages and whenever there is a major glibc update it tends to block progression of practically all packages to testing.
The way a PC boots is that the bios loads a peice of code from the MBR and runs it, it provides this code with services to access hard and floppy drives (no filesystem support just the ability to read and write sectors). What happens from there is up to the OS that put the code in the MBR. In the windows world the MBR code hands off to code in the boot sector of the active partition. That code in turn typically has some form of minimal filesystem support allowing it to read and load the rest of the OS.
Since it looks like sco never owned it in the first place I suspect novell will keep ownership of it. Scos exclusive distribution agreement is likely to be voided because of the way they violated it.
As I said there is a good chance IBM and/or novell will end up owning large parts of the reorganised sco anyway.
This is chapter 11 not chapter 7. Afaict for a company badly in debt chapter 11 basically means that some contracts may be converted into debts and the creditors then take over the company. Chapter 11 exists because of the realisation that a buisness that wen't bankrupt because of bad debt or mismanagement (sueing IBM on a dubious case using money that sun and microsoft payed for stuff you don't really own can probably be considered mismanagement) is often worth more to it's creditors kept as a going concern than the sum of it's parts would be worth. It is also a better choice from the point of view of customers and employees.
It seems to me like the likely outcome of all this is that novell and/or IBM and/or the other parties that have been fighting sco will end up as the largest creditors and therefore through the chapter 11 bankrupcy end up owning most of sco.
That does not however mean that any profitable parts of thier buisness will not continue either through IBM/Novell/whoever keeping them running or through being sold on. Assuming selling sco unix licenses and support is still profitable I can't see why it wouldn't continue.
Helium-3 can be used to make fusion mostly aneutronic (you can't get it completely aneutronic because of side reactions) which avoids the problems caused by high energy neutrons. The big downsides are the availibility of He-3 (which mining on the moon may relieve) and the fact that it requires much higher temperatures than D-T fusion.
He-3 is so rare on earth that extracting it here would require more energy than can be gained from fusing it! Tritium decays into He-3. However tritium has a half life of over a decade and making tritium is a bit of a pain too (it requires the very high energy neutron flux that proponets of helium-3 based fusion seek to avoid). Our current stocks of He-3 are a byproduct of the nuclear weapons industry.
If it's crashing once a day then there is something badly wrong either in hardware or in software. I would suggest running some tests to check the hardware is ok (memtest86, cpuburn and prime95 would be a good start) and if that doesn't bring up any problems reinstall windows and try not to install loads of shitware next time.
Also avoid using IE unless you absolotely have to, I reccomend removing IE from the quick launch, desktop and root of the start menu (you can leave a shortcut burried deeper in the start menu for when you really need IE) and adding firefox to the quicklauch or start menu root to reduce the temptation to use IE.
hardy herron (which i presume your "hairy hardon" was a derogatory reference to) doesn't even exist yet. Yes the name has been announced as has the fact that as expected it would be a LTS release but there is no hardy directory on the mirrors yet and there won't be until a couple of days after gutsy releases.
Actually in some ways you make it more safe because once a root password is set you get prompted for it when booting in single user mode. If the root account is set to disabled (as it is by default on ubuntu) then booting in single user mode will dump you straight at a root terminal.
Are copies of Windows2000 or Windows98 worth much more than cruddy beer coasters today? Try searching for a full retail (not academic, not student, not OEM and not upgrade) copy of 2K in it's original shrinkwrap on ebay.
A quick search on ebay UK shows a copy already at £30 with 6 hours still to go and prices tend to rise significantly in the last few minuits of an auction. Really for most people there is little reason to upgrade from 2K to XP. XP is really just 2K with more bloat added. 9x on the other hand is really on the way out with more and more apps depending on NT line only features.
Subscription agreements are only worthwhile if you have a good reason to upgrade regulally. Subscription agreements that don't let you keep the product when you leave them are only worthwhile if you are getting a huge discount from doing so and even then it's worth thinking twice. Look at the way universities have locked themselves into paying an anual MS tax with an extremely high cost of escape (both in terms of buying licenses and in terms of the auditing required to work out what machines need licenses and removing the software from machines that don't really need it)
I wish they'd take that out of the installer Way to cause a lot of geeks and developers a lot of trouble. Last time I tried I was unable to get OS-X to write NTFS properly from the finder (If you know a macfuse/ntfs-3g pair availible for download that is known to work properly please tell me about it). Some people may also still need to run 9x or older versions of linux as part of a multiboot setup.
IMO there should however be a clear warning in the users section of control panel stating that the privilages you set are practically worthless. The drive converter should also come with a clear warning that you need to fixup the permissions after running it.
My experiance with low end (rtl8139 based) network cards is they tend to have the socket for a boot rom but no boot rom fitted. Onboard network interfaces usually have the ability to be booted from as standard though.
but I tend to think that the complexity of setting up a boot server is the biggest barrier to network booted installs.
More subtly, it addresses that weird fear that windows really isn't going away when you install Debian. Unfortunately to resize the windows partition to make space for debian you still have to use manual partitioning mode:(
Debian is a loose knit community of developers with different priorities. Many of theese will have copies of windows (legal or otherwise) they can use to develop and test such a launcher.
I very much doubt this took a lot of time to develop. How to boot linux from NTLDR has been known for a while and the rest of it is really just a simple download manager and a few infromation screens.
maybe there is something wrong with your windows install, this method relies on changing boot.ini which on a properly set up system should not be possible for non admins.
If your system drive is fat32 or was fat32 at install time and was converted then windows security is basically nonexistant.
* forgotton bios password. * motherboard that doesn't support CD booting or at least doesn't support it properly. * USB or firewire CD drive and a bios that doesn't support booting from it. * No cd drive at all (the loader can be used to set off an install from the network).
It's not immediately toxic but the body does use it as a way to get rid of toxic chemicals so if you keep drinking all your pee then those chemicals will just build up in your system.
Biggest bar to all of this is the price-point. I'm in the UK so things are probablly a bit different over here from in the US but the basic principles should remain the same.
We have managed to get digital decoder boxes down to the sub £10 range so that is no longer a real issue for us, I presume the same will happen in time on your side of the pond.
IMO the biggest bar is that digital doesn't degrade gracefully and needs pretty good signal strength to be watchable. Worse it can appear to be ok most of the time but every few days become unwatchable due to either the weather attenuating the signal or the box getting hot. The cost of getting your houses ariel and signal distribution setup fixed up (or getting one put in from scratch where you used set top ariels before) is likely to dwawf the cost of the boxes.
Another big problem is that recording with a seperate recorder and digitial decoder is a PITA. You can get boxes that can decode digital terestrial, record the results onto a hard drive and then archive them to DVD but they aren't cheap.
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It *can* non destrutively resize the windows partition but it's not particularlly obvious how to make it do that.
not really, if you pin testing to a higher priority than unstable (or use the default-release setting which does just that) next time testing and unstable have the same version of a package apt will stop pulling updates to that package from sid.
Yes you will probablly end up running sids version of certain core libraries most of the time but new major versions of those core libraries tend to get quite a bit oef testing before they even hit sid.
2) testing is a better desktop than sid because its more stable -- this is outright false. Testing is a worse desktop than sid *BECAUSE* its more stable. That means if something breaks, it stays broken for a while. I think the policy is that a package has to sit in sid for 10 days without a change before it can move into testing. That means if a packages slips through sid without a particular problem being noticed (it happens) then it sits in testing until someone files the bug report. Then the fix has to sit in sid for at least 10 days from the time it is uploaded. You can see its very easy to be in a broken situation in testing for quite a while.
So the bug hits later and gets fixed later, overall you shouldn't be exposed to it for any more time. Also RC bugfixes that aren't otherwise risky should really be getting uploaded with higher urgencies cutting down that waiting time.
The bigger problem with testing is that sometimes build issues on some obscure architecture hold up progression of packages to testing for a LONG time. There is currently such an issue with mozilla related packages and whenever there is a major glibc update it tends to block progression of practically all packages to testing.
The way a PC boots is that the bios loads a peice of code from the MBR and runs it, it provides this code with services to access hard and floppy drives (no filesystem support just the ability to read and write sectors). What happens from there is up to the OS that put the code in the MBR. In the windows world the MBR code hands off to code in the boot sector of the active partition. That code in turn typically has some form of minimal filesystem support allowing it to read and load the rest of the OS.
Since it looks like sco never owned it in the first place I suspect novell will keep ownership of it. Scos exclusive distribution agreement is likely to be voided because of the way they violated it.
As I said there is a good chance IBM and/or novell will end up owning large parts of the reorganised sco anyway.
This is chapter 11 not chapter 7. Afaict for a company badly in debt chapter 11 basically means that some contracts may be converted into debts and the creditors then take over the company. Chapter 11 exists because of the realisation that a buisness that wen't bankrupt because of bad debt or mismanagement (sueing IBM on a dubious case using money that sun and microsoft payed for stuff you don't really own can probably be considered mismanagement) is often worth more to it's creditors kept as a going concern than the sum of it's parts would be worth. It is also a better choice from the point of view of customers and employees.
It seems to me like the likely outcome of all this is that novell and/or IBM and/or the other parties that have been fighting sco will end up as the largest creditors and therefore through the chapter 11 bankrupcy end up owning most of sco.
That does not however mean that any profitable parts of thier buisness will not continue either through IBM/Novell/whoever keeping them running or through being sold on. Assuming selling sco unix licenses and support is still profitable I can't see why it wouldn't continue.
Helium-3 can be used to make fusion mostly aneutronic (you can't get it completely aneutronic because of side reactions) which avoids the problems caused by high energy neutrons. The big downsides are the availibility of He-3 (which mining on the moon may relieve) and the fact that it requires much higher temperatures than D-T fusion.
He-3 is so rare on earth that extracting it here would require more energy than can be gained from fusing it! Tritium decays into He-3. However tritium has a half life of over a decade and making tritium is a bit of a pain too (it requires the very high energy neutron flux that proponets of helium-3 based fusion seek to avoid). Our current stocks of He-3 are a byproduct of the nuclear weapons industry.
If it's crashing once a day then there is something badly wrong either in hardware or in software. I would suggest running some tests to check the hardware is ok (memtest86, cpuburn and prime95 would be a good start) and if that doesn't bring up any problems reinstall windows and try not to install loads of shitware next time.
Also avoid using IE unless you absolotely have to, I reccomend removing IE from the quick launch, desktop and root of the start menu (you can leave a shortcut burried deeper in the start menu for when you really need IE) and adding firefox to the quicklauch or start menu root to reduce the temptation to use IE.
hardy herron (which i presume your "hairy hardon" was a derogatory reference to) doesn't even exist yet. Yes the name has been announced as has the fact that as expected it would be a LTS release but there is no hardy directory on the mirrors yet and there won't be until a couple of days after gutsy releases.
Actually in some ways you make it more safe because once a root password is set you get prompted for it when booting in single user mode. If the root account is set to disabled (as it is by default on ubuntu) then booting in single user mode will dump you straight at a root terminal.
Are copies of Windows2000 or Windows98 worth much more than cruddy beer coasters today?
Try searching for a full retail (not academic, not student, not OEM and not upgrade) copy of 2K in it's original shrinkwrap on ebay.
A quick search on ebay UK shows a copy already at £30 with 6 hours still to go and prices tend to rise significantly in the last few minuits of an auction. Really for most people there is little reason to upgrade from 2K to XP. XP is really just 2K with more bloat added. 9x on the other hand is really on the way out with more and more apps depending on NT line only features.
Subscription agreements are only worthwhile if you have a good reason to upgrade regulally. Subscription agreements that don't let you keep the product when you leave them are only worthwhile if you are getting a huge discount from doing so and even then it's worth thinking twice. Look at the way universities have locked themselves into paying an anual MS tax with an extremely high cost of escape (both in terms of buying licenses and in terms of the auditing required to work out what machines need licenses and removing the software from machines that don't really need it)
I wish they'd take that out of the installer
Way to cause a lot of geeks and developers a lot of trouble. Last time I tried I was unable to get OS-X to write NTFS properly from the finder (If you know a macfuse/ntfs-3g pair availible for download that is known to work properly please tell me about it). Some people may also still need to run 9x or older versions of linux as part of a multiboot setup.
IMO there should however be a clear warning in the users section of control panel stating that the privilages you set are practically worthless. The drive converter should also come with a clear warning that you need to fixup the permissions after running it.
My experiance with low end (rtl8139 based) network cards is they tend to have the socket for a boot rom but no boot rom fitted. Onboard network interfaces usually have the ability to be booted from as standard though.
but I tend to think that the complexity of setting up a boot server is the biggest barrier to network booted installs.
More subtly, it addresses that weird fear that windows really isn't going away when you install Debian. :(
Unfortunately to resize the windows partition to make space for debian you still have to use manual partitioning mode
But if you are resorting to drinking pee you are probablly already dehydrated.
BTW at least one firm make a nvidia based graphics card in pci express X1, http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1045/index.html . Maybe you could use a couple of those to drive extra displays.
Debian is a loose knit community of developers with different priorities. Many of theese will have copies of windows (legal or otherwise) they can use to develop and test such a launcher.
I very much doubt this took a lot of time to develop. How to boot linux from NTLDR has been known for a while and the rest of it is really just a simple download manager and a few infromation screens.
maybe there is something wrong with your windows install, this method relies on changing boot.ini which on a properly set up system should not be possible for non admins.
If your system drive is fat32 or was fat32 at install time and was converted then windows security is basically nonexistant.
* forgotton bios password.
* motherboard that doesn't support CD booting or at least doesn't support it properly.
* USB or firewire CD drive and a bios that doesn't support booting from it.
* No cd drive at all (the loader can be used to set off an install from the network).
Ubuntu does import a lot of stuff from debian sid but they also package a lot of stuff themselves nowadays.
From what I can gather sid isn't too bad most of the time anyway it's just every so often big upgrades come through and break stuff.
my guess is that automatic updates was on one of the middle settings where it checks automatically but does not install automatically.
If they can forciblly update the updater then they should be able to replace the updater with a version that will let them force down other upgrades.
It's not immediately toxic but the body does use it as a way to get rid of toxic chemicals so if you keep drinking all your pee then those chemicals will just build up in your system.
Biggest bar to all of this is the price-point.
I'm in the UK so things are probablly a bit different over here from in the US but the basic principles should remain the same.
We have managed to get digital decoder boxes down to the sub £10 range so that is no longer a real issue for us, I presume the same will happen in time on your side of the pond.
IMO the biggest bar is that digital doesn't degrade gracefully and needs pretty good signal strength to be watchable. Worse it can appear to be ok most of the time but every few days become unwatchable due to either the weather attenuating the signal or the box getting hot. The cost of getting your houses ariel and signal distribution setup fixed up (or getting one put in from scratch where you used set top ariels before) is likely to dwawf the cost of the boxes.
Another big problem is that recording with a seperate recorder and digitial decoder is a PITA. You can get boxes that can decode digital terestrial, record the results onto a hard drive and then archive them to DVD but they aren't cheap.