They've got 2 security guards on the Sydney Harbour Bridge (the big arch across the harbour they wrote Eternity on for New Years 2000). At first glance this may seem like a resonable way to protect a national symbol. At further glances it would be apparent the person who decided this is either stoned or a politician.
It's a car bridge. Thousands of cars cross it every day. Quite a few trucks do too. Big trucks. Lots of room inside. And with the wonderful Sydney traffic system, stopping is barely going to be noticed.
The bridge was finished in 1932 and is a serious bridge. None of this flimsy, late 20th century sway in the wind rubbish. If there is anything left for it to be anchored to, then it's not going anywhere.
There are other targets that are far more attractive that don't have any security guards on them. There's a tunnel under the harbour and another, less beefy bridge further into the harbour.
The security guards are mostly useless anyway. Security guards were set to guard the Opera House (The big white buildings that do a credible impersonation of wind traps from Dune) at about the same time they were put on the bridge. The successfully managed to not stop anti-war protestors from writting "No War" in 3 meter high letters along the top of one of them (and a special mention goes to the cleanup crew who managed to get the paint to run the full length of the building making it look as though it had been washed with a red sock).
Open source doesnt necessarily mean "instant development". It took over a year before anything useful came of the project.
It took six months to realise what they'd been given was shit and that'd they'd need to start again.
Now that it has made some progress, it is more difficult for a closed-source company to compete with it.
For evidence compare IE 6.0 and OE (whatever) with Mozilla 1.0.ish which is where they were about a year or 18 months ago. Now compare IE 6.0 and OE (whatever) with Mozilla 1.3. Throw in the fact Mozilla is much more multiplatform than anything MS has released and see the demise of IE.
THINK, don't just follow the guy with the megaphone.
It's a developmental problem. People start forming their own opinions in the early teen years but the problem is they only see issues in black and white. There is an absolute right and an absolute wrong and they can't understand why the grown ups don't see this.
What changes is at around 18/19 you start to see the gray areas inbetween. You realise there are very few issues that are anywhere near as clean cut as you thought they were. Unfortunatly, until the grey areas appear it's pretty much pointless trying to explain it.
Unfortunately it's possible to derail the development of certain grey areas by outside forces *cough*religion*cough* which means some people will always have unrealistic views on some topics.
Re:Why not the FSF/Emacs/GCC/GDB month?
on
RMS Turns 50
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· Score: 1
I don't care about the GNU/blabla name myself but his contribution, both technical and philosophical, is simply enormous.
Which does not make him above critisism. Doing great things in the past or having suffered in the past does not justify doing the wrong thing now. One day the people claiming ownership of "freedom" will realise this.
Or are you suggesting that people who believe in certain moral guidelines are more likely to violate those guidelines than people who don't believe in them?
Or possibly that those very guidelines were written by men who have a vested interest in preventing women from ever being equal.
One of these days some bright spark in Sun management is going to realise that Linux doesn't have to be the death of Sun the company or Solaris. Sun sells hardware and services, the OS is just something they need to make to make everything else these sellable. Linux is much better suited to the smaller end of Suns sales and they get most of the development for free. On the other hand Solaris is better tuned for the large end of Sun sales and if they remove the small end from their target it can only get better there.
Sun needs to realise without the free unixes they currently would be in a very poor position right now. Windows would own the less than 8-way market. Sun would be religated to the high end with Windows slowly creeping up (and don't talk to me about MacOS. Without the free unixes Jobs would still be faffing around with the next generation MacOS until it also gets canned, just like the 4 before it).
But the people they represent (lets face it, usability experts represent the average computer user. Experienced unix people either learn what they're given or make it like what they know) aren't the people that use linux! The first thing I do on installing a new version of KDE is make it how I want it to be. With the new release of GNOME I don't hav that option and so ditch it shortly after trying it.
Without the backers (ie unix geeks, the very people the latest release turns away), GNOME really doesn't stand a chance.
This worked with 4.2.0 with 4.1.0 being the latest debian maintained package. I have a feeling it may break fonts for 4.3.0 though.
1) Get the latest XFree86 binaries excepting the config package (I tried with sources but had more luck with binaries).
2) Rename/usr/X11R6 to/usr/X11R6.debian
3) untar the binaries into/usr/X11R6
4) Rename/usr/X11R6 to/usr/X11.4.3.0
5) ln -s/usr/X11R6.4.3.0/usr/X11R6
6) Restart X.
I've been using this for six months now (due to the latest gatos drivers eternally needing a version of X that wasn't in debian). The good news with doing this is it's relatively easy to unfsck if things don't work. It sounds as though they've changed the font server configs so you may have problems with this in the latest version (I haven't done this yet).
I'd recommend changing the link back to the.debian dir before doing a apt-get upgrade or things may get really pear shaped in a hurry.
In Australia it doesn't seem nearly as bad as in the US. High school still isn't a barrel of laughs for all and being right at the bottom still sucks arse in a big way but for the vast majority it ranged between kinda fun and bearable.
If I had to say why it's different I'd put it down to sport. Australians generally enjoy sport. We'll watch a game that's played for 6 hours a day for 5 days where a significant portion of the games end up having no result (test cricket for those who have no idea what I'm talking about) and still call it exciting. But despite this there is no jock/cheerleader thing anywhere. The closest we have are sporties who are the people who are good at sport. They tend to be in the popular bunch but it isn't a free ticket to the top of the heirarchy. Sporties would get their prizes in assemblies but so would the smart kids. It was about equal time and all everyone else wanted to do was go to lunch rather than sit in the assembly anyway.
The only way onto higher education is by study. Universities play sport but there aren't special courses designed to coddle athletes to a degree. If you want a uni degree, you have to be smart and/or work hard. I can honestly say I have never seen anyone who intentionally did badly just to fit in. Being not so bright will get you teased as much as being smart.
As with the Kiwi above, pretty much everywhere here has school uniforms so everyone looks much the same. Physical education (gym class?) becomes a once a week torture but other than that there wasn't much you could do to distinguish yourself. When I was there it was socks. 5, 6 pairs of socks and you were the hippest thing since Grease.
Also, Australians, seriously laid back. Putting in all that effort into getting ready in the morning really isn't worth it. Generally you'd find an area that was where your particular social group hang out and go there until some of your mates turned up. All that effort is pretty much wasted.
One sure way to single yourself out is to be arrogent. Being smart will mean kids'll call you names (geek, nerd, square, cube, unit etc) but as a whole most people wont care. Saying "You all suck because you are soo stupid" will not only get you special treatment from the popular kids, it'll also mean you wont have friends for much longer either.
Combine all that and high school isn't that bad for most people. Most people find a bunch of people they can call friends and hang around with, and the groups seem to be more fluid than in US schools. Speaking to somebody from a lower social group doesn't mean it's all over. You try not to antagonise the rough kids. Doing well in class isn't a torture sentence and being good at sports isn't a free pass to cool. Even doing the part time popular thing means you will generally fit.
The problem with this paper is that it describes an overly complicated way to detect multiple IP's behind a NAT firewall when there is a much easier, simpler and already used method: transparent proxying of HTTP and checking the browser identifier.
And when somebody fires up IE because a site they are looking at doesn't work in Mozilla? Or they change their browser ID to make a site that checks the browser type before letting you access it?
Because the American ass load is different to the British arse load. Get them mixed up and you have nasty accidents involving donkeys.
Then you have Australia where the official line is we use metric buttloads but most people think in arse loads. Nobody really understands ass loads. Fortunately most construction projects involve beer and the ubiquitous "Bit more, bit more, whooo!" measuring system. And also fencing wire and more beer.
My suggestion is go liquid fuel-- you can get liquid oxygen without too much hassle (needed for everything from medical to welding) and the fuel could consist of anything from kerosene to acetylene.
I used to be a big supporter of RedHat. It was mostly all good and the six monthly reinstall didn't really bother me that much. But since jumping the fence to Debian I can see how much greener the grass is over here.
The problem with a RedHat release is that there's no way to update it to the latest version without a reinstall. RPM as implemented by RedHat is good for maintaining a single version of the software but isn't good for maintaining and upgrading it. The "updates" Redhat produce don't change the version of the package, they just fix bugs. Updating to the latest version of a package is a nightmare of dependency problems. RPMs offered by vendors are pretty much only good for a single RedHat release (making life difficult for pretty much everyone).
Debian on the other hand allows you to get the latest version of the software and everything it needs in a single command. Upgrading is usually pretty painless.
From what we know about the vastness of space and the immense distances that UFOs would have to travel to get here, it would take some pretty amazing technology, especially if it was transporting biological entities.
Everyone focuses on the technological aspects of space flight, great distances etc etc. I think a more interesting question is can a species evolve from being an animal, driven by instinct, to a civilised being living in harmony with it's environment and each other fast enough to not destroy itself? And no, humans are no where near that point yet.
If it isn't possible then there is little chance of finding intelligent life in the universe. It's taken billions of years to develop intelligent life on this planet. Humans have been around for about a million years or so. 10 thousands years ago we started farming. 5 thousand years ago civilisations sprung up. 100 years ago the industrial age started. Now the way we are going the industrial age could last as little as 30 years and that's provided we don't wipe ourselves out with a super virus, nuclear war or Steve Irwin like disregard for dangerous animals first.
Now if we do the maths, assuming other human like species have developed in much the same way we did, the chances of any two species developing at about the same time so that they can actually detect the other one is there is very small. Each species has a window of a couple of hundred years in the billions it takes for them to develop to make enough noise to be detectable by another species on a planet far far away.
I find it interesting that the trees are all still standing - less only their leaves!
Eucalytus trees evolved to survive all but the most extreme bushfires. The generally accepted theory is that the soil is so poor in Australia that the best time to germinate is just after a bushfire where the ground is covered in nutrients from the burned trees and bushes.
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There are no famous people from New Zealand. Once somebody starts doing something note worthy, they're instantly adopted by Australia.
Given a choice between Unix and Windows ...
It's a car bridge. Thousands of cars cross it every day. Quite a few trucks do too. Big trucks. Lots of room inside. And with the wonderful Sydney traffic system, stopping is barely going to be noticed.
The bridge was finished in 1932 and is a serious bridge. None of this flimsy, late 20th century sway in the wind rubbish. If there is anything left for it to be anchored to, then it's not going anywhere.
There are other targets that are far more attractive that don't have any security guards on them. There's a tunnel under the harbour and another, less beefy bridge further into the harbour.
The security guards are mostly useless anyway. Security guards were set to guard the Opera House (The big white buildings that do a credible impersonation of wind traps from Dune) at about the same time they were put on the bridge. The successfully managed to not stop anti-war protestors from writting "No War" in 3 meter high letters along the top of one of them (and a special mention goes to the cleanup crew who managed to get the paint to run the full length of the building making it look as though it had been washed with a red sock).
They're running out of room in 32 bits
What changes is at around 18/19 you start to see the gray areas inbetween. You realise there are very few issues that are anywhere near as clean cut as you thought they were. Unfortunatly, until the grey areas appear it's pretty much pointless trying to explain it.
Unfortunately it's possible to derail the development of certain grey areas by outside forces *cough*religion*cough* which means some people will always have unrealistic views on some topics.
- Robert Heinlein, 1907-1988
Sun needs to realise without the free unixes they currently would be in a very poor position right now. Windows would own the less than 8-way market. Sun would be religated to the high end with Windows slowly creeping up (and don't talk to me about MacOS. Without the free unixes Jobs would still be faffing around with the next generation MacOS until it also gets canned, just like the 4 before it).
Sending from a places called Sunnyvale how could you not? Hell it could well have been Sunnydale going on past /. editorial proof reading excellence.
Without the backers (ie unix geeks, the very people the latest release turns away), GNOME really doesn't stand a chance.
1) Get the latest XFree86 binaries excepting the config package (I tried with sources but had more luck with binaries). /usr/X11R6 to /usr/X11R6.debian /usr/X11R6 /usr/X11R6 to /usr/X11.4.3.0 /usr/X11R6.4.3.0 /usr/X11R6
2) Rename
3) untar the binaries into
4) Rename
5) ln -s
6) Restart X.
I've been using this for six months now (due to the latest gatos drivers eternally needing a version of X that wasn't in debian). The good news with doing this is it's relatively easy to unfsck if things don't work. It sounds as though they've changed the font server configs so you may have problems with this in the latest version (I haven't done this yet).
I'd recommend changing the link back to the .debian dir before doing a apt-get upgrade or things may get really pear shaped in a hurry.
No it isn't. If it were it would have more funding.
If I had to say why it's different I'd put it down to sport. Australians generally enjoy sport. We'll watch a game that's played for 6 hours a day for 5 days where a significant portion of the games end up having no result (test cricket for those who have no idea what I'm talking about) and still call it exciting. But despite this there is no jock/cheerleader thing anywhere. The closest we have are sporties who are the people who are good at sport. They tend to be in the popular bunch but it isn't a free ticket to the top of the heirarchy. Sporties would get their prizes in assemblies but so would the smart kids. It was about equal time and all everyone else wanted to do was go to lunch rather than sit in the assembly anyway.
The only way onto higher education is by study. Universities play sport but there aren't special courses designed to coddle athletes to a degree. If you want a uni degree, you have to be smart and/or work hard. I can honestly say I have never seen anyone who intentionally did badly just to fit in. Being not so bright will get you teased as much as being smart.
As with the Kiwi above, pretty much everywhere here has school uniforms so everyone looks much the same. Physical education (gym class?) becomes a once a week torture but other than that there wasn't much you could do to distinguish yourself. When I was there it was socks. 5, 6 pairs of socks and you were the hippest thing since Grease.
Also, Australians, seriously laid back. Putting in all that effort into getting ready in the morning really isn't worth it. Generally you'd find an area that was where your particular social group hang out and go there until some of your mates turned up. All that effort is pretty much wasted.
One sure way to single yourself out is to be arrogent. Being smart will mean kids'll call you names (geek, nerd, square, cube, unit etc) but as a whole most people wont care. Saying "You all suck because you are soo stupid" will not only get you special treatment from the popular kids, it'll also mean you wont have friends for much longer either.
Combine all that and high school isn't that bad for most people. Most people find a bunch of people they can call friends and hang around with, and the groups seem to be more fluid than in US schools. Speaking to somebody from a lower social group doesn't mean it's all over. You try not to antagonise the rough kids. Doing well in class isn't a torture sentence and being good at sports isn't a free pass to cool. Even doing the part time popular thing means you will generally fit.
Inaccuracy is biggest sin a scientist can make, except when it makes the maths easier.
Then you have Australia where the official line is we use metric buttloads but most people think in arse loads. Nobody really understands ass loads. Fortunately most construction projects involve beer and the ubiquitous "Bit more, bit more, whooo!" measuring system. And also fencing wire and more beer.
Like Tassies going to ever get anything! Peanut :)
The problem with a RedHat release is that there's no way to update it to the latest version without a reinstall. RPM as implemented by RedHat is good for maintaining a single version of the software but isn't good for maintaining and upgrading it. The "updates" Redhat produce don't change the version of the package, they just fix bugs. Updating to the latest version of a package is a nightmare of dependency problems. RPMs offered by vendors are pretty much only good for a single RedHat release (making life difficult for pretty much everyone).
Debian on the other hand allows you to get the latest version of the software and everything it needs in a single command. Upgrading is usually pretty painless.
If it isn't possible then there is little chance of finding intelligent life in the universe. It's taken billions of years to develop intelligent life on this planet. Humans have been around for about a million years or so. 10 thousands years ago we started farming. 5 thousand years ago civilisations sprung up. 100 years ago the industrial age started. Now the way we are going the industrial age could last as little as 30 years and that's provided we don't wipe ourselves out with a super virus, nuclear war or Steve Irwin like disregard for dangerous animals first.
Now if we do the maths, assuming other human like species have developed in much the same way we did, the chances of any two species developing at about the same time so that they can actually detect the other one is there is very small. Each species has a window of a couple of hundred years in the billions it takes for them to develop to make enough noise to be detectable by another species on a planet far far away.