This had me infuriated one time when gconfd was hosting a remote network
infuriate...confd...remote network.
Am I the only one that's been through agony with gconfd?
I run KDE, but like a few Gnome apps like Firefox and Evolution.
And I run where my/home/me is NFS mounted.
And I frequently get hosed by
GConf Error: Adding client to server's list failed, CORBA error: IDL:omg.org
that I've read is probably related to NFS-client server problems that can only be corrected or compensated if you have root on your box and can edit/etc/orbitrc.
I'm not root on this box and am suffering.
[Sorry for drifting - the keywords got me going...
But Jane's problem is that she knows about as much about her computer's operating system as she knows about the automatic transmission in her car.
She bought these advanced devices (computers, cars) in good faith that since everyone else seemed to be buying them, they must work somehow, and if there's a problem, then a lot of people will be in the same boat trying to solve the same problem, so that solutions will be easy to come by.
But there's more to Jane's computer problems than to her car problems: since she bought her PC, she's bought a bunch of convenient, shrink-wrapped boxes of software to run on that box.
If Jane gets up the courage to switch to something like Mac OS X or Linux, she won't know how to deal with getting that shrink-wrapped Windows application and all of its weird data files from her Windows box onto the new application.
Tragically for Jane, advantageously for Microsoft, there is a significant barrier discouraging her from switching to a competiting platform.
If the Windows API were an free, complete openly-published standard that competing companies could implement, then this wouldn't be a problem.
the statistics of how these are distributed in unprocessed files are probably not random.
Sounds to me like my home computer system needs to be compiled with anti-optimization to throw in some more of these synonyms randomly into my executables.
What about the possibility of either running Linux inside VMWare on a Windows machine or the reverse?
Admission: I don't have recent direct experience with VMWare myself; it used to be that the two systems needed different IP addresses, but I don't know if that would keep within the constraints your customer wants to impose.
[My two cents: the constraint sounds overly artificial. A network-presence appliance that's secure and does its job is good enough for most people. Think of network printers, for example. It's not like every single active IP presence is going to need a Windows XP update...
Finally, I've heard some people express a preference for MinGW over Cygwin for some reason...
Belkin said the new pre-n products will provide four times faster speed and coverage area than 802.11b and g products.
Faster!?
More coverage area!?
Then, how much power does it typically take to run an 802.11n card compared to the established alternatives?
Re:It would be interesting to know if...
on
Linux vs. Windows
·
· Score: 1
the projected 6% desktop share is Linux helping new users reach out to computing, or if it is biting into Microsoft's market share.
Those are two constituencies for growth of the Linux desktop market.
But there's a third: curmudgeons that have been using UNIX CISC/RISC workstations since they first came out in the 1980s, and even some that were using dumb terminals in front of VAXes and PDP-11s.
But here in the USA, we have an election year and populist politicians in the mix.
There are a bunch of voting coal miners on the one hand.
There are a whole lot of semi-intelligent SUV-driving people that are wondering why the hell America has to get most of its oil from Saudi Arabia, home of most of the 9/11 hijackers, where the ruling government is not democratically elected but if it were it would like more like Afghanistan did 4 years ago in terms of harsh religious intolerance and lack of respect for human rights.
Then there are environmentalists upset about recent give-aways by the current administration in mercury emission levels by coal-fired power plants.
So this is a great time for politicians to talk about getting (a) clean (b) energy from (c) coal.
The only politically-better platform is to advocate powering cars from ethanol from corn grown by farmers in swing states.
I'm thinking research into all possible energy alternatives is a good thing, but that the economic reality is that mining anthracite coal is probably the better trade-off in terms of getting electrical power for the least environmental impact.
I'd mention that a rational debate and analysis would be good on noo-cyu-lar energy, but the advocates on both sides of that issue make it as intractable as a discussion on Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The more organizations deploy Linux, the lower the cost will become for further deployments.
Not only will a sizable deployment of Munich office workers using Linux reduce the transition costs of future organizations migrating to Linux (that is, applications evolve more into what people are used to from Windows), but it will also help drive further improvements in the quality of Linux applications and tools (we want this new feature added to this Linux application).
Munich could very easily be the first leak in what could turn into a torrential migration.
Every day that goes by, the costs of migration away from Windows go down and the benefits of migration to Linux go up.
Why create a standard to support "stupid shit" that then creates lots of proprietary systems with steep learning curves for new developers/team members?
Because it will tie developers and users closely to your proprietary offerings and assure that the addicts will need to buy your crackware in the future, thus improving shareholder value.
Note that intrusion into your privacy is already part of insurance that you buy.
You have to put down your gender, age, ZIP code, make and model of the car you drive.
All of those items already go into determining what the insurance company will charge.
Interestingly, though, there's been some reluctance to explicity discriminate on some factors, such as race, because of the backlash that would ensue. I'm not even sure if gender discrimination on insurance rates is permitted everywhere.
Likewise, there was some hesitance about genetic profiling to deeply probe a potential client's propensity to develop disease, although a physical examination is required for a life insurance policy.
But reigning in the level of privacy intrustion is definitely where you need to provide input to your government. They're the ones that often require you to demonstrate you have car insurance before they'll issue you a new registration sticker for your car.
My favorite option, though, is to start using those infernal copyright laws to protect and to limit the distribution of data about me in the same way that those laws protect and limit the distribution of data about Britney Spears voice.
Any insurance company that sells a piece of that information to anyone without my permission should be fined.
You'd THINK that if Microsoft wanted to keep Linux from growing, they'd identify the things that Linux does well and Windows does not, and work on that.
I wouldn't think so.
If you've grown as dominant as Microsoft has for the OS API and formats such as .doc,.xls,.ppt it's poor business strategy to try to open up your formats to make interoperability easier.
Interoperability is great when you're growing. After you get big, the profitable strategy is called Roach Motel - customers check in, but they don't check out.
Not until OO.o achieves something like 60% of the marketplace will you ever see MS support an "Export as OpenOffice.org..." button in Word.
Linux has a temporary advantage in the early phases, just as Microsoft did in the early 1980s.
The enthusiastic, the technically adept, the patient, the intelligent people are adopting Linux, using it, showing their prowess by bringing up umpteen zillion servers with fantastic uptimes and remote ssh serviceability over slow intercontinental networks.
Some of that advantage is due to Linux, but some of it, too, must be attributed to the people currently using it.
As the distro makers start encroaching into Microsoft's territory, BrainSurgeryMadeEasy.com, then there will be tougher slogging.
I hope that FOSS programmers are up to the challenge of keeping true to principles of security and technical excellence and we don't start seeing kernel modules and browser plug-ins that sacrifice principles for WhizBang features that marketing advocates.
My decision is decoupled from actual cost when I use health insurance, be it my employer's or the government's. I should have to pay a monotonic proportion of the true cost of the medical procedure so that I am inclined to make more cost effective choices.
My decisions are in the dark. Does that MD rank 434 out of 438 among doctors (Notice how hard it is to get precise information about doctor quality; State Boards just give a Pass/Fail, where Fail is for felonies and pedophiles - a close-knit society just like cops or lawyers)? What are other doctors of known ability charging for the same procedure? Can I pay a doctor less and sacrifice some of my right to sue for malpractice? Make all the information known and let the user make their own decisions in a level marketplace.
For human-life-critical applications, you should be using something that is demonstrably proven.
Reminds me of the license that Sun provided with Java a few years ago.
There was plenty of scary text about how you shouldn't be using Java for things like life support equipment, realtime control of aircraft with passengers, nuclear reactors, etc.
IIRC, when MS was forced by some court or another to provide The Real Java instead of some EmbracedNExtended Java, they went ahead and showcased Sun's special warning front and center for people to see "just how dangerous" this Java thing can be:) Beware!
you can see how those at the top might want to keep that club pretty exclusive.
Such a conspiracy theory isn't warranted.
A simpler explanation is that those at the top want (a) to keep their wealth and, (b) to grow their wealth.
If strategies for gettin that to happen include stomping on small investors access to the IPO market, that is merely incidental and ancillary to the major objectives.
The editors of Slashdot seem to love posting articles whose sole purpose is to evoke flame wars
But can you blame them?
If you look at the number of postings for different Slashdot stories, you'll see a definite trend for more page views for the controversial stories (and adding rhetoric to enhance the controversy improves readership and the number of postings).
This is exactly satisfying a market-driven economy, since page views translate into greater ad revenue.
The same tactic has been demonstrated to be successful by other media outlets, such as Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp. Would your eyes gravitate toward some printed text delving into government budgetary details, or some tabloid picture, say of a beautiful young womam claiming to have escaped from Saddam Hussen's harem?
There's no reason the same tactics can't be as successful at Slashdot, too.
PS, this hotel chain still relies on PC's running windows 95b for all the booking / reservation / billing stuff.
An important and practical lesson that what is good enough to get the job done gets used and used and used. No matter that it smells bad to those of us on the bleeding edge of technology.
It was the biggest split between 'experts and the public he'd ever found.
Which I take to mean that either the experts
aren't doing their job teaching the public, the public isn't doing its job learning from the experts, or this whole democracy experiment is doomed and we ought to revert to a meritocracy if we really want the best government.
But we'll probably just stay with the status quo, where the public is convinced to vote to keep those currently powerful in power the next time.
If these private journals paid for work, that'd be different but far from it
I appreciate your suggestion; it's a good one. But it does requires both courage and principle to stand up for what is right.
Why?
Because people evaluating my job performance, deciding tenure, giving raise, etc. give greater credence to articles published in the Journal of the Society of Highly-Selective Elitists than to articles published anywhere that begins with http://www.
Yet another convenient, artificial, potentially misleading benchmark.
What incentive would they have to make these older articles available
That's it exactly.
No private, for-profit publisher or copyright owner of these scientific articles has much of any incentive to make them widely available for free.
But a strong argument can be made that scientific progress in general would be furthered by such access.
A possible solution is to decrease the length of the copyright (already sitting up near 75 years due to Sonny Bono's efforts on behalf of the Disney Corporation), or for the government to steal the copyrights of important works that benefit the public (eminent domain but applied to "intellectual property" instead of to real estate, like when a freeway needs to go through your front yard).
Personally, I think copyright terms, like those of patents, should be drastically reduced. Only naming conventions for brands, trademarks, need any kind of longer term protection IMHO.
It seems like your problem was more a function of the inconvenience of pre-digital publishing than the prohibitive cost of the journals.
No, while the journal in question was published prior to the digital error, the main reason for inconvenience was that my institutional library has limited funds for journal subscriptions.
Even in the mid 1970's they did not have the money to buy and hold subscription to the journal I needed.
Free or lower cost journals (even of the pre-digital dead tree variety) would have solved this problem.
On-line journals don't have to be free (and indeed, my library pays for access to SciSearch among other services), but a different advantage to the digital era of publishing is better searching.
Slashdot Mirror
This had me infuriated one time when gconfd was hosting a remote network
infuriate...confd...remote network.
Am I the only one that's been through agony with gconfd?
I run KDE, but like a few Gnome apps like Firefox and Evolution.
And I run where my /home/me is NFS mounted.
And I frequently get hosed by
that I've read is probably related to NFS-client server problems that can only be corrected or compensated if you have root on your box and can editI'm not root on this box and am suffering.
[Sorry for drifting - the keywords got me going...
So what's the solution for Jane Boxwine?
Switch!
You make good points.
But Jane's problem is that she knows about as much about her computer's operating system as she knows about the automatic transmission in her car.
She bought these advanced devices (computers, cars) in good faith that since everyone else seemed to be buying them, they must work somehow, and if there's a problem, then a lot of people will be in the same boat trying to solve the same problem, so that solutions will be easy to come by.
But there's more to Jane's computer problems than to her car problems: since she bought her PC, she's bought a bunch of convenient, shrink-wrapped boxes of software to run on that box.
If Jane gets up the courage to switch to something like Mac OS X or Linux, she won't know how to deal with getting that shrink-wrapped Windows application and all of its weird data files from her Windows box onto the new application.
Tragically for Jane, advantageously for Microsoft, there is a significant barrier discouraging her from switching to a competiting platform.
If the Windows API were an free, complete openly-published standard that competing companies could implement, then this wouldn't be a problem.
the statistics of how these are distributed in unprocessed files are probably not random.
Sounds to me like my home computer system needs to be compiled with anti-optimization to throw in some more of these synonyms randomly into my executables.
What about the possibility of either running Linux inside VMWare on a Windows machine or the reverse?
Admission: I don't have recent direct experience with VMWare myself; it used to be that the two systems needed different IP addresses, but I don't know if that would keep within the constraints your customer wants to impose.
[My two cents: the constraint sounds overly artificial. A network-presence appliance that's secure and does its job is good enough for most people. Think of network printers, for example. It's not like every single active IP presence is going to need a Windows XP update...
Finally, I've heard some people express a preference for MinGW over Cygwin for some reason...
Belkin said the new pre-n products will provide four times faster speed and coverage area than 802.11b and g products.
Faster!?
More coverage area!?
Then, how much power does it typically take to run an 802.11n card compared to the established alternatives?
the projected 6% desktop share is Linux helping new users reach out to computing, or if it is biting into Microsoft's market share.
Those are two constituencies for growth of the Linux desktop market.
But there's a third: curmudgeons that have been using UNIX CISC/RISC workstations since they first came out in the 1980s, and even some that were using dumb terminals in front of VAXes and PDP-11s.
Signed,
One Who Learned Emacs Before the Mouse
Popular 'n widely deployed - like Gator 'n gonorrhea!
How many brilliant people
Well, let the research continue.
But here in the USA, we have an election year and populist politicians in the mix.
There are a bunch of voting coal miners on the one hand.
There are a whole lot of semi-intelligent SUV-driving people that are wondering why the hell America has to get most of its oil from Saudi Arabia, home of most of the 9/11 hijackers, where the ruling government is not democratically elected but if it were it would like more like Afghanistan did 4 years ago in terms of harsh religious intolerance and lack of respect for human rights.
Then there are environmentalists upset about recent give-aways by the current administration in mercury emission levels by coal-fired power plants.
So this is a great time for politicians to talk about getting (a) clean (b) energy from (c) coal.
The only politically-better platform is to advocate powering cars from ethanol from corn grown by farmers in swing states.
I'm thinking research into all possible energy alternatives is a good thing, but that the economic reality is that mining anthracite coal is probably the better trade-off in terms of getting electrical power for the least environmental impact.
I'd mention that a rational debate and analysis would be good on noo-cyu-lar energy, but the advocates on both sides of that issue make it as intractable as a discussion on Israeli-Palestinian peace.
The more organizations deploy Linux, the lower the cost will become for further deployments.
Not only will a sizable deployment of Munich office workers using Linux reduce the transition costs of future organizations migrating to Linux (that is, applications evolve more into what people are used to from Windows), but it will also help drive further improvements in the quality of Linux applications and tools (we want this new feature added to this Linux application).
Munich could very easily be the first leak in what could turn into a torrential migration.
Every day that goes by, the costs of migration away from Windows go down and the benefits of migration to Linux go up.
Why create a standard to support "stupid shit" that then creates lots of proprietary systems with steep learning curves for new developers/team members?
Because it will tie developers and users closely to your proprietary offerings and assure that the addicts will need to buy your crackware in the future, thus improving shareholder value.
</obvious>Note that intrusion into your privacy is already part of insurance that you buy.
You have to put down your gender, age, ZIP code, make and model of the car you drive.
All of those items already go into determining what the insurance company will charge.
Interestingly, though, there's been some reluctance to explicity discriminate on some factors, such as race, because of the backlash that would ensue. I'm not even sure if gender discrimination on insurance rates is permitted everywhere.
Likewise, there was some hesitance about genetic profiling to deeply probe a potential client's propensity to develop disease, although a physical examination is required for a life insurance policy.
But reigning in the level of privacy intrustion is definitely where you need to provide input to your government. They're the ones that often require you to demonstrate you have car insurance before they'll issue you a new registration sticker for your car.
My favorite option, though, is to start using those infernal copyright laws to protect and to limit the distribution of data about me in the same way that those laws protect and limit the distribution of data about Britney Spears voice.
Any insurance company that sells a piece of that information to anyone without my permission should be fined.
You'd THINK that if Microsoft wanted to keep Linux from growing, they'd identify the things that Linux does well and Windows does not, and work on that.
I wouldn't think so.
If you've grown as dominant as Microsoft has for the OS API and formats such as .doc, .xls, .ppt it's poor business strategy to try to open up your formats to make interoperability easier.
Interoperability is great when you're growing. After you get big, the profitable strategy is called Roach Motel - customers check in, but they don't check out.
Not until OO.o achieves something like 60% of the marketplace will you ever see MS support an "Export as OpenOffice.org..." button in Word.
Linux has a temporary advantage in the early phases, just as Microsoft did in the early 1980s.
The enthusiastic, the technically adept, the patient, the intelligent people are adopting Linux, using it, showing their prowess by bringing up umpteen zillion servers with fantastic uptimes and remote ssh serviceability over slow intercontinental networks.
Some of that advantage is due to Linux, but some of it, too, must be attributed to the people currently using it.
As the distro makers start encroaching into Microsoft's territory, BrainSurgeryMadeEasy.com, then there will be tougher slogging.
I hope that FOSS programmers are up to the challenge of keeping true to principles of security and technical excellence and we don't start seeing kernel modules and browser plug-ins that sacrifice principles for WhizBang features that marketing advocates.
The two biggest problems I see in healthcare are:
For human-life-critical applications, you should be using something that is demonstrably proven.
Reminds me of the license that Sun provided with Java a few years ago.
There was plenty of scary text about how you shouldn't be using Java for things like life support equipment, realtime control of aircraft with passengers, nuclear reactors, etc.
IIRC, when MS was forced by some court or another to provide The Real Java instead of some EmbracedNExtended Java, they went ahead and showcased Sun's special warning front and center for people to see "just how dangerous" this Java thing can be:) Beware!
Am I the only one who gets grumpy
No!
I like to indent my C code using the GNU style and it does go in a ways sometimes.
But my co-developers, first they do when they open up an Emacs on our application is to stretch the damn right margin out to fucking infinity.
Thereafter, everyone must do the same or be confounded with crap due to weird wrapping.
Email has suffered this way recently, too.
stuffing them in their own world. All their posts would be modded up and their view of the site was totally different
I like that. Having MetaModded my share of crap, I can say there are more than a few Slashdot user profiles that could use
somewhere along the line.you can see how those at the top might want to keep that club pretty exclusive.
Such a conspiracy theory isn't warranted.
A simpler explanation is that those at the top want (a) to keep their wealth and, (b) to grow their wealth.
If strategies for gettin that to happen include stomping on small investors access to the IPO market, that is merely incidental and ancillary to the major objectives.
I'm very interested in good OpenGL performance, since my Linux workstation is used for scientific graphics.
So are there any comparisons of rough benchmarks of such performance for recently-released videocards, along the lines of SPECviewperf?
The editors of Slashdot seem to love posting articles whose sole purpose is to evoke flame wars
But can you blame them?
If you look at the number of postings for different Slashdot stories, you'll see a definite trend for more page views for the controversial stories (and adding rhetoric to enhance the controversy improves readership and the number of postings).
This is exactly satisfying a market-driven economy, since page views translate into greater ad revenue.
The same tactic has been demonstrated to be successful by other media outlets, such as Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp. Would your eyes gravitate toward some printed text delving into government budgetary details, or some tabloid picture, say of a beautiful young womam claiming to have escaped from Saddam Hussen's harem?
There's no reason the same tactics can't be as successful at Slashdot, too.
PS, this hotel chain still relies on PC's running windows 95b for all the booking / reservation / billing stuff.
An important and practical lesson that what is good enough to get the job done gets used and used and used. No matter that it smells bad to those of us on the bleeding edge of technology.
It was the biggest split between 'experts and the public he'd ever found.
Which I take to mean that either the experts aren't doing their job teaching the public, the public isn't doing its job learning from the experts, or this whole democracy experiment is doomed and we ought to revert to a meritocracy if we really want the best government.
But we'll probably just stay with the status quo, where the public is convinced to vote to keep those currently powerful in power the next time.
If these private journals paid for work, that'd be different but far from it
I appreciate your suggestion; it's a good one. But it does requires both courage and principle to stand up for what is right.
Why?
Because people evaluating my job performance, deciding tenure, giving raise, etc. give greater credence to articles published in the Journal of the Society of Highly-Selective Elitists than to articles published anywhere that begins with http://www .
Yet another convenient, artificial, potentially misleading benchmark.
What incentive would they have to make these older articles available
That's it exactly.
No private, for-profit publisher or copyright owner of these scientific articles has much of any incentive to make them widely available for free.
But a strong argument can be made that scientific progress in general would be furthered by such access.
A possible solution is to decrease the length of the copyright (already sitting up near 75 years due to Sonny Bono's efforts on behalf of the Disney Corporation), or for the government to steal the copyrights of important works that benefit the public (eminent domain but applied to "intellectual property" instead of to real estate, like when a freeway needs to go through your front yard).
Personally, I think copyright terms, like those of patents, should be drastically reduced. Only naming conventions for brands, trademarks, need any kind of longer term protection IMHO.
It seems like your problem was more a function of the inconvenience of pre-digital publishing than the prohibitive cost of the journals.
No, while the journal in question was published prior to the digital error, the main reason for inconvenience was that my institutional library has limited funds for journal subscriptions.
Even in the mid 1970's they did not have the money to buy and hold subscription to the journal I needed.
Free or lower cost journals (even of the pre-digital dead tree variety) would have solved this problem.
On-line journals don't have to be free (and indeed, my library pays for access to SciSearch among other services), but a different advantage to the digital era of publishing is better searching.