I can think of several reasons a geek might get XP while preferring Linux. A job that lets you telecommute but doesn't supply a notebook or a Linux-friendly way on to the VPN. Getting locked into XP through years of acquiring familiar apps and tools. Shelling out cash on specialty hardware before checking Linux compatibility. Pouncing on the chance to snap up XP just to hedge their bets before they can only count on finding Vista. And then there's always the people who intend to dual-boot. You'll see them buying XP, then they'll get Linux without alerting the media.
TFA article is pretty clear on why the housewife wants the Linux Eee PC. But it doesn't even tell you what they meant by "geek" - fondness for games? already uses more than two programs that didn't come on a computer? computer literacy? - much less offer any reasoning.
Being sued, while it sucks ass, is not the only unsettling prospect. Picture a Google marketing researcher standing over your shoulder every time you go to YouTube. Taking notes, asking for your demographic and contact info, trying to figure out who will pay money to get inside your head.
The traditional media world just sends stuff to the channels I tune into and puts things on the pages I visit. Yeah, they do research on who likes what, but they're very up front about it. They had me participate in an advance screening of a pilot once - I was able to help keep a really shitty sitcom off the air (Ever seen Rue McClanahan as a German-born preschool principal in a Full House ripoff? You're welcome.) without having to disclose anything about myself that they didn't expect to be true of hundreds of thousands of people.
If Viacom has decided to get Orwellian all of a sudden, why is it that Google has exactly what they're looking for ready to hand it over to them on a terabyte platter? Google wrote a nifty search engine, put out a couple of cool apps, circulated a lot of open code, put together a geek's paradise of a workplace, and said they weren't evil. That doesn't mean they can do no wrong, and it doesn't mean they're your friends. It doesn't even mean they didn't backtrack on the evil thing.
I think GP is wanting to know why Viacom needs to know who watched, when posting the copyrighted content is more unambiguously actionable. FTA:
Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos
When the Supreme Court ruled on Grokster, they considered that Grokster knew that the service would be used overwhelmingly for illegal files, and that legal files wouldn't account for enough traffic to make the whole thing worthwhile/profitable. Illegal activity may not have been integral to the technical model of what they were doing, but it was integral to the business model. It looks like they're going to try to make the case that Google knew that copyrighted material was going to be essential to driving enough traffic to the site to make it a credible medium. That would make their participation in the infringement pretty willful.
Being able to run within a small memory space is critical for linux. Otherways, there won't be any difference with Vista.
No, actually, getting as much out of the RAM you've put in your machine as you're supposed to is just the icing on the cake. Having a web browser, photo editor, 3d modeler, and 3d MMORPG open at the same time was pretty cool. Pulling it off with one measly gig was frickin' sweet, but if it had taken a gig and a half, or even two gigs, I'd still be a long way from a Vista convert. (Has anyone sighted a Vista convert?)
There are a million reasons Linux will give you a cleaner, more efficient system. You did describe some of them very well, but let's not lose our heads here. Give me a machine for free with a terabyte of RAM and as many quad cores as you can squeeze in it, and I'll still want a platform I can tweak to my liking, one that doesn't constantly come up with ways to nag me, reach in my wallet, or imply I'm a criminal, and one that's just generally built to put me in the driver's seat of my own computer.
It sounds like your living in some internet stone age where regional monopolies are trying to squeeze every dime out of you they can without having to provide much service to their customers at all
It's a lot different servicing 9.8 million square kilometers than it is servicing 41,000 square kilometers. Throw in the tradition of companies engaging in the most aggressive anti-competitive practices they possibly can unless the government steps in despite their efforts to buy them off (a publicly-traded company must engage in any legalized form of bribery available - passing up this opportunity for more profits is an actionable tort), the enormous economic pressure on companies to spend as little money as possible while bringing in as much as possible (anyone in IT in the US getting whatever they need to do their jobs without any hassles, let me know where you work), and the widespread belief that being sophisticated enough to realize that they're getting a raw deal is "elitist" and wrong/weak/arrogant/gay/unpatriotic, and yeah. Internet Stone Age. There are actually, staggering though it will be to someone like yourself from civilization, advertisements still going around that talk about 768K DSL as the "High Speed" alternative to dialup.
Linux From Scratch would be a good fallback position if building what you want on top of Gentoo or Arch didn't turn out to be as comparatively easy as it was supposed to be. It'll make you do a lot more work, but overcomes the snags through brute force of documentation, assuming little foreknowledge.
For a distro you can actually work in, the minimalist boot options of Knoppix would let you do a quick restart of X and see what your apps do in something like what your final release image is like. If nothing else, it's going to be the easiest way to explore the different minimal GUI's out there. If Monoppix has all the same boot options, it sounds like a perfect fit for the machine you want to do your coding in.
Flash drives have been around for a while, you know. And so have the filesystems:
YAFFS and JFFS2 look to me like they might be showing their age.
From Wikipedia:
"YAFFS2 is similar in concept to YAFFS1, and shares much the same code... The main difference is that YAFFS2 needs to jump through significant hoops to meet the "write once" requirement of modern NAND flash.
YAFFS2 now supports "checkpointing" which bypasses normal mount scanning, allowing very fast mount times. Mileage will vary, but mount times of c. 3 seconds for 2 GB have been reported.
Measuring mount times in seconds per gigabyte is not encouraging for the design goals we're talking about here. The disadvantages section of the JFFS2 article pretty well speaks for itself, but note
"All nodes must still be scanned at mount time."
Overcoming that hurdle was how YAFFS2 even moved up to the seconds per gigabyte range - the introductory paper for LogFS says
"On the authors notebook, mounting an empty JFFS2 on a 1GiB USB stick takes around 15 minutes. That is a little slower than most users would expect a ïlesystem mount to happen."
The developer's gift for dramatic understatement aside, LogFS sounds like they intend to meet the challenge of what's actually next head-on but the home page still has nice tidbits like -
"http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Logfs - this advertises several non-existent features, so don't take it too seriously. On the other hand, most of them will get implemented over time."
Note that the link above only lists six features so for "several" to be non-existent, well... So no, it's not a given that the problem of a workable filesystem is long since solved, or that a suitable one will actually be ready for prime time when they've got the SSD hardware at the "sweet spot".
How can you "abuse heroin"?
By using it until you've destroyed your body? You know, by not getting sufficient nutrition because you're spending all your money on junk, or by using it so frequently you fail to notice your health deteriorating because you're nodding all the time.
That would be abusing yourself with heroin. Or, if one applies the definition of "abuse" where healthy, or at least not particularly unhealthy, behavior is differentiated from other patterns of behavior, that would fit. But that test isn't applied before calling illegal drug use "abuse" - it's just pointed out if the criteria happen to be there. And of course, heroin consuming all of your time and money is a purely the pharmacological effect of overuse, it has nothing to do with having to get it illegally.
Calling it "abuse" is a way of stifling debate
No it is NOT a way of stifling debate, it is a way of identifying when a pattern of healthy use has changed into a pattern of unhealthy use otherwise known as abuse.
Using legislative approval as the sole criterion of "abuse" is exactly that. Or are you telling me that you've seen a great deal of time spent identifying potentially healthy patterns of use when the drug of choice happens to be illegal? Hear much hard data on the people who suffer the fewest negative consequences? You hear it with alcohol - there's a pretty empirically well-defined portrait of the social drinker who won't experience negative consequences. Lifelong abstention isn't the only scenario where someone takes a controlled substance without the blessing of a doctor and doesn't experience total disaster, but it's the only one "respectable" people ever talk about. This despite the fact that the risk of death from alcohol is still higher than with many of the things that the government has chosen to protect us from, sometimes much higher. The risk that you'll involuntarily cause harm to someone else sticks out like a sore thumb.
It's pretty obvious you're a user with an axe to grind. You're totally wrong though, and it makes me angry to see you disseminating faulty information.
What gave it away? Typical junkie debating semantics and politics on slashdot? No, I'm not a user - it's a spectacularly bad idea. But so is forgoing critical thinking in the name of rabid prohibition. That was the part where things got really ugly. And I mean a lot uglier than people telling you that you had to be getting high if you didn't agree with the laws against it. My axe to grind is that I can't walk down the street without someone panhandling to get their fix. Well, I could, but only by venturing into the neighborhoods where they don't *ask*. I'm sick of hearing about the brave, upright people protecting me from the escalation of the problem they created, but not well enough that I don't have anything to worry about. I'm too smart to do heroin, but until people wake up to the fact that the laws have made things worse for nearly a century, and that the only approaches that have showed hope of making things any better have all involved exceptions to those laws, heroin may just get me killed.
Are you an idiot?
Drug abuse, by any definition of "abuse" has nothing to do with (informed) consent.
Um, actually, there are definitions of "abuse" that deal with exactly that. There are better definitions for gp to refute - the ones that deal with the expectation that one lives up to an obligation to behave properly. The term "drug abuse" implies that any substance that can chemically interact with your body - even if naturally occurring and/or readily available without outside assistance - defaults to a state where society has a list of uses that are acceptable for you to engage in. This list starts blank and you are obligated to pay for the expense of satisfying society that there are acceptable uses, and you cannot ever demonstrate to society that you are up to the task of deciding the matter entirely for yourself. Even if you're a qualified scientist.
Under your idiotic definition, a fully informed heroin junkie isn't abusing drugs.
Under his definition a heroin junkie may be abusing many things - the charity of people who will preserve him from the full range of consequences of his decisions, treatment programs that he has no intention of actually making full use of but must attend to avoid penalties of one form or another. Then again, he may not be abusing any damn thing at all. But heroin? How can you "abuse heroin"? Society doesn't spell out a set of obligations to you in exchange for its efforts to keep it available for you, or acknowledge a right way and a wrong way to use it. It's like accusing someone of "abusing serial killing" or "abusing date rape". If you're against the use of certain drugs by anyone anywhere, then the charge is "heroin use" or "cocaine use". Calling it "abuse" is a way of stifling debate - "Are you for or against permitting abuse? Are you saying you're in favor of legalizing abuse?"
This is getting a bit weird. I'm all for Linux, but c'mon.... What in Linux "just works" like the Unified Mac Experience?
I move a window to the edge of my screen and it snaps into place at the last second so that it's exactly at the edge of my window. I can keep any window I want on top of or behind other windows so that I can work with two windows at once without having to constantly Alt-Tab between them or make them ridiculously small. When I browse an audio CD, it displays the tracks in a series of folders that shows me what the files look like ripped and encoded in all of the audio codecs I have installed ready for me to drag and drop onto my hard drive. When I zoom in on a jpeg, my photoviewer applies an algorithm to blow it up without pixelating it. When I want a piece of software I just pick it out of a list and it's there... oh wait. I don't remember any of that from using a Mac.
Okay, "Just Works" just like on a Mac... hmm... I put my thumb drive or a data CD in and the mounted volume appears on my desktop? Media just plays for me right in my browser? My music organizing software recognizes my MP3 player and offers to load it for me? No wait, it didn't care what brand I used. I actually had a much easier time mapping to a printer shared from Windows than any of the dozen or so attempts I've heard of people making on a Mac, but I'm willing to assume they were all nincompoops or picked a printer that wouldn't have worked for me either and call it a push.
But seriously, I can't hardly think of a Linux user-unfriendliness headache that I haven't seen dramatically improve in the last two or three years, at least not one I care about. If you don't believe me, try installing the new Nvidia manufacturer drivers. It prompted me to kill my X server first, warned me that it didn't mean by dropping to single-user mode, found my kernel sources without any help, said something about them being a little off and creating a new kernel interface for me (again without any help on my part), then offered to update my xorg.conf file for me, which it did, beautifully. I swear the only reason that driver install didn't do everything it had to do without asking or informing me is that the average Linux user would have considered it rude. Maybe if (assuming you haven't) you used a Mac long enough to discover all its warts and you weren't trying administer 8 machines, use Win98 as a webserver, and get Linux to run CAD software on a shoestring budget, you wouldn't have Macs up on a pedestal.
It's also not so hard to imagine one being left in there because you've got this lumpy bloody thing in a body full of lumpy bloody things.
Okay, I want the surgeon to be freed up for the tasks that require a surgeon while nurses, surgical techs, and/or interns count sponges. And I don't want the gory details on how a sponge can hide, I'll take it on faith that it's very difficult to track down. But I expect him to have a slightly better grasp of anatomy than "lumpy blood thing".
"Nurse, see that lumpy bloody thing there?"
"You mean his liver, doctor?"
"Yes. What's that lumpy bloody thing above it?"
"That's his stomach."
"You sure?"
"Yes, doctor."
"I'm not convinced. Hand me the bar code scanner."
Funny? WTF?? Straightforward, factual, logical explanation to a question. Perhaps the mods, failing to recognize the format, took it as some form of parody.
Now, if the Blender team could ever pull theierr head out of their ass and bring in a UI developer and stay out of the way... they might have something. But it's been ears coming and I doubt we'll ever see Blender become usable.
I've actually seen an interview with a Blender developer (a Linux magazine I flipped through, I can't remember which one) from when Elephant's Dream came out that discussed why they made the interface the way they did. Being the in-house application of NeoGeo, it was geared towards how they worked, and the developers gave the animators what they wanted - maximum productivity after learning the application when used the way that particular group of people liked to use it. The developers came to them and offered them an easier to learn interface - they were told "No, you idiot. We're going out of business and have to try to finish our last few projects. We're not going to hire anyone new. Now add this highly unintuitive key sequence to shortcut this arcane task that no novice has ever heard of." After it was released for widespread consumption, ease of learning became a common request, but there were still people learning the interface it had and wanting to be able to use it the way they had learned to. After almost ten years since its shareware release, and five since its release under GPL, this hypothetical easy-to-use, powerful, intuitive 3d modeling software that someone must have their head up their ass not to have delivered on a silver platter by now would probably have to take the form of a completely separate front-end, a fork, or a complete rewrite with some of the nuts and bolts used over.
And there are peopleoutthere who think that Blender "has something" just like it is. If a hobbyist or student wants gratis open-source 3d modeling with an easy to use interface, they should try Art of Illusion. It's nowhere near as powerful, but it's easy and intuitive enough for someone to learn on, and it can export into formats used by the big boys. According to TFA, Blender has the same "Learning path to be productive" as the others, even with the less familiar and intuitive interface. If someone is "getting serious", there isn't really a way around having to invest the time to learn something. And of six packages the article reviewed, only one could be learned in the single month they give you to try modo, and I'm sure those figures are for people who aren't squeezing it in on a part-time basis.
Oh, and there's a few gotchas with modo. They support both platforms - Mac and Windows! Should I download the trial and see if I can get it to work under Wine? Let me click on the "Try Modo" link - "Interested in trying modo? As a result of modo 301 now being available, all of our website bandwidth is being focused on supporting our registered modo customers. Sign up to create an account and you will be informed just as soon as the new evaluation version of modo 301 is available. If you already have an account you're already on the list to be notified." What? If I have an account, I'm on a list to be notified that there's a trial version available? Oh, they want $400 for an upgrade (which they're ready to sell you sight-unseen right now). Okay, let me see if I can figure out if I can use modo to turn blueprints into 3d models the way they do here. Hmm... not too big on the import/export capabilities are they? Looking over the so-called tech specs (looks like they hired some marketing people and got out of the way) I can only find "modo is able to harvest animation data from other 3D applications in order to render it. modo reads.MDD files for this purpose." Maybe it
Yeah. Because people have 'economic reasons' to spend $13000+ for a very small 2-person car with a very limited range.
Top speed of 25 mph of course kills it for, I'd say, 95% of all Americans at least.
I've driven one of these, and the "top speed" of 25 mph is somewhat understated -- I clocked it maxing out at around 35...I'd like to see better range, too.
FTA:
...this bright May morning in Scandinavia, where the idea of a mass-produced battery-powered vehicle is being resurrected and actual cars are scheduled to begin rolling off the production line by year's end.
It's no Tesla Roadster -- the current battery is speed-limited to 62 miles an hour. But it is nimble and quick and goes about 112 miles on a single charge.
STIRLING SOLUTION: Dean Kamen's heat engine could extend the Think's range by hundreds of miles, turning the car into a mobile generator.
Finding ways out of the harm caused by cars is important. When they make progress on practical electric cars, we shouldn't be talking about what was available five years ago as if nothing had changed. Especially since what was available five years ago didn't even have the best battery available installed.
The first thing I do when I get a new terminal is change all the backgrounds to black and the foreground to light grey or white
I don't think the comparison holds. I've never bothered to change the default settings on Konsole or xterm on my machine, and I find them equally easy on the eyes - xterm set to black on white, Konsole the other way around. But clicking a little through Blackle, and it was completely unreadable beyond the largest and most prominent text. Look at the link text, it doesn't look a thing like your xterm, does it? Unlike uniform, predictable console output, websites need to vary text size and color intensity to structure information, and white on black quickly becomes difficult to read as you reduce font size and contrast.
previously commercial only package is now open for all the use, whether for open-source projects or commercial offerings
The antonym of "open-source" is "closed-source" or "proprietary". Anyone telling you you can't use and distribute GPL'ed software commercially is in violation of the GPL.
"I have made it clear since the beginning that I will never sell the name," Giersch said. "It is my sole intention to realise my idea for a hybrid mail system. I am absolutely convinced of its success. Neither "G-mail" nor myself are for sale."
Now, I guess if your friends in the Healthcare industry are pure evil, then Google is being evil, but I don't see how you can construe that as "protection".
There's a film out that, if you take the point of view that the vast majority of the people who see it do, talks about how people who are sick and dying are not being helped by people who amass large amounts of money (and prestige, public goodwill, etc.) for helping sick people. Google, in the role that I and a lot of people understood them to have for most of the last decade, could reasonably be expected to do nothing about it - only make sure that people found the information on the subject that they chose to try to find. In a more realistic worldview, they sell ads, they advertise that they sell ads, and if people on side of the debate or the other, or both, buy ads that's how it goes - the service is there for anyone who wants to buy. Instead, when:
Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through "Get the Facts" or issue management campaigns.
they don't say "Fuck off. We don't do propoganda." No, they get involved. If no one's come to them yet, they actively reach out. To one side. The one with the money. The one with the blood money. If you weren't there already, this is the last nail in the coffin of the notion of Google as anything more than any old corporation with its requisite ration of evil.
The major version number in 2.6.x.x is 2. Six is the minor version number, for which the term "series" is frequently used. The third number is called the "release" number, and the fourth is called "trivial" (although sometimes the difference is "the X server doesn't crash every ten seconds any more" and I don't personally consider it trivial). They stopped using the minor version/series number to denote stability vs. development in 2.6, and did away with having a stable vs. development branch altogether, but Adrian Branch has been maintaining 2.6.16.x since December of 2005 to serve the old role - a stable feature-set with the relevant bugfixes from newer releases applied.
In this case, there is a good argument there was not proper notice.
There's also a good argument that he did nothing to enter into the agreement. If you buy a car, and there's a cap over the ignition from which a sign is hanging saying that you agree to various terms and conditions if you use the car, that's a pretty shitty way to get someone to enter into a contract, but someone can point to the moment where you agreed to it, or at least failed to raise an objection. If there's a stack of papers in the back seat that you've never seen before telling you that you've forfeited all sorts of rights and incurred all sorts of obligations, that's thinner stuff.
You may be right about "contract iff signature" bullshit in general, but any printed EULA's that were introduced to him only when he received the computer, not during any part of the sale, he didn't sign, didn't mail in, didn't scratch off any of the boxes to see what he won, didn't connect the dots to see what kind of flower they made, they were just foisted upon him without his consideration or consent. It's the same as if Gateway had randomly stopped somebody on the street and handed him a stack of documents that said he could never sue them. That's not a contract. Oh, right. IANAL. I hope that's not a contract.
But there's a twist: it gets stronger every time you shoot at it, bomb it or do anything violent towards it. Why are you still shooting at it?
Because it also gets stronger if you don't do anything violent towards it and don't let it dictate your agenda, and then you'd have to explain to your constituents that you did nothing. It's a problem that calls for doing things that are sneaky and clever, but the jackasses we have running the place aren't up to the challenge. And the War on Terror is to Gulf War II as the War on Drugs is to petty shakedowns and "Drug Checkpoint" extortion rackets - convenient excuse for something that greedy, powerful people wanted to do anyway for self-serving reasons.
Yes, spam seems to have a lot of kings to arrest. Here's a classic from 2005. [detnews.com]In addition to ruling as king, he also served as Poster Boy. A real Renaissance spammer.
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of several reasons a geek might get XP while preferring Linux. A job that lets you telecommute but doesn't supply a notebook or a Linux-friendly way on to the VPN. Getting locked into XP through years of acquiring familiar apps and tools. Shelling out cash on specialty hardware before checking Linux compatibility. Pouncing on the chance to snap up XP just to hedge their bets before they can only count on finding Vista. And then there's always the people who intend to dual-boot. You'll see them buying XP, then they'll get Linux without alerting the media.
TFA article is pretty clear on why the housewife wants the Linux Eee PC. But it doesn't even tell you what they meant by "geek" - fondness for games? already uses more than two programs that didn't come on a computer? computer literacy? - much less offer any reasoning.
Being sued, while it sucks ass, is not the only unsettling prospect. Picture a Google marketing researcher standing over your shoulder every time you go to YouTube. Taking notes, asking for your demographic and contact info, trying to figure out who will pay money to get inside your head.
The traditional media world just sends stuff to the channels I tune into and puts things on the pages I visit. Yeah, they do research on who likes what, but they're very up front about it. They had me participate in an advance screening of a pilot once - I was able to help keep a really shitty sitcom off the air (Ever seen Rue McClanahan as a German-born preschool principal in a Full House ripoff? You're welcome.) without having to disclose anything about myself that they didn't expect to be true of hundreds of thousands of people.
If Viacom has decided to get Orwellian all of a sudden, why is it that Google has exactly what they're looking for ready to hand it over to them on a terabyte platter? Google wrote a nifty search engine, put out a couple of cool apps, circulated a lot of open code, put together a geek's paradise of a workplace, and said they weren't evil. That doesn't mean they can do no wrong, and it doesn't mean they're your friends. It doesn't even mean they didn't backtrack on the evil thing.
I think GP is wanting to know why Viacom needs to know who watched, when posting the copyrighted content is more unambiguously actionable. FTA:
When the Supreme Court ruled on Grokster, they considered that Grokster knew that the service would be used overwhelmingly for illegal files, and that legal files wouldn't account for enough traffic to make the whole thing worthwhile/profitable. Illegal activity may not have been integral to the technical model of what they were doing, but it was integral to the business model. It looks like they're going to try to make the case that Google knew that copyrighted material was going to be essential to driving enough traffic to the site to make it a credible medium. That would make their participation in the infringement pretty willful.
...it's hard to get excited about the prospect of our privacy being protected by having this data in Google's hands instead of Google's and Viacom's.
Being able to run within a small memory space is critical for linux. Otherways, there won't be any difference with Vista.
No, actually, getting as much out of the RAM you've put in your machine as you're supposed to is just the icing on the cake. Having a web browser, photo editor, 3d modeler, and 3d MMORPG open at the same time was pretty cool. Pulling it off with one measly gig was frickin' sweet, but if it had taken a gig and a half, or even two gigs, I'd still be a long way from a Vista convert. (Has anyone sighted a Vista convert?)
There are a million reasons Linux will give you a cleaner, more efficient system. You did describe some of them very well, but let's not lose our heads here. Give me a machine for free with a terabyte of RAM and as many quad cores as you can squeeze in it, and I'll still want a platform I can tweak to my liking, one that doesn't constantly come up with ways to nag me, reach in my wallet, or imply I'm a criminal, and one that's just generally built to put me in the driver's seat of my own computer.
It's a lot different servicing 9.8 million square kilometers than it is servicing 41,000 square kilometers. Throw in the tradition of companies engaging in the most aggressive anti-competitive practices they possibly can unless the government steps in despite their efforts to buy them off (a publicly-traded company must engage in any legalized form of bribery available - passing up this opportunity for more profits is an actionable tort), the enormous economic pressure on companies to spend as little money as possible while bringing in as much as possible (anyone in IT in the US getting whatever they need to do their jobs without any hassles, let me know where you work), and the widespread belief that being sophisticated enough to realize that they're getting a raw deal is "elitist" and wrong/weak/arrogant/gay/unpatriotic, and yeah. Internet Stone Age. There are actually, staggering though it will be to someone like yourself from civilization, advertisements still going around that talk about 768K DSL as the "High Speed" alternative to dialup.
Linux From Scratch would be a good fallback position if building what you want on top of Gentoo or Arch didn't turn out to be as comparatively easy as it was supposed to be. It'll make you do a lot more work, but overcomes the snags through brute force of documentation, assuming little foreknowledge.
For a distro you can actually work in, the minimalist boot options of Knoppix would let you do a quick restart of X and see what your apps do in something like what your final release image is like. If nothing else, it's going to be the easiest way to explore the different minimal GUI's out there. If Monoppix has all the same boot options, it sounds like a perfect fit for the machine you want to do your coding in.
YAFFS and JFFS2 look to me like they might be showing their age.
From Wikipedia:
"YAFFS2 is similar in concept to YAFFS1, and shares much the same code... The main difference is that YAFFS2 needs to jump through significant hoops to meet the "write once" requirement of modern NAND flash. YAFFS2 now supports "checkpointing" which bypasses normal mount scanning, allowing very fast mount times. Mileage will vary, but mount times of c. 3 seconds for 2 GB have been reported.Measuring mount times in seconds per gigabyte is not encouraging for the design goals we're talking about here. The disadvantages section of the JFFS2 article pretty well speaks for itself, but note
"All nodes must still be scanned at mount time."Overcoming that hurdle was how YAFFS2 even moved up to the seconds per gigabyte range - the introductory paper for LogFS says
"On the authors notebook, mounting an empty JFFS2 on a 1GiB USB stick takes around 15 minutes. That is a little slower than most users would expect a ïlesystem mount to happen."The developer's gift for dramatic understatement aside, LogFS sounds like they intend to meet the challenge of what's actually next head-on but the home page still has nice tidbits like -
"http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Logfs - this advertises several non-existent features, so don't take it too seriously. On the other hand, most of them will get implemented over time."Note that the link above only lists six features so for "several" to be non-existent, well... So no, it's not a given that the problem of a workable filesystem is long since solved, or that a suitable one will actually be ready for prime time when they've got the SSD hardware at the "sweet spot".
That would be abusing yourself with heroin. Or, if one applies the definition of "abuse" where healthy, or at least not particularly unhealthy, behavior is differentiated from other patterns of behavior, that would fit. But that test isn't applied before calling illegal drug use "abuse" - it's just pointed out if the criteria happen to be there. And of course, heroin consuming all of your time and money is a purely the pharmacological effect of overuse, it has nothing to do with having to get it illegally.
Calling it "abuse" is a way of stifling debate No it is NOT a way of stifling debate, it is a way of identifying when a pattern of healthy use has changed into a pattern of unhealthy use otherwise known as abuse.Using legislative approval as the sole criterion of "abuse" is exactly that. Or are you telling me that you've seen a great deal of time spent identifying potentially healthy patterns of use when the drug of choice happens to be illegal? Hear much hard data on the people who suffer the fewest negative consequences? You hear it with alcohol - there's a pretty empirically well-defined portrait of the social drinker who won't experience negative consequences. Lifelong abstention isn't the only scenario where someone takes a controlled substance without the blessing of a doctor and doesn't experience total disaster, but it's the only one "respectable" people ever talk about. This despite the fact that the risk of death from alcohol is still higher than with many of the things that the government has chosen to protect us from, sometimes much higher. The risk that you'll involuntarily cause harm to someone else sticks out like a sore thumb.
It's pretty obvious you're a user with an axe to grind. You're totally wrong though, and it makes me angry to see you disseminating faulty information.What gave it away? Typical junkie debating semantics and politics on slashdot? No, I'm not a user - it's a spectacularly bad idea. But so is forgoing critical thinking in the name of rabid prohibition. That was the part where things got really ugly. And I mean a lot uglier than people telling you that you had to be getting high if you didn't agree with the laws against it. My axe to grind is that I can't walk down the street without someone panhandling to get their fix. Well, I could, but only by venturing into the neighborhoods where they don't *ask*. I'm sick of hearing about the brave, upright people protecting me from the escalation of the problem they created, but not well enough that I don't have anything to worry about. I'm too smart to do heroin, but until people wake up to the fact that the laws have made things worse for nearly a century, and that the only approaches that have showed hope of making things any better have all involved exceptions to those laws, heroin may just get me killed.
Um, actually, there are definitions of "abuse" that deal with exactly that. There are better definitions for gp to refute - the ones that deal with the expectation that one lives up to an obligation to behave properly. The term "drug abuse" implies that any substance that can chemically interact with your body - even if naturally occurring and/or readily available without outside assistance - defaults to a state where society has a list of uses that are acceptable for you to engage in. This list starts blank and you are obligated to pay for the expense of satisfying society that there are acceptable uses, and you cannot ever demonstrate to society that you are up to the task of deciding the matter entirely for yourself. Even if you're a qualified scientist.
Under his definition a heroin junkie may be abusing many things - the charity of people who will preserve him from the full range of consequences of his decisions, treatment programs that he has no intention of actually making full use of but must attend to avoid penalties of one form or another. Then again, he may not be abusing any damn thing at all. But heroin? How can you "abuse heroin"? Society doesn't spell out a set of obligations to you in exchange for its efforts to keep it available for you, or acknowledge a right way and a wrong way to use it. It's like accusing someone of "abusing serial killing" or "abusing date rape". If you're against the use of certain drugs by anyone anywhere, then the charge is "heroin use" or "cocaine use". Calling it "abuse" is a way of stifling debate - "Are you for or against permitting abuse? Are you saying you're in favor of legalizing abuse?"
I move a window to the edge of my screen and it snaps into place at the last second so that it's exactly at the edge of my window. I can keep any window I want on top of or behind other windows so that I can work with two windows at once without having to constantly Alt-Tab between them or make them ridiculously small. When I browse an audio CD, it displays the tracks in a series of folders that shows me what the files look like ripped and encoded in all of the audio codecs I have installed ready for me to drag and drop onto my hard drive. When I zoom in on a jpeg, my photoviewer applies an algorithm to blow it up without pixelating it. When I want a piece of software I just pick it out of a list and it's there... oh wait. I don't remember any of that from using a Mac.
Okay, "Just Works" just like on a Mac... hmm... I put my thumb drive or a data CD in and the mounted volume appears on my desktop? Media just plays for me right in my browser? My music organizing software recognizes my MP3 player and offers to load it for me? No wait, it didn't care what brand I used. I actually had a much easier time mapping to a printer shared from Windows than any of the dozen or so attempts I've heard of people making on a Mac, but I'm willing to assume they were all nincompoops or picked a printer that wouldn't have worked for me either and call it a push.
But seriously, I can't hardly think of a Linux user-unfriendliness headache that I haven't seen dramatically improve in the last two or three years, at least not one I care about. If you don't believe me, try installing the new Nvidia manufacturer drivers. It prompted me to kill my X server first, warned me that it didn't mean by dropping to single-user mode, found my kernel sources without any help, said something about them being a little off and creating a new kernel interface for me (again without any help on my part), then offered to update my xorg.conf file for me, which it did, beautifully. I swear the only reason that driver install didn't do everything it had to do without asking or informing me is that the average Linux user would have considered it rude. Maybe if (assuming you haven't) you used a Mac long enough to discover all its warts and you weren't trying administer 8 machines, use Win98 as a webserver, and get Linux to run CAD software on a shoestring budget, you wouldn't have Macs up on a pedestal.
It's also not so hard to imagine one being left in there because you've got this lumpy bloody thing in a body full of lumpy bloody things.
Okay, I want the surgeon to be freed up for the tasks that require a surgeon while nurses, surgical techs, and/or interns count sponges. And I don't want the gory details on how a sponge can hide, I'll take it on faith that it's very difficult to track down. But I expect him to have a slightly better grasp of anatomy than "lumpy blood thing".
"Nurse, see that lumpy bloody thing there?"
"You mean his liver, doctor?"
"Yes. What's that lumpy bloody thing above it?"
"That's his stomach."
"You sure?"
"Yes, doctor."
"I'm not convinced. Hand me the bar code scanner."
Funny? WTF?? Straightforward, factual, logical explanation to a question. Perhaps the mods, failing to recognize the format, took it as some form of parody.
Actually, (0.81 - 0.77) / 0.77 = 0.052 That's a 5.2% increase. They didn't just do the arithmetic wrong, they did the wrong arithmetic.
I've actually seen an interview with a Blender developer (a Linux magazine I flipped through, I can't remember which one) from when Elephant's Dream came out that discussed why they made the interface the way they did. Being the in-house application of NeoGeo, it was geared towards how they worked, and the developers gave the animators what they wanted - maximum productivity after learning the application when used the way that particular group of people liked to use it. The developers came to them and offered them an easier to learn interface - they were told "No, you idiot. We're going out of business and have to try to finish our last few projects. We're not going to hire anyone new. Now add this highly unintuitive key sequence to shortcut this arcane task that no novice has ever heard of." After it was released for widespread consumption, ease of learning became a common request, but there were still people learning the interface it had and wanting to be able to use it the way they had learned to. After almost ten years since its shareware release, and five since its release under GPL, this hypothetical easy-to-use, powerful, intuitive 3d modeling software that someone must have their head up their ass not to have delivered on a silver platter by now would probably have to take the form of a completely separate front-end, a fork, or a complete rewrite with some of the nuts and bolts used over.
And there are people out there who think that Blender "has something" just like it is. If a hobbyist or student wants gratis open-source 3d modeling with an easy to use interface, they should try Art of Illusion. It's nowhere near as powerful, but it's easy and intuitive enough for someone to learn on, and it can export into formats used by the big boys. According to TFA, Blender has the same "Learning path to be productive" as the others, even with the less familiar and intuitive interface. If someone is "getting serious", there isn't really a way around having to invest the time to learn something. And of six packages the article reviewed, only one could be learned in the single month they give you to try modo, and I'm sure those figures are for people who aren't squeezing it in on a part-time basis.
Oh, and there's a few gotchas with modo. They support both platforms - Mac and Windows! Should I download the trial and see if I can get it to work under Wine? Let me click on the "Try Modo" link - "Interested in trying modo? As a result of modo 301 now being available, all of our website bandwidth is being focused on supporting our registered modo customers. Sign up to create an account and you will be informed just as soon as the new evaluation version of modo 301 is available. If you already have an account you're already on the list to be notified." What? If I have an account, I'm on a list to be notified that there's a trial version available? Oh, they want $400 for an upgrade (which they're ready to sell you sight-unseen right now). Okay, let me see if I can figure out if I can use modo to turn blueprints into 3d models the way they do here. Hmm... not too big on the import/export capabilities are they? Looking over the so-called tech specs (looks like they hired some marketing people and got out of the way) I can only find "modo is able to harvest animation data from other 3D applications in order to render it. modo reads .MDD files for this purpose." Maybe it
FTA:
It's no Tesla Roadster -- the current battery is speed-limited to 62 miles an hour. But it is nimble and quick and goes about 112 miles on a single charge.
STIRLING SOLUTION: Dean Kamen's heat engine could extend the Think's range by hundreds of miles, turning the car into a mobile generator.
Finding ways out of the harm caused by cars is important. When they make progress on practical electric cars, we shouldn't be talking about what was available five years ago as if nothing had changed. Especially since what was available five years ago didn't even have the best battery available installed.
I don't think the comparison holds. I've never bothered to change the default settings on Konsole or xterm on my machine, and I find them equally easy on the eyes - xterm set to black on white, Konsole the other way around. But clicking a little through Blackle, and it was completely unreadable beyond the largest and most prominent text. Look at the link text, it doesn't look a thing like your xterm, does it? Unlike uniform, predictable console output, websites need to vary text size and color intensity to structure information, and white on black quickly becomes difficult to read as you reduce font size and contrast.
The antonym of "open-source" is "closed-source" or "proprietary". Anyone telling you you can't use and distribute GPL'ed software commercially is in violation of the GPL.
FTA:
There's a film out that, if you take the point of view that the vast majority of the people who see it do, talks about how people who are sick and dying are not being helped by people who amass large amounts of money (and prestige, public goodwill, etc.) for helping sick people. Google, in the role that I and a lot of people understood them to have for most of the last decade, could reasonably be expected to do nothing about it - only make sure that people found the information on the subject that they chose to try to find. In a more realistic worldview, they sell ads, they advertise that they sell ads, and if people on side of the debate or the other, or both, buy ads that's how it goes - the service is there for anyone who wants to buy. Instead, when:
they don't say "Fuck off. We don't do propoganda." No, they get involved. If no one's come to them yet, they actively reach out. To one side. The one with the money. The one with the blood money. If you weren't there already, this is the last nail in the coffin of the notion of Google as anything more than any old corporation with its requisite ration of evil.
Apologies to Mr. Bunk. That's what happens when you make a geek get up at 5:00 A.M. to take somebody to the airport.
The major version number in 2.6.x.x is 2. Six is the minor version number, for which the term "series" is frequently used. The third number is called the "release" number, and the fourth is called "trivial" (although sometimes the difference is "the X server doesn't crash every ten seconds any more" and I don't personally consider it trivial). They stopped using the minor version/series number to denote stability vs. development in 2.6, and did away with having a stable vs. development branch altogether, but Adrian Branch has been maintaining 2.6.16.x since December of 2005 to serve the old role - a stable feature-set with the relevant bugfixes from newer releases applied.
In this case, there is a good argument there was not proper notice.
There's also a good argument that he did nothing to enter into the agreement. If you buy a car, and there's a cap over the ignition from which a sign is hanging saying that you agree to various terms and conditions if you use the car, that's a pretty shitty way to get someone to enter into a contract, but someone can point to the moment where you agreed to it, or at least failed to raise an objection. If there's a stack of papers in the back seat that you've never seen before telling you that you've forfeited all sorts of rights and incurred all sorts of obligations, that's thinner stuff.
You may be right about "contract iff signature" bullshit in general, but any printed EULA's that were introduced to him only when he received the computer, not during any part of the sale, he didn't sign, didn't mail in, didn't scratch off any of the boxes to see what he won, didn't connect the dots to see what kind of flower they made, they were just foisted upon him without his consideration or consent. It's the same as if Gateway had randomly stopped somebody on the street and handed him a stack of documents that said he could never sue them. That's not a contract. Oh, right. IANAL. I hope that's not a contract.
Because it also gets stronger if you don't do anything violent towards it and don't let it dictate your agenda, and then you'd have to explain to your constituents that you did nothing. It's a problem that calls for doing things that are sneaky and clever, but the jackasses we have running the place aren't up to the challenge. And the War on Terror is to Gulf War II as the War on Drugs is to petty shakedowns and "Drug Checkpoint" extortion rackets - convenient excuse for something that greedy, powerful people wanted to do anyway for self-serving reasons.
Yes, spam seems to have a lot of kings to arrest. Here's a classic from 2005. [detnews.com]In addition to ruling as king, he also served as Poster Boy. A real Renaissance spammer.