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    The Philosophy Thread

    I think you should consider this: the theory that states those extra dimensions exist (which we cannot even observe) is based on some model. In order to refrain from this becoming pure speculation (and probably not being taken seriously for abusing the term "dimension" to fit your every...
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    The Philosophy Thread

    Just my view of the process of "thought", about how consciousness is achieved and how it may end. (Sorry to derail some of your questions mali) I consider the brain to be the sole source of thoughts. Synapses connecting a gigantic neural network will eventually form a conscience. We're not sure...
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    The Philosophy Thread

    I am tempted to respond... Prepare yourself :) Existence is an observation. You know you exist when you are conscious of your own existence. Things exist once you become conscious of their existence. Every person observes the world in their own way; you become conscious of different things...
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    Appstore Security

    It must be because they are located in Finland. If you buy from Europe when you're in Europe, you pay the tax to the country you're buying from.
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    Appstore Security

    I am attempting to reduce the commercial investing party's concern. To them, sales lost to piracy is often an issue, even if they only think so. By giving commercial parties a fair solution (as opposed to DRM-ing their content) you can increase their interest, which is exactly what you want to...
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    Appstore Security

    I don't see any legal battles happening against piracy, so I am also kind of worried here against buyers starting to pirate the commercial software. It could easily destroy any commercial interest. I'm thinking about something that might help prevent the stealing in an unobtrusive manner. It...
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    Mathematical Analysis Software - Pandora.

    You should really give SAGE Math at try, it aims to be a wrapper for all current math software (both open source and closed), choosing the fastest components for the problems you give it, and offers it through a nice generic Python front-end. It already matches Mathematica in features, as far as...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    I agree with your point though. PND overlays allow for way more flexible and user-friendly configuration. The only problem could be performance, so if we just provide a way to permanently fuse a PND with a filesystem (read: install), there is at least one certain way to deal with performance...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    Why does it break? PND's are read-only, so they cannot be corrupted. The containing filesystem (if read/write) better be using something with a journal. Writable persistent overlays themselves can be corrupted, but that's the user's fault for not unmounting, and even then journalling will help...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    The init.d scripts will run by prefix order. If you remount (and thus make available) the overlay in, say, S10 of the boot runlevel, which makes available services above S10, they will still be started right after the remount script finishes. S-scripts in other runlevels aren't even influenced...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    I think it should still be possible for static apps to have some kind of PND overlay system, this is the only way in which we can cleany "install/remove" without actually touching (read: permanently changing) stuff. If we just tell the user that the PND requires an overlay with the OS (whatever...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    NoA file, it seems to be generated. Not sure what does that though, this is a standard Debian install. Good find, but I can't see how much of the time this is eating. Anyway, wouldn't such generation be in the 0.2 seconds of user time? It still leaves about ~100ms of sys time per mount. Perhaps...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    That, indeed, would be beautiful. However, I have found another limitation: time. Look at this: #!/bin/bash max=7 mkdir -p mnt dev overlay iso/overlay mkisofs -o dummy.pnd iso 2>/dev/null mount -t aufs -o br:iso/overlay none overlay for i in $(seq 0 $max) do cp dummy.pnd $i mkdir...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    Not sure about Ubuntu, but in Debian I need the appropriate aufs-modules- packages for my kernel and I need to load the module aufs explicitly. Edit: major constraint warning: It appears that most kernels are compiled to allow a maximum of 256 loopback devices, with a default limit of 8 as a...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    Well, I don't understand the details, but the least complex setup is going to be something like this: /dev/sdb, SD card device /mnt/sdb1, with EXT3 (for the journalling!) ---> PND file loopback mounted on /dev/loopx /dev/loopx, losetup device PND /mnt/pndx, where the prior loop is mounted --->...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    Minor: you can't hardlink directories. You can, however, mount --bind them, which accomplishes the same. So there appears to be no problem after all? I'm pretty certain that at least aufs can do this (supposedly the improved version of unionfs which does a lot of branch management). The only...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    Good point. I'd advocate an export HOME=$PNDROOT for single-app like PND's. And a $REALHOME for, naturally, the real location of the user's home. This will cause issues with common configuration files, but nothing that can't be handled by the apps if they are specifically packaged for Pandora...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    Because the internal NAND wears down even slower than an SD card when the appropriate technologies are used. You can take advantage of the MTD in the system, but there is no such thing as MTD the moment you are talking about SD cards. If, by default, it uses UBIFS, and we count on the NAND to...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    Well, as the sole purpose of an overlay is to not modify a filesystem while unifying all available data anyway, and if you modify the filesystem you don't have a reason to use overlays, I am confused by your statement. We have to have the ability for PND's to augment the function of the OS...
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    Discussion About Additions To The Pnd Format

    I think aufs deals just fine with disappearing branches, and branch configuration seems to be its strong point too. I've been trying to find proof of this (only found some people discussing this lightly), but I guess I'll have to set up some tests myself. And, if you leave it completely up to...
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