So, Rob, tell me, did it hurt when you plummeted off the turnip wagon?
I mean jeez. This is the second story today I saw where you guys seem to be just trying to cause a fire-storm. Two links deep we have the press release about the Linux DVD player. (Oh horror of horrors! The project is running LATE! That never happens in the real world.)
Then this. That's quite the Linux distribution they have there. They are right to change the license if their whole distro can be in that 504kb zipfile I downloaded a minute ago.
Don't you guys even make a slight attempt to research your stories before you post them?
Probably best you posted anonymously. If you hadn't you would have revealed yourself as either (a) not a programmer or (b) someone your ISO staff should be coming down on like a ton of bricks. And like it or not, if you want to do business in the real world, ISO counts for a lot.
I don't know if the thread is still active or not, but here goes. Actually, the reason why I claim that 2001 is about HAL is because of how the story is about evolution. (In this one I would say that the monoliths were initially agents of change, but the cause/effect relationship seems less important here.) My thinking is that Clarke here was suggesting that the next evolutionary step may be initiated by humans. Although in light of his subsequent books it seemed that he decided against that approach or I just mis-interpreted the whole thing.
Initially I planned to stay out of this discussion as I do with most Slashdot threads. I read the review and thought to myself "This person just doesn't get it." Which isn't a big deal. A lot of people don't get Clarke. It's nothing against them, it's just his style. Then I read a lot of the comments mirroring my feelings on the book. (I loved it, by the way. I've read it two or three times now and I've been thinking lately it's time to read it again.) So I was reassured that my comments were unnecessary. But then I read some comments like this and I really can't pass up the opportunity to converse with someone who really does seem to "get it". This is what I got out of it, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say on the subject. First, I would suggest that the book is more of a tragedy than sci-fi. To back this up I would also suggest that the main characters in the book are the Overlords, not the humans (which is why I feel they come off so flat sometimes.) This isn't such a stretch when you think about Clarke's other books, like 2001, where the protagonist is clearly the computer. It is the only fully emotionally-developed character in that book. But that's off the point. My biggest problem with the review is that somehow the reviewer seems to have gotten the cause and effect relationship regarding the arrival of the Overlords exactly backwards. That's not all that hard to believe since the denoument is only touched on briefly and near then end of the book when a lot of other things are happening all at once. Anyway, let me be perfectly clear on this point. The Overlords arrive because humanity was nearing the next (final?) evolutionary step. (He is also suggesting, in a back-handed manner, that evolution is a stepped process, a theory that is still debated if I'm not mistaken.) So how do I say this is a tragedy? The Overlords have become something of caretakers or custodians of our plane of existence. They have slipped into an evolutionary cul-de-sac and in an attempt to discover how to get back on the path, they are overseeing each race's final moments on this plane in hopes that it will reveal something about how they too can evolve. Clarke gives some small hope for the future of their race, but he doesn't leave you with a lot of confidence in them. Anyway, that's my take on it.
I'm with @Home in Ottawa too on what appears to be the worst subnet of the bunch for noise. I used to be routinely portscanned, but some truly draconian security measures on my box at home have taken care of that. These days a portscan shouldn't reveal anything about me at all to the scanner (I've tried from other machines to verify this). As for my mail server, well, sendmail out of the box on Slackware wouldn't even route email to my local mail accounts if it was sent directly to me. I had to re-write my.cf file to allow mail to be delivered at all.
Speaking as one of their 'innocent' (at least in my eyes) users, I whole-heartedly support the UDP against @Home. If there was something I could do to stop the spam I would. As it is, I'm going to get very noisy on my end about them addressing this UDP with all due haste. It isn't like I've posted to USENET in the last four or five months anyway, but I figure it won't hurt to turn up the heat on them from the inside too.
On the other hand, my firewall is pretty reliable. If I could find some open servers that would allow me posting I'd happily avoid the @Home servers entirely.
Jeez, I remember years ago when I started programming my first database application with Sybase as the back-end there were two different date types they supported. A long (four-digit) format and a compressed format where anything before 35 (I think) was interpreted as 20xx. I know that wasn't all that long ago (no more than four years, I'm sure) but surely this wasn't a new feature then.
I'm immediately suspicious of any web-site, hocking linux that has nothing but images for links in the first two sections of their forms. Even these WinLinux 2000 jokers had a reasonably readable web-page from lynx.
Exactly how is this different from Caldera?
on
WinLinux 2000
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· Score: 1
Ummmm, what I really want to know is what they are offering that Caldera hasn't already offered. Lemme see here, UMSDOS based, a Control Panel icon to run loadlin.exe, reading existing Windows hardware settings to use in the Linux setup. Yep, thanks guys, you rock.
This seems even lower than the Mandrake guys offering a "better Red Hat". At least they acknowledge where their distribution comes from. Seems like every cheese-eater with a CD burner is trying to make a quick buck off the uninformed masses these days by claiming Windows-interoperatbility. I see nothing particularly special about their screenshots.
I have a bit of advice for all you "distribution chasers". Instead of wasting your time and energy building your own half-baked distribution, why don't you offer to help the people who built the one you are working on? Until you have a fundamental difference of opinion about how the distribution should look, you don't have any good reason to roll your own.
Admittedly it's been a year since I lived in New Brunswick, and when I did, it was in Fredericton, not St. John, but the rates for fibre into your house were pretty prohibitive at the time. I looked into it and decided that my USR wasn't so bad after all. Especially when I saw what passes for "cable" modems there. ugh.
I agree that NBTel is pretty good about bringing new technology to the homes, but it still wasn't there a year ago, my Roger's connection is a _lot_ better than any of the connections my old friends in NB have. (And that should speak volumes for anyone living in Ottawa.)
Re:Kernel Usage will fork unless...
on
Kernels Galore
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· Score: 1
At least with Linux you have a reasonable idea of what will break when you upgrade. What about Windows? Without any explination upgrading one of my machines from Win95 to Win98 caused the network card to stop working. The same model card in the same motherboard with the same BIOS revision on a different machine, also upgraded works fine. The difference is that the one that works is one where I flashed the EEPROM to choose the IRQ. They all work fine in Linux and NT.
My point is that an OS upgrade (and really, when most people think of the kernel, they really mean the OS) is a violent action and in Linux it is far less so than in other products. MS has already prepared the world for problems with OS upgrades, we can just make it less painful with the new, shorter development cycle.
Not quite. Ontario understands politics and this really isn't a whole lot more than a ploy to convince techies that we can be happier here than in the US. The problem is that way too many of us are packing up our maple leafs and our two-fours of beer and heading south for bigger paycheques.
Not that I have done even a tiny bit of research on the matter, but I would be inclined to think the moon falls into pretty much the same category as Antarctica. Depending on what country you live in you may view it as another bit of dirt to stick a flag in or you may see it as a nationless zone. For example, several countries have claimed large (and in some cases overlapping) sections of Antarctica. IIRC Australia is one of them. Other countries (the US immediately springs to mind) refuse to recognize any territorial claims there. The UN didn't have an official position on it at the time I last looked (about a year ago) and Canada's position was in a state of flux. We were trying to decide if we agreed with our noisy neighbours to the south or the stogy folks across the pond who've been so understanding over the years.
RMS has clearly demonstrated on every single occasion that he subscribes to communist ideals if not the Communist party. I think it would be harsh to label him a Communist in the McCarthy-ism sense, but he clearly wants a world without all the sort of heirarchy the Software insdustry currently has.
(Personally, if anything, I'd be more inclined to call him a socialist, but remember, I'm a Liberal Canadian. *grin*)
Okay, I'll start off by saying that the whole midichlorians thingy makes my teeth itch. I really liked the whole mysticism around the force and seeing it summed up that way -- oh, it's the concentration of tachyons around his sub-space gravametric field that gives him that skill -- really annoys me.
That having been said, I'm really trying to give Lucas the benefit of the doubt here because over all I really enjoyed TPM and I do think it is a worthy offering as the beginning of the series.
". . . that the little unspellable beasties that allow for the use of the force possible impregnated a woman to create Anakin."
This is the only point of yours that I'm going to take any issue with. I'd like to put forward the theory (and it's totally my theory, I haven't been reading the books or on the usenet groups) that the little beasties aren't sentient in any way. I would suggest that they didn't impregnate her, but that there were so many of them around her the pregnancy was a side effect. That would ascribe no more intelligence to them than a tapeworm and still have the same result.
As for your comments about "pre-determined", I don't even want to think about how many times I've heard the word "destiny" in the four movies. I think it is a foregone conclusion that if Lucas isn't personally an determinist, his stories certainly are.
I'm using the Voodoo3 server now. There are a few more bugs in it than the old S3 one I was using, but when compared to my WinNT / Win98 combination, it is still far more reliable.
The only problems I had with it were unrelated to the actual server code. I had to upgrade my poor old XFree86 3.2 to 3.3.3.1. And even that took less time (and fewer reboots) than the last time I tried to install a game in Win98.
I completely agree. Overclocking isn't some sort of rebellion against Intel (or any other chip manufacturer, for that matter). It's a geek thing. It's all about tweaking your machine until you have every last bit of power avaliable.
A colleague of mine has a brother that works at one of the big hardware manufacturers (not allowed to say which, but they are behind Linux) and he was saying that a lot of the chips that are manufactured are deliberately rated lower than their maximum clock speed if they are even marginal during QA.
Say Intel makes a hundred 450MHz processors and of those only ten pass thier QA. The remaining ninety may be tested at 400MHz. If they pass there, they may be re-marked as 400s and sold that way. When you consider that for someone like Intel, with their QA standards being so high, this is a huge cost savings. And that means that a lot of the chips can safely be overclocked (actually, clocked back to what they were built to do) without any serious stability issues.
Of course Intel (and others) wouldn't recommend this kind of thing since it really is doing something that they feel isn't entirely safe. But I don't perceive any enmity between the folks like Tom, from Tom's Hardware Guide, (who first taught me how to overclock) and Intel.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, two things I may have missed on the site are:
Details like this are what makes the difference for me when I try to catagorize these guys as 'legitmate' or 'fly-by-night'.
Karma be damned again.
So, Rob, tell me, did it hurt when you plummeted off the turnip wagon?
I mean jeez. This is the second story today I saw where you guys seem to be just trying to cause a fire-storm. Two links deep we have the press release about the Linux DVD player. (Oh horror of horrors! The project is running LATE! That never happens in the real world.)
Then this. That's quite the Linux distribution they have there. They are right to change the license if their whole distro can be in that 504kb zipfile I downloaded a minute ago.
Don't you guys even make a slight attempt to research your stories before you post them?
Karma be damned.Huh. I must be safe. My site is decidedly vert.
Probably best you posted anonymously. If you hadn't you would have revealed yourself as either (a) not a programmer or (b) someone your ISO staff should be coming down on like a ton of bricks. And like it or not, if you want to do business in the real world, ISO counts for a lot.
I don't know if the thread is still active or not, but here goes. Actually, the reason why I claim that 2001 is about HAL is because of how the story is about evolution. (In this one I would say that the monoliths were initially agents of change, but the cause/effect relationship seems less important here.) My thinking is that Clarke here was suggesting that the next evolutionary step may be initiated by humans. Although in light of his subsequent books it seemed that he decided against that approach or I just mis-interpreted the whole thing.
Initially I planned to stay out of this discussion as I do with most Slashdot threads. I read the review and thought to myself "This person just doesn't get it." Which isn't a big deal. A lot of people don't get Clarke. It's nothing against them, it's just his style. Then I read a lot of the comments mirroring my feelings on the book. (I loved it, by the way. I've read it two or three times now and I've been thinking lately it's time to read it again.) So I was reassured that my comments were unnecessary. But then I read some comments like this and I really can't pass up the opportunity to converse with someone who really does seem to "get it". This is what I got out of it, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say on the subject. First, I would suggest that the book is more of a tragedy than sci-fi. To back this up I would also suggest that the main characters in the book are the Overlords, not the humans (which is why I feel they come off so flat sometimes.) This isn't such a stretch when you think about Clarke's other books, like 2001, where the protagonist is clearly the computer. It is the only fully emotionally-developed character in that book. But that's off the point. My biggest problem with the review is that somehow the reviewer seems to have gotten the cause and effect relationship regarding the arrival of the Overlords exactly backwards. That's not all that hard to believe since the denoument is only touched on briefly and near then end of the book when a lot of other things are happening all at once. Anyway, let me be perfectly clear on this point. The Overlords arrive because humanity was nearing the next (final?) evolutionary step. (He is also suggesting, in a back-handed manner, that evolution is a stepped process, a theory that is still debated if I'm not mistaken.) So how do I say this is a tragedy? The Overlords have become something of caretakers or custodians of our plane of existence. They have slipped into an evolutionary cul-de-sac and in an attempt to discover how to get back on the path, they are overseeing each race's final moments on this plane in hopes that it will reveal something about how they too can evolve. Clarke gives some small hope for the future of their race, but he doesn't leave you with a lot of confidence in them. Anyway, that's my take on it.
I'm with @Home in Ottawa too on what appears to be the worst subnet of the bunch for noise. I used to be routinely portscanned, but some truly draconian security measures on my box at home have taken care of that. These days a portscan shouldn't reveal anything about me at all to the scanner (I've tried from other machines to verify this). As for my mail server, well, sendmail out of the box on Slackware wouldn't even route email to my local mail accounts if it was sent directly to me. I had to re-write my .cf file to allow mail to be delivered at all.
Speaking as one of their 'innocent' (at least in my eyes) users, I whole-heartedly support the UDP against @Home. If there was something I could do to stop the spam I would. As it is, I'm going to get very noisy on my end about them addressing this UDP with all due haste. It isn't like I've posted to USENET in the last four or five months anyway, but I figure it won't hurt to turn up the heat on them from the inside too.
On the other hand, my firewall is pretty reliable. If I could find some open servers that would allow me posting I'd happily avoid the @Home servers entirely.
Jeez, I remember years ago when I started programming my first database application with Sybase as the back-end there were two different date types they supported. A long (four-digit) format and a compressed format where anything before 35 (I think) was interpreted as 20xx. I know that wasn't all that long ago (no more than four years, I'm sure) but surely this wasn't a new feature then.
I'm immediately suspicious of any web-site, hocking linux that has nothing but images for links in the first two sections of their forms. Even these WinLinux 2000 jokers had a reasonably readable web-page from lynx.
Ummmm, what I really want to know is what they are offering that Caldera hasn't already offered. Lemme see here, UMSDOS based, a Control Panel icon to run loadlin.exe, reading existing Windows hardware settings to use in the Linux setup. Yep, thanks guys, you rock.
This seems even lower than the Mandrake guys offering a "better Red Hat". At least they acknowledge where their distribution comes from. Seems like every cheese-eater with a CD burner is trying to make a quick buck off the uninformed masses these days by claiming Windows-interoperatbility. I see nothing particularly special about their screenshots.
I have a bit of advice for all you "distribution chasers". Instead of wasting your time and energy building your own half-baked distribution, why don't you offer to help the people who built the one you are working on? Until you have a fundamental difference of opinion about how the distribution should look, you don't have any good reason to roll your own.
Eh. Why is American beer served cold?
So you can tell it from piss.
;-)
Admittedly it's been a year since I lived in New Brunswick, and when I did, it was in Fredericton, not St. John, but the rates for fibre into your house were pretty prohibitive at the time. I looked into it and decided that my USR wasn't so bad after all. Especially when I saw what passes for "cable" modems there. ugh.
I agree that NBTel is pretty good about bringing new technology to the homes, but it still wasn't there a year ago, my Roger's connection is a _lot_ better than any of the connections my old friends in NB have. (And that should speak volumes for anyone living in Ottawa.)
pkgtool is your friend.
At least with Linux you have a reasonable idea of what will break when you upgrade. What about Windows? Without any explination upgrading one of my machines from Win95 to Win98 caused the network card to stop working. The same model card in the same motherboard with the same BIOS revision on a different machine, also upgraded works fine. The difference is that the one that works is one where I flashed the EEPROM to choose the IRQ. They all work fine in Linux and NT.
My point is that an OS upgrade (and really, when most people think of the kernel, they really mean the OS) is a violent action and in Linux it is far less so than in other products. MS has already prepared the world for problems with OS upgrades, we can just make it less painful with the new, shorter development cycle.
Not quite. Ontario understands politics and this really isn't a whole lot more than a ploy to convince techies that we can be happier here than in the US. The problem is that way too many of us are packing up our maple leafs and our two-fours of beer and heading south for bigger paycheques.
Not that I have done even a tiny bit of research on the matter, but I would be inclined to think the moon falls into pretty much the same category as Antarctica. Depending on what country you live in you may view it as another bit of dirt to stick a flag in or you may see it as a nationless zone. For example, several countries have claimed large (and in some cases overlapping) sections of Antarctica. IIRC Australia is one of them. Other countries (the US immediately springs to mind) refuse to recognize any territorial claims there. The UN didn't have an official position on it at the time I last looked (about a year ago) and Canada's position was in a state of flux. We were trying to decide if we agreed with our noisy neighbours to the south or the stogy folks across the pond who've been so understanding over the years.
RMS has clearly demonstrated on every single occasion that he subscribes to communist ideals if not the Communist party. I think it would be harsh to label him a Communist in the McCarthy-ism sense, but he clearly wants a world without all the sort of heirarchy the Software insdustry currently has.
(Personally, if anything, I'd be more inclined to call him a socialist, but remember, I'm a Liberal Canadian. *grin*)
Okay, I'll start off by saying that the whole midichlorians thingy makes my teeth itch. I really liked the whole mysticism around the force and seeing it summed up that way -- oh, it's the concentration of tachyons around his sub-space gravametric field that gives him that skill -- really annoys me.
That having been said, I'm really trying to give Lucas the benefit of the doubt here because over all I really enjoyed TPM and I do think it is a worthy offering as the beginning of the series.
". . . that the little unspellable beasties that allow for the use of the force possible impregnated a woman to create Anakin."
This is the only point of yours that I'm going to take any issue with. I'd like to put forward the theory (and it's totally my theory, I haven't been reading the books or on the usenet groups) that the little beasties aren't sentient in any way. I would suggest that they didn't impregnate her, but that there were so many of them around her the pregnancy was a side effect. That would ascribe no more intelligence to them than a tapeworm and still have the same result.
As for your comments about "pre-determined", I don't even want to think about how many times I've heard the word "destiny" in the four movies. I think it is a foregone conclusion that if Lucas isn't personally an determinist, his stories certainly are.
I'm using the Voodoo3 server now. There are a few more bugs in it than the old S3 one I was using, but when compared to my WinNT / Win98 combination, it is still far more reliable.
The only problems I had with it were unrelated to the actual server code. I had to upgrade my poor old XFree86 3.2 to 3.3.3.1. And even that took less time (and fewer reboots) than the last time I tried to install a game in Win98.
I completely agree. Overclocking isn't some sort of rebellion against Intel (or any other chip manufacturer, for that matter). It's a geek thing. It's all about tweaking your machine until you have every last bit of power avaliable.
A colleague of mine has a brother that works at one of the big hardware manufacturers (not allowed to say which, but they are behind Linux) and he was saying that a lot of the chips that are manufactured are deliberately rated lower than their maximum clock speed if they are even marginal during QA.
Say Intel makes a hundred 450MHz processors and of those only ten pass thier QA. The remaining ninety may be tested at 400MHz. If they pass there, they may be re-marked as 400s and sold that way. When you consider that for someone like Intel, with their QA standards being so high, this is a huge cost savings. And that means that a lot of the chips can safely be overclocked (actually, clocked back to what they were built to do) without any serious stability issues.
Of course Intel (and others) wouldn't recommend this kind of thing since it really is doing something that they feel isn't entirely safe. But I don't perceive any enmity between the folks like Tom, from Tom's Hardware Guide, (who first taught me how to overclock) and Intel.