It should be possible to produce special-purpose profiles of Debian. On the back burner of the Brown LUG is a subset of Debian, plus a couple of extra packages and at least one virtual package (or, possibly, a task). It would be provided in an on-campus repository.
I keep meaning to look into how difficult it would be to write a tool that could take a list of packages and an apt repository to mirror and create from it a mirror containing just the named packages and their dependencies. Even better would be if it could do it with symlinks to a full repository so that a full repository and a subset can exist side-by-side without wasting disk.
It's certainly possible to produce special-purpose distributions from other distributions, but only Debian lends itself to this sort of manipulation and centralization.
It's "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" not "Linux, Open Source, and All That Jazz." "The more reasonable readers" to whom you refer are not the target audience. The stuff about astronomy and astrophysics has nothing to do with OS or Linux either, but it's of interest to us nerds. Furthermore, Microsoft's status as the 500 pound gorilla means that most of its moves fall under "stuff that matters" to the world at large and nerds in particular.
Finally, I will point out two things:
There is no such thing as a news feed that contains only content any individual person cares about. (Well, no news at all means no objectionable content, but that's a trivial solution.)
It is a good thing that there is no such news feed. It's bad enough how easy it is to avoid opinions with which one disagrees. Exposure information and opinions that do not fit your world view improves you as a person.
You've written three novels (A World Out of Time, The
Integral Trees, The Smoke Ring) set in the universe of The
State. I've always found their semi-dystopian view of
Earth's future as a totalitarian state interesting. Do you
see elements of The State in the world of today?
While the universes of Known Space and the Draco Tavern and
even magical prehistory (The Magic Goes Away, etc.) have
been wellsprings of inspiration for you, the universe of The
State seems to be a second-class citizen. I've greatly
enjoyed all three novels, and I've been hoping for an
expansion of their universe for some time, especially some
greater exploration of living in such a society on Earth
itself. I'd also like to read the story of the dispute between
Earth and its colonies. Have you lost interest in the world
of The State?
First off, I see a lot of people posting about how UFS does not support resource forks. This is technically true, but false in practice. Any non-Classic application which reads or writes resource forks will work just fine on files stored on a UFS partition. Same with metadata (type/creator). While HFS and HFS+ associate the data fork with the hidden resource fork and metadata one way, UFS does it another. The resource fork and metadata are hidden and associated with the data fork by a naming convention rather than by an intrinsic aspect of the filesystem.
Second, I cannot recommend UFS for a root partition. Too many installers rely on the root partition being HFS+. They give errors about not being able to install on a "network file system" (which should be possible regardless). I had my system set up with several UFS partitions and no HFS+ partition at all, and ran into problems trying to install a bunch of stuff I genuinely wanted. So I gave up and made my root partition HFS+.
What I recommend, however, is that only the root be HFS+. My/Users partition is UFS. A couple of other partitions are UFS. I ordered an external FireWire drive and the several partitions I will be putting on it (including/Library,/Applications, and/Developer) will all be UFS.
(For those who are worried about/Library being externally mounted -- I haven't figured out what difference Apple intends there to be between/System/Library and/Library since both seem to be used identically, but I have chosen to treat/System/Library as containing things central to the running system such as StartupItems and Extensions, and/Library to be things related to applications, such as Application Support and Fonts.)
To maintain my various UFS partitions, I have an/etc/fstab and run fsck -p in the Disks StartupItem. I've been doing things this ways for months and it seems to work quite nicely. I will mention that I do not use any Classic applications, so having partitions (such as my home directory) visible from Classic is not a concern. YMMV.
Please put in the sockets and signals that Qt implement? Those are damn nice.
Look at libsigc++ for a well-designed implementation of signals and slots which does not rely on a source code generator (moc) and catches various bugs at compile-time instead of runtime.
Qt has the right idea, but its implementation involves unpleasant cruft and extra language keywords (emit, slots, signals, Q_OBJECT, etc.).
Just because any spacefaring civilization would "need" a better means of communication than electromagnetic radiation doesn't mean that such a thing exists. Despite all the science fiction I'm sure we've all read, there is no strong reason to believe that anything, information, radiation, or particles, can travel faster than light.
Remember, the universe doesn't seem to run on wish fulfillment.
I like the idea of a super-duper-replication device. Now, let's consider fair use. Suppose I buy a car. Obviously, someone would come up with a law that would prevent me from selling copies of it. On the other hand, how about if I make a copy of it for archival purposes. This means that I can drive around the copy and if I get into an accident I can just ditch the busted car and replicate a fresh copy from my archive. Or after putting 30,000 miles on it I can just skip the whole tire rotation and just go ahead and grab a new copy. As long as I don't get tired of the particular make and model, and as long as they don't change what's in gas (like the leaded/unleaded thing a couple of decades back), I never buy a car again. Is it still fair use?
I'm not saying it is or isn't, I'm just curious about people's reaction to the idea. Oh, yeah, does it matter how much it costs me to super-duper-replicate an object?
Sun wanted to provide a well-designed, componentized GUI toolkit and that is exactly what Swing is. Every Swing component is a JavaBean as well, the event handling is more elegant than any GUI toolkit I have ever seen (yes, it typically involves a deep call stack, though I've never seen it go beyond 8 or 9 levels), and the available functionality is astounding.
I was able to throw together a fairly largescale app with ease, customize portions of it, perform cute (and occasionally useful) buffering tricks, etc. It is just barely possible that Qt could be as complete and easy to use as Swing, but I doubt it. Nothing else even comes close.
Now if I could just write a GTK theme to Swing Pluggable Look and Feel converter...
I have to agree with this. Furthermore, every relationship I've had with any level of success has been as a result of an introduction by a friend. I met my first gf through a friend I met on a BBS, but that's the closest I've come to a successful online relationship.
Way back when I was 17 I had a brief romance with someone I met on IRC, but even the friendship aspect of it petered out, in good part due to being 3000 miles apart.
It was said before that one should make friends and let everything else just happen; among other things, your friends are your best filters for knowing you and knowing who would suit you.
I was thinking along those lines myself. The whole moderation thing strikes me a bit as jury duty, but without the negative connotations we often associate with jury duty (never been called so I don't know). The similarity is that we are called upon to contribute some of our time to be impartial for the good of the society/community. I figure if/when I am called upon to moderate I will read articles at the -1 threshold for the few days during which I am a moderator.
This forces me to see all kinds of noise, of course, but since it is only a few days a month according to CT, I am willing to tolerate it given the possibility that some gems have been overlooked or irresponsibly downgraded. I would encourage anyone who is a moderator to do the same.
Perhaps, actually, it would be appropriate to force the issue, i.e. set things up so that thresholds are unavailable while moderating. Maybe even the number of comments on articles should be hidden from moderators on the front page so that they are not scared off by posts with a slew of comments (not that flamebait articles are hard to spot...).
I've noticed that/. has the same tendency as Usenet groups to have occasional threads which got stupid at some point and all subsequent replies (i.e. everything in the subtree rooted at the stupid post) are stupid as well. I treasure the ',' command in trn, which allows me to junk the subtree of posts below the post I am currently reading. Perhaps such a thing should be available for moderators so that they can demote an entire subtree. I realize that this is a lot of power, but there should be some way of adjusting for it.
By the way, I would be delighted if the color of the subject bar of a post corresponded to its score, darkening for higher score. Or maybe the user prefs could have a color choice for each score level. Yeah, it's eye candy, but if used well it could be effective visual feedback.
"Modifications and/or Larger Works may require additional patent licenses from Apple which Apple may grant in its sole discretion."
You took that sentence out of context. They are saying that while Apple is granting use of any patents they own which cover the code in question, you don't get a free license on all of their patents if you happen to include some of their code in a larger work which would otherwise still infringe on some patent of theirs. Arguments on whether software patents are A Good Thing or not aside, this is reasonable. If you have code which would infringe on their patent(s), including some of their code does not change that.
"or (c) terminate Your rights to use the Affected Original Code, effective immediately upon Apple's posting of a notice to such effect on the Apple web site that is used for implementation of this License."
This would be them covering their asses, and rightly so. If they have infringed someone else's patent in their code, they can't really continue to license it to anyone else, now can they? A more relevant and distressing clause is 12.1(c) (12.1 is the section on ways in which the license can/will be terminated):
"automatically without notice from Apple if You, at any time during the term of this License, commence an action for patent infringement against Apple."
This says that if you sue Apple for patent infringement, however unrelated to the current code, you lose any license to use the code. This means that Apple can blithely infringe on any patent held by anyone using their code and, if sued, can sue for copyright infringement on the code covered by their license since the license terminates the moment the (first) lawsuit comes up.
I am much more bothered by this clause than any other. I am not sure if this qualifies as open source or not... the source is free and open AFAICT, but its use weakens the position of protecting one's patents from Apple. Oh, and incidentally, IANAL.
Read carefully. YCHTT stands for "You Can't Handle The Truth," which is what the anonymous poster used as a sig or tagline or something. YCHTT was being used as a way to refer to him, not as sarcastic nastiness.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep meaning to look into how difficult it would be to write a tool that could take a list of packages and an apt repository to mirror and create from it a mirror containing just the named packages and their dependencies. Even better would be if it could do it with symlinks to a full repository so that a full repository and a subset can exist side-by-side without wasting disk.
It's certainly possible to produce special-purpose distributions from other distributions, but only Debian lends itself to this sort of manipulation and centralization.
Finally, I will point out two things:
While the universes of Known Space and the Draco Tavern and even magical prehistory (The Magic Goes Away, etc.) have been wellsprings of inspiration for you, the universe of The State seems to be a second-class citizen. I've greatly enjoyed all three novels, and I've been hoping for an expansion of their universe for some time, especially some greater exploration of living in such a society on Earth itself. I'd also like to read the story of the dispute between Earth and its colonies. Have you lost interest in the world of The State?
Second, I cannot recommend UFS for a root partition. Too many installers rely on the root partition being HFS+. They give errors about not being able to install on a "network file system" (which should be possible regardless). I had my system set up with several UFS partitions and no HFS+ partition at all, and ran into problems trying to install a bunch of stuff I genuinely wanted. So I gave up and made my root partition HFS+.
What I recommend, however, is that only the root be HFS+. My /Users partition is UFS. A couple of other partitions are UFS. I ordered an external FireWire drive and the several partitions I will be putting on it (including /Library, /Applications, and /Developer) will all be UFS.
(For those who are worried about /Library being externally mounted -- I haven't figured out what difference Apple intends there to be between /System/Library and /Library since both seem to be used identically, but I have chosen to treat /System/Library as containing things central to the running system such as StartupItems and Extensions, and /Library to be things related to applications, such as Application Support and Fonts.)
To maintain my various UFS partitions, I have an /etc/fstab and run fsck -p in the Disks StartupItem. I've been doing things this ways for months and it seems to work quite nicely. I will mention that I do not use any Classic applications, so having partitions (such as my home directory) visible from Classic is not a concern. YMMV.
Look at libsigc++ for a well-designed implementation of signals and slots which does not rely on a source code generator (moc) and catches various bugs at compile-time instead of runtime.
Qt has the right idea, but its implementation involves unpleasant cruft and extra language keywords (emit, slots, signals, Q_OBJECT, etc.).
Just because any spacefaring civilization would "need" a better means of communication than electromagnetic radiation doesn't mean that such a thing exists. Despite all the science fiction I'm sure we've all read, there is no strong reason to believe that anything, information, radiation, or particles, can travel faster than light.
Remember, the universe doesn't seem to run on wish fulfillment.
I like the idea of a super-duper-replication device. Now, let's consider fair use. Suppose I buy a car. Obviously, someone would come up with a law that would prevent me from selling copies of it. On the other hand, how about if I make a copy of it for archival purposes. This means that I can drive around the copy and if I get into an accident I can just ditch the busted car and replicate a fresh copy from my archive. Or after putting 30,000 miles on it I can just skip the whole tire rotation and just go ahead and grab a new copy. As long as I don't get tired of the particular make and model, and as long as they don't change what's in gas (like the leaded/unleaded thing a couple of decades back), I never buy a car again. Is it still fair use?
I'm not saying it is or isn't, I'm just curious about people's reaction to the idea. Oh, yeah, does it matter how much it costs me to super-duper-replicate an object?
Actually, JDK 1.3's version of the JFC is codenamed Kestrel and is supposed to have some significant changes. See this for more information.
Sun wanted to provide a well-designed, componentized GUI toolkit and that is exactly what Swing is. Every Swing component is a JavaBean as well, the event handling is more elegant than any GUI toolkit I have ever seen (yes, it typically involves a deep call stack, though I've never seen it go beyond 8 or 9 levels), and the available functionality is astounding.
I was able to throw together a fairly largescale app with ease, customize portions of it, perform cute (and occasionally useful) buffering tricks, etc. It is just barely possible that Qt could be as complete and easy to use as Swing, but I doubt it. Nothing else even comes close.
Now if I could just write a GTK theme to Swing Pluggable Look and Feel converter...
I have to agree with this. Furthermore, every relationship I've had with any level of success has been as a result of an introduction by a friend. I met my first gf through a friend I met on a BBS, but that's the closest I've come to a successful online relationship.
Way back when I was 17 I had a brief romance with someone I met on IRC, but even the friendship aspect of it petered out, in good part due to being 3000 miles apart.
It was said before that one should make friends and let everything else just happen; among other things, your friends are your best filters for knowing you and knowing who would suit you.
I was thinking along those lines myself. The whole moderation thing strikes me a bit as jury duty, but without the negative connotations we often associate with jury duty (never been called so I don't know). The similarity is that we are called upon to contribute some of our time to be impartial for the good of the society/community. I figure if/when I am called upon to moderate I will read articles at the -1 threshold for the few days during which I am a moderator.
This forces me to see all kinds of noise, of course, but since it is only a few days a month according to CT, I am willing to tolerate it given the possibility that some gems have been overlooked or irresponsibly downgraded. I would encourage anyone who is a moderator to do the same.
Perhaps, actually, it would be appropriate to force the issue, i.e. set things up so that thresholds are unavailable while moderating. Maybe even the number of comments on articles should be hidden from moderators on the front page so that they are not scared off by posts with a slew of comments (not that flamebait articles are hard to spot...).
I've noticed that /. has the same tendency as Usenet groups to have occasional threads which got stupid at some point and all subsequent replies (i.e. everything in the subtree rooted at the stupid post) are stupid as well. I treasure the ',' command in trn, which allows me to junk the subtree of posts below the post I am currently reading. Perhaps such a thing should be available for moderators so that they can demote an entire subtree. I realize that this is a lot of power, but there should be some way of adjusting for it.
By the way, I would be delighted if the color of the subject bar of a post corresponded to its score, darkening for higher score. Or maybe the user prefs could have a color choice for each score level. Yeah, it's eye candy, but if used well it could be effective visual feedback.
"Modifications and/or Larger Works may require additional patent licenses from Apple which Apple may grant in its sole discretion."
You took that sentence out of context. They are saying that while Apple is granting use of any patents they own which cover the code in question, you don't get a free license on all of their patents if you happen to include some of their code in a larger work which would otherwise still infringe on some patent of theirs. Arguments on whether software patents are A Good Thing or not aside, this is reasonable. If you have code which would infringe on their patent(s), including some of their code does not change that.
"or (c) terminate Your rights to use the Affected Original Code, effective immediately upon Apple's posting of a notice to such effect on the Apple web site that is used for implementation of this License."
This would be them covering their asses, and rightly so. If they have infringed someone else's patent in their code, they can't really continue to license it to anyone else, now can they? A more relevant and distressing clause is 12.1(c) (12.1 is the section on ways in which the license can/will be terminated):
"automatically without notice from Apple if You, at any time during the term of this License, commence an action for patent infringement against Apple."
This says that if you sue Apple for patent infringement, however unrelated to the current code, you lose any license to use the code. This means that Apple can blithely infringe on any patent held by anyone using their code and, if sued, can sue for copyright infringement on the code covered by their license since the license terminates the moment the (first) lawsuit comes up.
I am much more bothered by this clause than any other. I am not sure if this qualifies as open source or not... the source is free and open AFAICT, but its use weakens the position of protecting one's patents from Apple. Oh, and incidentally, IANAL.
Read carefully. YCHTT stands for "You Can't Handle The Truth," which is what the anonymous poster used as a sig or tagline or something. YCHTT was being used as a way to refer to him, not as sarcastic nastiness.