Slashdot Mirror

Yesterday we totally nuked the Linux Counter by linking it on these pages. Steve sent us a link to a detailed page on the Slashdot Experience contains logs and the like, documenting the server going crunch. I'm reposting it because yesterday the server spent several hours down and I'd like more people to have a chance to register their Linux box. Drop on in, fill out the form and let the world know that you run Linux. When you can't track sales to determine an OSs market share, things get tricky. Update: 02/25 11:47 by CT : That didn't take long. Guess you guys have more work to do over there (sigh).

Anonymous Coward writes "It seems that they are comming near to 1.0.0 the first packages with a 1.0.0 in their name apear on ftp.gnome.org " I've posted a mirror list after this. Update: 02/25 11:44 by CT : Ok, there was some stuff in that directory, I swear. Or maybe I dreamed it. Grr. One of those days.

US:

ftp://ftp.circ.us.eu.org/mirrors/ftp.gnome.org
ftp://gnomeftp.wgn.net/pub/gnome
ftp://sod.res.cmu.edu/mirror/ftp.gnome.org
ftp://ftp.cybertrails.com/pub/gnome
ftp://ftp.jimpick.com/pub/mirrors/gnome
ftp://ftp.geo.net/pub/gnome

South America:
ftp://ftp.inf.utfsm.cl/pub/Linux/Gnome
ftp://ftp.puc.cl/pub/mirror/gnome

Europe:
http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/hci/GNOME
ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/hci/GNOME
ftp://ftp.gnome.ch/
ftp://ftp.gts.cz/pub/gui/gnome
ftp://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz/X11/Desktops/GNOME
ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-bonn.de/pub/os/unix/gnome/
ftp://ftp.fr.gnome.org/pub/gnome/
ftp://ftp.linux.hr/pub/gnome
ftp://ceu.fi.udc.es/pub/os/linux/X-Window/GNOME/
ftp://ftp.dit.upm.es/linux/gnome
ftp://ftp.linux.it/pub/mirrors/gnome
ftp://ftp3.linux.it/pub/mirrors/gnome
ftp://linux.a2000.nl/gnome
ftp://ftp.task.gda.pl/pub/linux/GNOME
ftp://sunsite.icm.edu.pl/pub/Linux/GNOME
ftp://ftp.utt.ro/mirrors/ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME
ftp://ftp.dataplus.se/pub/linux/gnome/
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/X11/GNOME
ftp://ftp.net.lut.ac.uk/gnome
ftp://ftp.archive.de.uu.net/pub/X11/GNOME

Asia:
ftp://ftp.dti.ad.jp/pub/X/GNOME/

Australia:
ftp://ftp.tas.gov.au/gnome
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/gnome

I-man writes "Extra extra! DOJ lawyer completely destroys the credibility of yet another Redmond Exec!" Wrap it up people. This is just getting to loony. I'm not sure which "Bill" related trial is more boring right now. They're both pretty darn funny though. Update: 02/23 02:24 by CT : cswiii sent us a nice link to a CNN story about a Six-week break trial. After which we'll finally get some closing.

Dave Miller, the ultracool hacker who does (definitely) work at Red Hat, wrote in to let us know Linux 2.2.2 has been released. A summary of changes should appear on Cutting Edge Linux shortly. This new kernel should fix the recent autofs bug (fixed in ac7). Update: 02/22 11:35 by J :Dave Whitinger, the guy behind the fabulous Linux Today site, wrote in with the linux-kernel-announce(ment). Update: 02/24 03:13 by CT : Dave Miller does work at Red Hat.

The excerpting of my book "Running To The Mountain" on Slashdot last week was shockingly and surprisingly successful. Because of the excerpting here, I shot near the top of Amazon's Top 100-selling books in just a few hours, and stayed on the list all weekend. This experiment in digital literary empowerment flew in the face of just about every conventional publishing wisdom about how books and the Internet and Web do -- or don't -- interact. It suggested that for writers, as well as for so many other groups, the Net can, in fact, be just as empowering as gasbags like me have been saying for years. What happened to me wasn't supposed to happen. It shocked my publisher, and more than a few journalists. And typically,it provoked some especially ugly -- and for me, quite sad -- discussions and accusations on the site.

Last week's excerpt of a chapter from my new book "Running To The Mountain" was a Net experiment, a chance to practice what I preach, and to test the boundaries of the much-invoked idea that the Net "empowers" people in new ways.

It succeeded beyond anybody's wildest dreams, especially those of my stunned publisher. And it might have made a bit of publishing history.

The idea to publish an excerpt from this particular book on this site was always both a stretch and a gamble. Although I'd talked to several magazines last year, including Wired and Outside, about excerpting it, I decided in January to offer the first serial rights to Rob and Jeff, who founded and run Slashdot.

This site has become my spiritual and literal Web home, and I've come to see the open source and free software movements as the most significant - and appealing -- movements in media.

My publisher was wary of the idea, since the rights were being offered for free. And since mainstream books are almost never launched on the Net or the Web, at least not successfully. And even though the chapter that was being excerpted related to technology and spirituality, it wasn't exactly the daily fare of Slashdot's technologically sophisticated editorial menu.

But I argued that the Net is inherently spiritual, and that technology can sometimes fit into that impulse. And that I'd rather see any money go to Slashdot (as an Amazon associate, they get a tiny slice of every book sold from the site, a long-standing and publicly disclosed arrangement) than to some magazine or publisher. I wanted to sell books, but also to demonstrate the potential of the Net for increasingly embattled writers as well as people wanting to buy stocks and talk about sex. An open source site - my open source site - seemed the right place to do that.

Everybody has to understand that this impulse flies in the face of every conventional wisdom in publishing: Media there means "Slate" or The New York Times or NPR, the thinking goes. It does not mean a website founded by some kids from Holland, Mi., with a Penguin for a symbol and names like Cmdr Taco and Hemos.

You can't sell books on the Net, is a publishing mantra. People are so used to getting things free that they won't pay for anything. People online not only don't read, but the very existence of the Net and the Web are destroying reading.

But Rob and Jeff generously agreed to excerpt the book, a personal account of a Mid-life trek to a mountaintop partly inspired by the late (and technology-hating writer - monk) Thomas Merton. Mostly I think, Rob and Jeff published the chapter because I'm an author on the site and they wanted to help.

They didn't know that I am what's called a "mid-list" author - this means I don't sell a lot of books, Grisham or McCourt style. Those kinds of writers make a lot of money. And those at the bottom of the list are usually academic or literary writers who don't write for money. People outsideof publishing often don't know what somebody like me will never make it to Oprah, and that as a "mid-list" author, I'm something of an endangered literary species.

Given the rise of giant publishing conglomerates (like my own publisher Random House) and chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble, it increasingly isn't really worth much of anybody's time to publish writers like me. We just don't move enough books.

So for some years now, me and hundreds of writers like me, have been trapped in mid-list Hell, struggling for a way to reach readers beyond the conventional gatekeepers - publicists, marketers, reviewers, talk-show hosts and producers. Writing for some years about the Net and Web, I knew I was staring at just such an alternative possibility, but had never had the chance to put it to the test.

Fortunately for me, a number of different things converged. I started writing for Slashdot, which has, along with interest in OSS, taken off. My Random House publicist loves and understands the Net (the first publicist I've ever met at a publishing house who does). I've been experimenting for weeks now with the effects of linking my book subject to various Websites whose readers and members might be interested - Merton sites, geek sites, Boomer sites, even Yellow Lab sites, since the book prominently features my two dogs.

So last Thursday, the day the book excerpt ran on Slashdot, and I caught another break. USA Today wrote a long, enthusiastic review (www.usatoday.com/life/) .. Things really cranked into high gear. I e-mailed Jeff Bates (Hemos here) who inserted the review into the body of the excerpt. My publicist quickly e-mailed the review and the Slashdot URL to other Websites, reporters and reviewers.

Few at Random House thought this experiment had much of a chance of working, I could tell. The notion that books couldn't be sold via the Web has become an article of faith, even as the recognition that the Web is important is growing.

A week ago, my Amazon ranking was 1.2 million. (There are about three million titles offered on Amazon. The morning Slashdot excerpted my book, my ranking was 9,000. The book hadn't yet shipped to bookstores but a few hundred copies were in the Amazon warehouse. Some perspective here: Amazon is one of many thousands of booksellers in America. It takes hundreds, not tens of thousands of books to shoot up on their list. But few writers like me ever sell hundreds of books in a two or three day period, let alone a few hours.

Within two hours of the Slashdot excerpt, I had shot up to the Amazon top-selling 100 books list. The people at Random House were flabbergasted. My book had their full attention.

The people at Amazon were surprised too. One editor there sent me an e-mail in the morning that read: "What the hell is going on? Your book is taking off!" By 2 p.m, the book was in the top 50. By that night, it was at 22.

Everyone's first impulse was to cite the USA Today review. But that didn't make sense. It was obvious to me that it was Slashdot that was driving the books. For one thing, USA Today is linked to Barnes & Noble's website, not Amazon. For another, newspaper reviews, even great ones like that, rarely move that many books so quickly.

By 7 p.m. Thursday, Amazon was out of books (they've gotten more), and the order time went from 1-2 days to two weeks. They remained out of books all weekend. The book began to show up in bookstores Sunday night and Monday.

It's hard to describe just how astonishing this was. For a book about spirituality and personal experience to be launched on an open source Website and then jump to the top of the Amazon list, ahead of some of the best-selling authors in the country, was shocking. The USA Today review helped, for sure. But since the book wasn't even on bookstore shelves, the overwhelming bulk of the sales had to come off of Slashdot.

This has a lot of significance for writers and publishing. And for websites like Slashdot as well. Writers can connect directly with their own audiences and free themselves of the marketing process. Smaller and more idiosyncratic writers can escape the mass-marketing pressure of modern publishing and reach smaller, niche audiences. More people - including people familiar with how the Web works - can become writers. And those Web audiences will buy books. The fact that so many /. readers would step outside of their own specialized interests and experiences suggest an audience that will make specialized and individual decisions about what it wants to buy, see or read.

Publishers can perhaps begin to grasp that their phobic, reactionary and profoundly uncreative response to the Internet is wrong. The Net won't harm literature or books. It could very well be the salvation of both.

By Saturday, the word that something unusual had happened was buzzing around publishers and media types - fitting enough, via e-mail. I'd gotten numerous e-mails and calls from publishing executives, reporters and writers asking what had happened, and how it had happened.

I told them that I was practicing what I'd been preaching. The Net is, in fact, empowering, and wherever it goes, people like me can take more responsibility for their own work and lives, bypass the very many greedy and spiritless people who only look at numbers and stats, and create my own history.

These days, writers are viewed in much the same way welfare recipients are - a dependent culture nobody wants to subsidize any longer. To some extent, it's a brutal new reality. But to some extent, it's also fair. How many of the people reading this are subsidized and supported in their work?

The very coolest part of all this is that I hacked the Net to sell a book that wasn't a cyber-book and became a best-seller, even if it turns out to have been for just a few glorious days. I've learned on Slashdot, and especially while struggling to use my Linux operating system, that hacking isn't just about breaking into phone companies. It's about taking control, learning how to master and use the system. Very heady stuff.

The Amazon editor e-mailed me on Friday to say that if the excerpt had stayed up on Slashdot (it is still up in the book section), I would have gone to Number One, almost certainly.

This is a great launch, and it was done on the Net and Slashdot. The book is just coming out. I have the book tour, more publicity and reviews, and plenty of Net and Web mischief to make. No matter what happens with here, I'm pleased with myself, with the Net, and with Slashdot. I spent the weekend linking the excerpt and the review to more than 100 different websites, and throughout the weekend, the book stayed in the Amazon Top 100 lists.

It was definitely one of the high points of my writing life, and an affirmation of my faith in the Net and the Web as a generous, profoundly liberating place.

So thanks.

Mail-to: jonkatz@Slashdot.org *********

On a less happy, more personal note. The successful launch of "Running To The Mountain" was marred by some especially ugly public postings the day the excerpt ran. For the first time since I've been writing on Slashdot - more than three months - I've had an experience with public posts and flaming that I felt crossed the line of civility, decency and fairness. Perhaps it's a simple-minded fantasy, but I see places like Slashdot not as collections of strangers, but as new kinds of communities within which we often - always even - violently disagree, but yet still understand that we all belong here.

My transition here has been tough and rewarding. I've had copy transmission and bug problems, had to struggle with a whole new technical language, grasp a new kind of media movement, and taken on what is for me a fundamental challenge - mastering Linux. As many of you know, while I've been welcomed here by the vast majority of Slashdotters, some have argued that I hadn't proven my techno-manhood on a kick-ass site like this and shouldn't be allowed to write here.

This is something I've encountered in one form or another for much of my life, so it really hasn't bugged me. It happens on all Websites, including Hotwired, where I wrote for three years. Writing online, one can't hide behind secretaries, voice-mail or security guards. The people who are unhappy with you are sitting right there next to what you right, and that's fine with me. If you can't take it, you won't last long online.

Flaming is part of the free spirit of the Web, and nobody should feel under the least bit of pressure to like me or agree with what I write. I agree with the sentiments of many of the flamers, mostly young males, that one of their functions is to keep people like me in check.

But the ugliness and venality of some of the public postings about the excerpt descended to a new level, even though many hundreds of you expressed support in the most direct and powerful possible way - you bought my book.

Some posters argued this was Katz-worship, a bizarre suggestion given the criticism I've gotten here, and how many books are mentioned, reviewed, and referred to on this site. From the first, the people e-mailing me on Slashdot have always been intensely and very diversely literate, bombarding me daily with book recommendations and ideas, from novels to computer books.

But the public posters - a small group which dominates public discussions -- function in a different, if parallel universe. One even suggested this was some sort of a corrupt "kick-back" arrangement by which a book unrelated to OSS content was excerpted, so that the owners of the site -- and me -- could make lots of money. Others said the content of the excerpted was unrelated to a technology site and shouldn't have been published.

This was pretty tough to read, not only because it's hurtful but because it's false. First off, it's absurd. If anyone at Slashdot makes a total of $50 from the excerpting of my book I'd be stunned. We're talking about hundreds of books here, not thousands, and royalties and percentages are tiny all around. Writers like me make so little money from the books we write, can't do them full time. In fact, my book advances and royalties are almost embarrassingly small. I couldn't possibly live off them.

And that's not a complaint. I love writing, and choose freely to do it. But there's no way my book can make a lot of money, even if it sells thousands of copies. That's not how publishing works. And there's sure no way the people running Slashdot are going to get anything more than a good dinner off of publishing my excerpt, and then if they go to Taco Bell. Publishers make money off huge, Oprah-driven best-sellers and specialty books about cooking, sex, religion or the Millenium. So writers like me write for different places - magazines, Websites, plus books - in order to make a living.

Whether people like the book or not, I'm also puzzled and surprised that anybody could argue that the subject matter of the chapter - the conflict between technology and spirituality - wasn't appropriate for Slashdot (truthfully, hardly anybody did make that argument except for the posters. Almost none of my e-mail did). Wired magazine thought it was appropriate enough for them. And hundreds of people on the site bought the book, the clearest refutation of that idea. Rob and Jeff would publish excerpts from the book of any Slashdot author, and be supportive of any book in any way they could. Thanks to them for that.

I can't complain because people disagree with me or my writing. It's also perfectly appropriate to jeer at my presence and my opinions. But when posters cross the line into vicious unfounded accusations, they've entered a different place. They've just become a brutal, ignorant mob.

Anybody who sincerely had questions about this, and wanted answers, as opposed to the joy of public preening, could have simply e-mailed me, and still can. I answer all of it: jonkatz@slashdot.org.

The fact is, there was a generous intent all around here. I write for Slashdot for free, and gave the rights to Slashdot for free, hoping that might draw some attention to the site, which it did, and if it helped them pay the rent and acknowledge the vast amounts of work they do to make this site for very little money, that was great. If it sold some books, even better.

To take this impulse and try and translate into some venal, mean-spirited enterprise seemed to me to go over the boundary of civilized disagreement, to betray the spirit of any community. It was ugly and disturbing, and not at all representative of the many people who e-mailed me their support and encouragement and who bought the book. If the excerpt and the response were a high point of my writing and Net life, this small but angry and hostile group of people embodied one of the lows.

mail-to: jonkatz@Slashdot.org

You can pick up the book at Amazon.

CT : I'd like to post a tiny addendum to Katz's bit here. As usual, the postings on the original review got flamey. This time it was really bad. I often am offended by Comments posted on Slashdot, but I'm rarely sad that I work so many hours running the site. Hate filled comments are the one thing that sucks about running Slashdot. It breaks my heart to see people use something that so many people work so hard (for so little) on, as a weapon for them to scream about anything that they disagree with. It's all right to disagree, but try to be civil about it. Katz is an important part of Slashdot. You can disagree, but I'm glad to have him here, and when it is all said and done, it is my decision. And it was the correct one. The postive mail about Jon always outweighs the negative, and more importantly, I usually enjoy reading Jon's articles. That's always my first goal- posting stories I want to read. I think thats why you guys are here- what you like is similiar enough to what I like that it's all worth it.

This whole hoopla really made my day- finally Katz got a little payback for the dozens of columns he wrote for free for a rinky dink little website. We probably got a few bucks to. But hopefully- and most importantly- a few of you got a book that you'll enjoy reading. Not a bad days work for anyone. If we can ignore the flames.

Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love writes "A head to head to head comparison of PowerPC G4, Intel Pentium III and E2K ( CT : that russian chip) can be found at macintouch. This has all of the makings for an interesting year, indeed."

Pac wrote this story for Segfault Very silly :-) Update: 02/20 01:21 by CT : as usual, segfault segfaults immediately after getting linked. And you thought Slashdot was unstable. And they only get like 3 hits a week.

Andy King sent us a fluffy little statement about Mother of Perl that I've simplified: Perl is good. We like it. This biweekly zine will help you know it better. First article is on XML. This isn't the Perl Journal (which has a permanent spot in my bathroom) but its not bad. Update: 02/18 12:20 by CT : course it would be better if the registration worked.

homebrewer writes "This quick little blurb on www.yahoo.com tells about IBM teaming up with Red Hat to sell Linux." Someone else submitted some bits about IBM providing Think Pads to hackers to make sure that Linux runs properly? IBM is doing a lot of the right things. I hear we should expect big things from them at LinuxWorld too. Update: 02/18 08:43 by CT : here's a related story. Similiar stuff, litte more detailed.

An anonymous reader said "An employee of Hash, Inc., the makers of the phenomenal Animation:Master 3D modeling and animation software, inquired today on the animation:master mailing list on whether or not users would buy a Linux verion of the software package, if Hash happened to port it to Linux. You can email Steve Sappington at Hash and let him know if you'd be interested in a Linux port. " For those of you who care, I animated Hamster Havoc and Duckpins in an earlier version of this software ages ago. I miss this program more than Diablo. Update: 02/18 09:09 by CT : Steve from Hash emailed me and said that this was completely untrue and to stop emailing him. I'm bummed.

An anonymous reader said "An employee of Hash, Inc., the makers of the phenomenal Animation:Master 3D modeling and animation software, inquired today on the animation:master mailing list on whether or not users would buy a Linux verion of the software package, if Hash happened to port it to Linux. You can email Steve Sappington at Hash and let him know if you'd be interested in a Linux port. " For those of you who care, I animated Hamster Havoc and Duckpins in an earlier version of this software ages ago. I miss this program more than Diablo. Update: 02/18 09:09 by CT : Steve from Hash emailed me and said that this was completely untrue and to stop emailing him. I'm bummed.

An anonymous reader said "An employee of Hash, Inc., the makers of the phenomenal Animation:Master 3D modeling and animation software, inquired today on the animation:master mailing list on whether or not users would buy a Linux verion of the software package, if Hash happened to port it to Linux. You can email Steve Sappington at Hash and let him know if you'd be interested in a Linux port. " For those of you who care, I animated Hamster Havoc and Duckpins in an earlier version of this software ages ago. I miss this program more than Diablo. Update: 02/18 09:09 by CT : Steve from Hash emailed me and said that this was completely untrue and to stop emailing him. I'm bummed.

An anonymous reader proved what happens when you combine to of mankind's greatest achievements (Legs Mindstorm and Star Wars) into one excellent geek toy. I want that lego R2-D2. They've also got a digital camera lego mindstorm. Hope your German is better then mine though. Update: 02/17 06:04 by CT : Web site go boom. Anyone have a copy in their cache?

If you ever questioned if Linux was going to hit the mainstream or not, this proves it. Linus will be giving a keynote at the April 19th COMDEX in Chicago. Hrm. Only 3 hours from home. Practically a stones throw from here. Wonder if I should crash. Update: 02/17 01:15 by CT : This is actually the Linux Pavillion Keynote at COMDEX. Not quite the whole deal. I said "a" keynote, not "the" keynote *grin*.

drwiii was the first to submit it and I guess I have to post it. Hemos and I have our pictures in the March issue of Wired (p45). We look like dorks, but when they took that picture it was like 5 degrees out and had something like a 25 degree wind chill. This is for the March issue they say as they order us to remove our coats and risk frostbyte so that we look timely. Eek. I guess this means I should buy this issue. Update: 02/15 10:34 by CT : I'm the ugly on. The ugly one on the right. The metal thing is a lighthouse.

An anonymous reader pointed us a a wired news article where you can read that the authors of the UltraHLE N64 emulator has had its source code released. The article talks about Nintendo considering Legal Action against the authors of the emulator, as well as the Sony/Connectix suit and the fact that another company is working on a Playstation emulator for windows. Update: 02/12 03:51 by CT : My bad. The source code wasn't actually released by the authors- the code is a disasembled bit posted by someone else. It doesn't compile. Will the real UltraHLE authors take the hint? Update: 02/13 03:04 by S : The code has been removed, although anyone could make it again with REC. In the mean time, Dextrose has an UltraHLE-on-Linux Howto which reveals that the combination of UltraHLE-Wine-Linux is faster than the original UltraHLE-Win98: with Zelda running at 21.3 fps under Linux versus 19.6 under Win98.

I think I need an SGI icon- the news from out there just keeps streaming in- Mage sent us a link to an interesting bit from Federal Computer Week talking about x86 Servers designed to run NT or Linux. The article has a pretty glaring mistake though, saying that Red Hat and Caldera are "Public Domain" Operating Systems. Update: 02/08 05:11 by CT : Hooray! We have an SGI icon now. Anyone have one for mp3s now?

erich@wrq.com was the first to tell us that KDE 1.1 is released.Update: 02/07 10:38 by H : It appears that while the annoucement has been made the binaries are not yet availible-should be up any time now. Update: 02/07 02:55 by CT : thanks to Christian Kreibich for the KDE Logo.

Joy of joys! Debian is going to try to get a new logo. They are doing this in conjunction with the latest Gimp Contest. My cheesy entry is on my gimp page *grin*. Anyway, there are more details on the pages linked above- and the winner gets a Debian CDs for their platform of choice (no fair asking for for something that runs on your C64)

Smack writes "Ebay didn't pick up their Cool Site of the Year award (just like Slashdot). So someone else picked it up for them, and now they're auctioning it off on Ebay itself! The price is already up to $130.00. What beautiful irony..." God bless the Internet. Now I'm beginning to wonder where my CSoTY trophy ended up... Update: 02/03 03:34 by CT : Wired picked up the story a little bit ago. They don't know where our trophy is either *grin*

Loic Dachary wrote in to say that catalog, a GPLd perl script to create your own Yahoo style directory is up for download. ja wrote in to say that LyX, TeX a frontend for dummies has officially hit v1.0 From my own blatant self promotion department, I actually registered CmdrTaco.net and have moved most of my non-slashdot stuff there- as well as cleaning up some design issues and making pages smaller and faster and prettier. Update your links, the old stuff will go away in the not so distant future. David Carver noted that the March 1999 issue of (What? Paper?) Performance Computing magazine mentions Slashdot on Page 13 regarding last Novembers reports on Cheap Alphas. For something truly strange, we have something Blaxthos sent: The Church of the Quivering Otter. It's actually even wierder than it sounds. An anonymous reader sent us a link to a CNN article about the Victoria's Secret commercial during the superbowl: Apparently the website got a million hits in the following hour. Was the game boring or do we just really like Stephenie Seymour? The answer to both of these is probably yes. Somewhat related is another patent following the one we mentioned yesterday. Rosmo sent us (Not for the ultra moral!) a patent that might be even scarier that that one.