Slashdot Mirror

To me they became evil the moment they raped https://dejanews.com/

But even pre-google newsgroups were available via web browser and services like Deja News ...

Shame about Deja News http://www.dejanews.com/

Are you saying this story is deja news?

Oh no! Yahoo bought something? Are you serious?! Well, long live Google then, because they invent everything in house, don't they?

True. However, for many oldtimers, they never fixed their bookmark for Dejanews which still functions.

My first Linux book was Linux Unleashed, 1st edition, published by Sams Publishing. This book included Slackware with it. I'm afraid to think what verion, as this book is (c) 1995. It was good for a start. It's been read, borrowed, and stolen over the years. Hopefully it has a good home now.

I still highly recommend Slackware for a distribution. It's what we use on all our servers, and my workstations (Home, Work, and Laptop)

I bought a co-worker Linux System Administration: A User's Guide by Marcel Gagne. Published by Addison Wesley. Flipping through it, this seems like a very good book. It seems to be working out. He's coming to me with very intelligent questions after reading chapters, rather than "What do I do at the prompt".

After the Unleashed book, I personally got into the O'Reilly books. If you do this, go to the store with the company credit card, it'll be expensive. Oddly enough, most bosses are ok with paying for books, even when they're being tight with equipment. You can't get a new $5 CPU fan, but you can spend $500 on books. Hmmmm.. Well, buy more books. :) Borders and Barnes & Noble frequently have sales on previous edition books. If you flip through both, sometimes you'll see there were only very subtle changes, or chapters which aren't important to you. For a $40 price difference, it's worth getting the older one. :)

O'Reilly Essential Systems Administration

Learning
the Unix Operating System (got it for my girlfriend, so she'd understand what I was doing all night)

vi Pocket Reference. It seems none of my coworkers could use vi before I got to this office. Now they're all using it. [esc][esc]:wq!

Programming Perl. If you're going to play with Unix, you should learn Perl.

Then you should read up on what you're working with. If you're networking or on the Internet, TCP/IP is good to know.

TCP/IP Network Administration

DNS and BIND very definately, unless you want to be clueless about what happens between typing in "yahoo.com" and it coming up in your browser. Having a good understanding there definately helps you debug problems.

Sendmail This is the perfect book to spin your head, and leave you with a headache for months. But it's the topic, not the book, that's so complicated. If it didn't do absolutely everything, I'm sure it would be simpler to use.

O'Reilly has a lot of great books.

"Learning" books are for beginners.

"Nutshell" books are usually to help you figure out something if you don't really know it.

The rest of the books have various degrees of learning to them. On my desk at work, for O'Reilly books, I have 3 different PERL books, the JavaScript book, and a few others that I reference on a regular basis.

I recommend going to book stores, and flipping through everything they have (restock it to the proper places). See what your comprehension level is. If you have no clue what they're talking about, you need an easier book. If you almost understand, buy it, read it, and then share it with a friend (especially on the company expense account! hehe).

When you're ready to get out of the books, and into the real world, the most valuable reference you'll ever have is dejanews.com. If you don't know an answer, search it there. Probably someone in the last 20 years has already asked it. It's the quickest way to look smart and impress your friends, even if you're stupid. :)

Having the stack of O'Reilly books is always good though. I recently changed offices (same company), and while riding in the elevator, I was offered a job because I looked educated and had a big stack of O'Reilly books in my arms.. Little did she know that was only 1/3 of them. The rest were still in my car..

Power Search is better.. Though their full archive is still unavailable :(((((((

Bastards....

Your Working Boy,

The only change I see is that www.dejanews.com once again redirects to the page www.deja.com. The usenet search otherwise looks exactly the same to me -- the same busted article threading, the same crufty featureless search engine, the same hobbled archive only going back about 17 months, the same totally broken "select language" non-feature.

Let's face it -- the usenet news part of deja has been neglected for a looong time now. Only time will show if this move reflects deja's renewed interest in being the best usenet news archive available, or if if its just a pit stop on the road to closing the doors and shutting the lights.

Go to http://www.dejanews.com/home_ps.shtml. Do a search for "Addtron switching hubs". The 3rd entry is the one by Earle Robinson that had the "ad" link embedded in it in the original Slashdot article.

Apparently the link isn't there when you do a power search?

I'm no USENET expert, by any stretch, but you *may* (most likely, you can) still be able to read/post messages using DejaNews. Of course, this is just in theory (my theory too, which isn't saying much.) So, like a lot theories, it stands an equal chance of being proven wrong or right.

Another way is to add the "X-no-archive: yes" header to your messages. If you are using Mutt put "my_hdr X-no-archive: yes" in your .muttrc (no quotes). This, however, doesn't work all the time. For example, some of the FreeBSD mailing lists are echoed to USENET newsgroups with the X-no-archive stripped out. There is nothing you can really do about this except not post to those mailing lists. Also, there are probably archiving engines out there which ignore X-no-archive just like there are probably web robots out there which ignore robots.txt

Also, you can be sure that governments keep track of all your newsgroup postings. news.cia.gov and so on.

DISCLAIMER: I'm in a real sarcastic mood and may say things some may find offensive! If you don't like what I have to say, DON'T READ IT! Of course, if you don't read it, how do you know you don't like it???

Hey I just moved into college which means a sweet dedicated connection.

Hay is the first stage of horse manure...

Don't be too upset when you find that everybody and their brother/sister use that same connection and it's so saturated that you can't use it!

What do people use to run web cams on Linux?

A computer running Linux with a web cam attached, duh! ;-) There are many different cam software out there, pick one and find out what camera is best supported by it. As for computers, I personally like older Alphas (21066A 233MHz vintage) running Linux; webserver, ftp, mail, file server, and web cam. All rolled up into one nice "compaq" (joke, Compaq now owns Alpha :-) system. A AS200 4/233 can be picked up anywere between $100 and $300 dollars or more depending on what you get with it.Check eBay for usually good deals on older Alphas. But your want's and needs will probably vary...

What are good compatible cams too?

The QuckCam's are popular, just make sure you don't buy a VC modle, as they are not supported last time I checked. Check the list archives for your Linux distribution or even better yet do a power search on dejanews.com and seach comp.os.linux.* for cam or webcam or something.

Good luck and have fun!


Long Live Alpha!

In fact, the switch to the expat parser found a pile of well-formedness errors in our XUL files, so I'm pretty sure they're correct. Maybe you need a newer version of expat?

• the well-formedness expat code
• Nisheeth Ranjan on well-formedness errors
• Nisheeth Ranjan on entities (kinda)

In fact, the switch to the expat parser found a pile of well-formedness errors in our XUL files, so I'm pretty sure they're correct. Maybe you need a newer version of expat?

• the well-formedness expat code
• Nisheeth Ranjan on well-formedness errors
• Nisheeth Ranjan on entities (kinda)

Here is link to the thread on Deja.
link

Having said that, AMD has a real uphill struggle on it's hands. They are ramping up the K7 on their 0.25um process while Intel is just moving to its 0.18um process for the P-III and P-III Xeon. And it's not just any old 0.18um process, according to a Register article I can't find right now and another recent article on comp.arch it has a lot of stuff that makes it more like a 0.13um process in some ways.

AMD really need to break into the high end on x86, otherwise Intel can keep killing them by pressing them into the sub-$100 space where they can't make any money. I wouldn't mind a K7-500 for under $100 though :-).

I will never understand why Motorola doesn't buy up the x86 part of AMD. AMD is cheap right now, they have a very good x86 design in the K7 and Motorola has the fabs. Are Motorola just going to leave the x86 market to Intel? Are they going to keep betting on the PowerPC to take off? Again and again, AMD has had a good design only to be outspent and outmanaged on the fab front. Motorola has the fab experience, they just need something with a high profit margin to build in them. Take a look at the Intel bottom line, there's money to be made in that business.

By the way: Interesting to see how crippled the x87 architecture really is. This is said to be a similar implementation technology to the Alpha 21264 (done by some of the same people if I recall correctly), yet the floating point performance of the 21264 in its current 600MHz 0.35um process totally smokes current high end x86s including, it seems, the K7 at 0.25um.

Erik Corry, who can't remember his password

Having said that, AMD has a real uphill struggle on it's hands. They are ramping up the K7 on their 0.25um process while Intel is just moving to its 0.18um process for the P-III and P-III Xeon. And it's not just any old 0.18um process, according to a Register article I can't find right now and another recent article on comp.arch it has a lot of stuff that makes it more like a 0.13um process in some ways.

AMD really need to break into the high end on x86, otherwise Intel can keep killing them by pressing them into the sub-$100 space where they can't make any money. I wouldn't mind a K7-500 for under $100 though :-).

I will never understand why Motorola doesn't buy up the x86 part of AMD. AMD is cheap right now, they have a very good x86 design in the K7 and Motorola has the fabs. Are Motorola just going to leave the x86 market to Intel? Are they going to keep betting on the PowerPC to take off? Again and again, AMD has had a good design only to be outspent and outmanaged on the fab front. Motorola has the fab experience, they just need something with a high profit margin to build in them. Take a look at the Intel bottom line, there's money to be made in that business.

By the way: Interesting to see how crippled the x87 architecture really is. This is said to be a similar implementation technology to the Alpha 21264 (done by some of the same people if I recall correctly), yet the floating point performance of the 21264 in its current 600MHz 0.35um process totally smokes current high end x86s including, it seems, the K7 at 0.25um.

Erik Corry, who can't remember his password

Sortof...

Try Mingo's patch against 2.1.89. He claims up to 3.8 gigs of memory. I doubt the patch will go cleanly against a 2.2.x tree so try it by hand. Of course there could be something drastically different in the 2.2.x kernels which will fry your board.. Not too likely though.

This Will character has been traced even further.

Wonder if that monster size link will work, it's just one of hundreds of such comments though, I am sure you can find some of your own.

Many of the Amazon reviews were also posted to the alt.fan.spinnwebe newsgroup. If your server doesn't get it, you can check it out on Deja News.

The butt hinge? From one of my home pages:

Microsoft has recently innovated and patented the door hinge as part of its runnaway embrace and extend strategy. This is no joke! One step closer towards Gates' promised and detailed World Domination.

But they do make decent mice. Software, on the other hand...

The butt hinge? From one of my home pages:

Microsoft has recently innovated and patented the door hinge as part of its runnaway embrace and extend strategy. This is no joke! One step closer towards Gates' promised and detailed World Domination.

But they do make decent mice. Software, on the other hand...

This is the oft-mentioned post from will@whistlingfish.net.

I did some checking on this a while back and it's true that there're not a lot of responses to this query.

There's one that told the guy to switch to FreeBSD and then there's this one from comp.os.linux.networking that kinda wondered why they're using such a souped-up box for Linux and asked if they could provide more setup information. There's no followup from will@whistlingfish after this.

If you looked at that post, you'll see that the guy was very helpful (he even gave some tips on php stuff) and he did asked for more setup info. There's no reason for anyone to write MOTS "gimme more info"-type posts. Most people would wait for more info from will and then continue from there. The fact that he didn't post anything back also suggests that it's possible he's already communicating with the helper by email.

... as I haven't seen Microsoft abusing patents yet.

Here is my favorite example of a few patents by Microsoft that may be stretching the limits of being resonable IP. Abuse? Its scares the hell out of me what they are doing.

The net posts asking for help that are mentioned in the white paper appear to have been most likely made under the pseudonym:

will@whistlingfish.net

Use DejaNews.

No-one seems to have done that and talked about it. I did; h ere's the relevant link that lists all the messages from this guy on Usenet. Take a look at them and post what you think about them. It seems to me he hit a strange, obscure bug in GNU, Linux, or Apache, and it might have something to do with network adapter or SCSI adapter problems.

This whole trend of finding blame for everything is COMPLETELY INSANE. Face it, SH!T HAPPENS. Reminds me of that theonion.com story about "World death rate holding at steady 100%." The extreme edge of this trend is the man who filed a lawsuit against God. Here is a link to a posting about it (the cnn link doesn't work).

I guess the new American dream is to have one of your family members killed in a horrible tragedy which can somehow be connected to an orginization with deep pockets like Time Warner.

Wouldn't that be funny if Michael Carneal filed a lawsuit against these parents because if they didn't have any kids then he couldn't have shot at anyone.

Oh, I almost forgot to throw in www.classaction.com. Hey, there's one going against alchol makers! (They are running WinNT on their server... go ahead and slashdot it!)

From comp.os.linux.advocacy: Samba on Linux benchmarks

There are no comparitive NT numbers in this benchmark.

The reason for that is that NT on the multiprocessor box performed so poorly in the test (a factor of 5 slower than Samba) that both PC Week and myself were convinced that something was wrong with the NT tuning.

The problem was that NT refused to use more than 300MB of memory for file cache (despite tweaking the only public setting that NT allows to modify this). Even searchin all Microsoft technical references and Web pages on NT tuning did not allow us to find anything to force NT to use more memory for disk cache.

My $.02: People who use NT deserve what they get.

The oldest I can find is:

this

Check it: http://www.dejanews.com/[ST_rn=qs]/qs.xp?QRY=Tolle fsen&OP=dnquery.xp&ST=QS&DB S=2 21 articles on usenet that have the name "Tollefsen" in it. 9 of which are PRE-April Fools day. One such, the earliest of the bunch, feb 25th, ( http://x16.dejanews.com/[ST_rn=qs]/getdoc.xp?AN=45 0055640&CONTEXT=923453248.4 13859955&hitnum=18)) comes from some guy (eh? grrl meybe) named Kai-Rune Tollefsen. and the title? "Citroen C15 - I OSLO". posted to no.marked.bil which COULD be interpeted as some kind of anti-bill gates bit at the farthest extreme. of course it's not. and it's in er.. that Norweigan(sp) ? Catch it? OSLO. go read the article again if u have to. now, who reads norweigan? perfect base for some kind of joke. something written in some unknown language with a couple key words in it to spark it all. nifty stuff, nO? anyone read norweigan? wanna tell us wtf it's all about?

Check it: http://www.dejanews.com/[ST_rn=qs]/qs.xp?QRY=Tolle fsen&OP=dnquery.xp&ST=QS&DB S=2 21 articles on usenet that have the name "Tollefsen" in it. 9 of which are PRE-April Fools day. One such, the earliest of the bunch, feb 25th, ( http://x16.dejanews.com/[ST_rn=qs]/getdoc.xp?AN=45 0055640&CONTEXT=923453248.4 13859955&hitnum=18)) comes from some guy (eh? grrl meybe) named Kai-Rune Tollefsen. and the title? "Citroen C15 - I OSLO". posted to no.marked.bil which COULD be interpeted as some kind of anti-bill gates bit at the farthest extreme. of course it's not. and it's in er.. that Norweigan(sp) ? Catch it? OSLO. go read the article again if u have to. now, who reads norweigan? perfect base for some kind of joke. something written in some unknown language with a couple key words in it to spark it all. nifty stuff, nO? anyone read norweigan? wanna tell us wtf it's all about?

Oops, screwed up a link on my last comment. I swear this one works.

I just hope that JWZ occasionally still posts to the mozilla newsgroups. Not that I read them just to catch his posts. Just like I don't read the newspaper just to read the comics.

It can never be said enough: Dejanews is your friend!

/usr/doc/HOWTO/PostgreSQL-HOWTO
"...because of laws of science, 'open source code' system like PostgreSQL, Linux will be always much better than 'closed source code' system..."
The date of the HOWTO is July 1998, but since this is chapter 4 (and v8 of the HOWTO) I'm certain this line was there for awhile. And its not the same as "Open Source(TM)" since one is a case-sensitive trademark.
www.dejanews.com
www.dejanews.com Again
One about Caldera and OpenDOS
Okay, I'll let you search dejanews now.. there are quite a few pages left (I'm only at '97-96 dates).

/usr/doc/HOWTO/PostgreSQL-HOWTO
"...because of laws of science, 'open source code' system like PostgreSQL, Linux will be always much better than 'closed source code' system..."
The date of the HOWTO is July 1998, but since this is chapter 4 (and v8 of the HOWTO) I'm certain this line was there for awhile. And its not the same as "Open Source(TM)" since one is a case-sensitive trademark.
www.dejanews.com
www.dejanews.com Again
One about Caldera and OpenDOS
Okay, I'll let you search dejanews now.. there are quite a few pages left (I'm only at '97-96 dates).

/usr/doc/HOWTO/PostgreSQL-HOWTO
"...because of laws of science, 'open source code' system like PostgreSQL, Linux will be always much better than 'closed source code' system..."
The date of the HOWTO is July 1998, but since this is chapter 4 (and v8 of the HOWTO) I'm certain this line was there for awhile. And its not the same as "Open Source(TM)" since one is a case-sensitive trademark.
www.dejanews.com
www.dejanews.com Again
One about Caldera and OpenDOS
Okay, I'll let you search dejanews now.. there are quite a few pages left (I'm only at '97-96 dates).

This a good reference as well.
Hello

Did I mention I love Dejanews?

JP

1. All lawyers must die.
2. CmdrTaco is functionally illiterate(well...maybe
   just dyslexic).*
3. There is no point in continuing the WIMP "ease
   of use" fallacy; the efforts of GNOME and KDE
   should be redirected towards voice recognition
   and control, and AI.
   ---------------------------------
   "The Internet interprets censorship as damage,

Could Lloyd Wood do it as often? Well, he's a fairly prolific t.b. Guy. He makes nifty Kaleidoscope themes for Mac users, and is a whiz-bang Mac advocate (including the recent suggestion that Apple follow Netscape's example and release the source to Cyberdog.)

I'd support /. "getting Wood" if 1) he could crank out the copy and 2) felt like cranking it out for /. at least twice as often as comp.sys.mac.system.

The choice would be Malda's, though. Could he handle too much reason and/or coherency in /. commentary? Wood might just as easily put up a wall of impenetrable logic and blow everyone's minds instead of raising their ire like Katz does.

I'd be more likely to read /. more often if Wood posted here, though.

J.

I'm awfully tempted to just say "Lloyd Wood doesn't get it." But that's overgeneralizing it, and so I'm ramble on for a bit about why I don't think he gets it. Of course, first I'll need to explain my perspective, (and thus, explain the 'it' that Mr. Wood doesn't get).

I don't usually read newspapers. When I do read a newspaper, I find myself irritated that they bother to kill trees to print such mindless tripe. I'm not terribly fond of television or radio news either. The closest I come is CNN Headlines News in the morning, and I only stand for it because I'm still in my semi-awake haze.

I feel abandoned by modern media. (Media as news source, not media as entertainment. Not that there is much of a line anyway.) They have decided what is important for me to know. But I really don't care. Mr. Wood probably won't appreciate this, but I think this issue is better dealt with by Jon Katz in several of his previous articles, including this one.

Anyway, as I sat here thinking about why I like Katz, even though I disapprove of many of his articles (I'm terribly unhappy about the book related stuff), I came to a realization. I do read a newspaper. It just happens to be digital and run by a guy better known as CmdrTaco than his real name.

A while ago, I read an interesting article complaining that the media was becoming too neutral (or at least trying hard to look neutral). Perhaps, the article argued, we needed media with opinions. (I apologize for forgetting the source of the article.) Well, as I look around, I find that Slashdot has become my media of choice. It's got opinions and attitudes, and it has become interesting to me. It's got the "editorial balance" that Mr. Wood seems to feel is so important, it just happens to have chosen to balance it against certain issues and opinions. (In fact, every newspaper, online magazine, and news show has such a skewed view, Slashdot just doesn't hide it under a veneer of impartiality.)

Yes, it's filtered through a certain set of glasses. But at least I get some say in which pair of glasses.

So, Slashdot is my newspaper, my magazine. It serves me. And, based on its popularity, it serves a lot of other people. But it doesn't serve everyone. No media outlet with an opinion can. (And those they try to avoid having an editorial slant, and opinion, end up alienating some people anyway.)

And if Slashdot partially serves one's needs, skip the stuff you don't like. My favorite newspaper (when I was still regularly reading such things) was the Wall Street Journal. I only read the front page to get a quick view of world news. The rest of the paper had no interest to me. If Katz has no interest to someone, don't read him. I eventually decided I was unwilling to purchase the Wall Street Journal to just read the front page, it wasn't worth the money. Fortunately, Slashdot is free, so it costs me nothing to skip Katz's articles, or Star Wars stuff, or anything else. (With the advent of the customizable Slashdot, I can choose to never see posts by a particular author or on a particular topic.)

So, why is Mr. Wood complaining? In fact, why is Mr. Wood reading Slashdot? If you feel that the editor is "...someone who appears to be functionally illiterate...and it looks as if he would think that 'editorial balance' has something to do with spreading webserving load via SMP." why read on? It's nice that Mr. Wood is willing to forgive Rob for the above "given his youth and lack of a decent education....", but clearly Slashdot is not for him. Perhaps Mr. Wood would be happier with more traditional newspapers headed by older, wiser, and presumably better educated heads.

Cheap shots:

Mr. Wood took a few cheap shots, so I thought I'd fire a few back (in no particular order:

(All quotes are Mr. Woods. Of course, in many cases he is quoting Mr. Katz.)

If I posted this to Slashdot it would be quietly censored - as previous anti-Katz material has reportedly been. I don't believe Malda has either the courage or the understanding of editorial balance to post this in full in his Brave New Widely-Moderated World Where Anything Supposedly Goes, despite the traffic and attention it may attract.

Mr. Wood proceeds to rip many of Jon Katz's quotes out of content. (No, I'm not refuting all of them. Yes, I think that some of the points Mr. Wood brings up are valid, but some verge on petty.)

Geeks bit the heads off of chickens and rats in carnivals...

Suggesting that Alice Cooper, faded mainstream media musician who gets television time as an indicator of American culture, is a geek, strikes me as rather, well, odd. Come again?

Movies (and TV) are, after all, one of a culture's most revealing, reliable mirrors

And what does this tell us about ancient Rome - or should I watch a rerun of 'Ben Hur'? If this is true of the United States, I'm glad I don't live there. I'd hate to think that the Jerry Springer show was real life, or that Katz appearing on the Today Show would indicate that many Americans using the Internet are just like Katz.

If Katz's technical knowledge is still open to question, I'll point out:

will give you a 'welcome to the NT 4 options pack' page running on an IIS server. Remember, Katz is a man praising Linux to the skies...while dismissing Gates as a dwarf even as he relies on Gates' software.

Between "skies" and "while" in the above quote, I pulled the following:

(All Hail Linux! To criticise Linux is to risk the wrath of thousands of high school students and other sociopaths who can't spell!),

Online, everybody is a critic, each opinion as good as any other.

This is said by the man who goes on to talk about text written in 'ASCCI', thus disproving his own claim. I think the opinion that it's called ASCII is likely to be the rather better opinion.

Wood points out that Katz doesn't have a college degree. So what? A college degree is a piece of paper. I know people who graduate from college with minds completely free of knowledge, and people who never graduated that I deeply respect for their knowledge and wisdom.

You've got a long way to go, guys.

Not to mention that someone who voluntarily allows someone -- someone they "love" no less -- to be tortured for all eternity -- for a finite "crime" committed over a finite period by finite beings, no less -- is evil by pretty much any definition of the word. There's nothing to be gained from it, nothing to be learned, you can't even use the "pain as teacher" excuse. Most civilized human nations don't even torture their own worst criminals, let alone those they love.

"Yeah, I loved her, but she rejected me, so I locked her in my basement for the rest of her life and had her tortured." Why do you insist on the double standard of not holding your god accountable for his actions? Those are the actions of a serial killer, not any being who merits my respect.

Christ's sacrifice? Then why is it that everyone always says that Christ "died for my sins" when that sacrifice is ultimately fairly trivial? People have died for all kinds of things but that doesn't make them worthy of worship.

If the GNUstep GNUrus can't be bothered to answer this question, why should I be bothered to look into GNUstep for using it or for developing apps? They can't even be bothered to fix their mailing-list page.

If it could be gotten to work, I'm sure it would be a worthy addition to the toolkit/environment flame^H^H^H^H^Hwars. But as it is, it seems (to this outsider) to be no more than an ineffectual quilting-bee.

Flames welcome. I'd like to learn more.

--

The basic opinion is: Apple's testing the waters here; its further actions will be governed by the response of the open-source community. If people treat Apple as slime and "just as bad as Microsoft", as some people on Slashdot have been doing, then it's assured that Apple's open-source efforts will never go beyond what they are now. But if they see positive results coming out of their experiment -- like good outside enhancements or bugfixes, or market-viable porting opportunities -- then they may very well more fully embrace the idea of open source.

Please, people. Be rational about this. Good can come from it if we avoid extremism and ideological jihads.

From: don@misckit.com (Donald A. Yacktman)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sys.n ext.advocacy
Subject: Re: The brewing QuickTime/Linux issue
Date: 18 Mar 1999 19:33:01 GMT
Organization: XMission http://www.xmission.com/
Message-ID:

"Michael J. Peck" wrote:
>taiQ wrote:
>> Yep, but it's still welcome news. Wasn't it Randy Rencsok who
>> advocated this route in an essay on his web site? I'd be interested in
>> reading about his opinions on this turn of events.
>
>I think it was Don Yacktman, if you mean the "OpenMach" proposal. And
>come to think of it, if that's what you mean, you're right; that's
>approximately what it is, but I never really thought of it.

Both Randy and I wrote some things on this. Randy suggested opening up higher level stuff than what I proposed, such as the Yellow Box. He and I also consulted with each other somewhat, and both chose to take slightly different approaches to the same thing.

I'll make a few rambling comments now; I do intend to put up an open letter thanking Apple on the Rhaptel site (http://www.of.org/rhaptel/) either today or tomorrow.

I didn't go as far as Randy in my proposal for strategic reasons. I'd certainly like to see Apple eventually open up everything, but I just don't think that is practical to do up front.

I'm looking more at the idea of driving in a wedge. Ask for something smaller, something that is easy to do. They do it. If it is successful, then you can ask for something a little bit bigger. Taking two steps--A to B and then B to C--is much easier than one big step A to C. Another analogy is to realize that to turn a large ship, you do it in smaller increments, taking its inertia into account.

Apple's taken step #1--Open Mach. In fact, they've released two things beyond Open Mach, consider them surprise bonuses: SoundKit and Netinfo. So, kudos for Apple to have the courage to take that first baby step. Now they've passed the baton to us. We have to make it a success.

And this "wedge" process is something that Apple is fully aware of. They are actually trying to turn the ship and this is just the first increment. I have very good reason to believe that if we take the baton and run with it--if Apple sees some real successes with Darwin--then we shouldn't be surprised if Apple opens up more things.

I'm not making a promise here, just an "educated guess". But I do think that Apple is serious about Open Source and is looking *very* closely at how Darwin, ahem, "evolves" and that such evolution will shape the future directions Apple takes. I've got several good (NDA) reasons for believing this to be the case.

>I think the issue here is that the lower levels were already pretty well
>known. In any case, if one were to port the lower levels, one would have
>Mach + BSD. It's not exactly the sort of thing one shouts "Hallelujah"
>about, seeing as how the hue and cry these days, in the Open Source
>community, is for more sophisticated *upper* levels (hence the KDE/GNOME
>happenings, the XFree86 griping, the Berlin project, and the hardware
>OpenGL push). It could be that someone will port Mach + BSD to other
>platforms, but once you have the port, what are you going to do with it?

I can see a few things happening. One obvious scenario is that Apple can *always* "port" their upper layers to any Darwin implementation that seems to be popular with the community. The beauty of letting the open source community take the wheel is that the marketing people can just watch how things unfold to determine which products are worth producing.

There are other scenarios, but I won't elaborate them here or now. As I understand it, Darwin is the _beginning_, not the _end_, so assuming that the community does kick in, there could be a lot more to come.

By the way, most of the data I've collected reinforces the point that Apple is fully behind this "newfound" open source direction. For example, in reference to Perens' arguments, if the APL needs to be modified slightly to make it work better, I get the impression that Apple is willing to make some tweaks. They've even said that, in effect, they are new to this whole thing and expect it to adapt to the community as needed. They're admitting that they are the students, and they're willing to learn. Apple _wants_ this to succeed, so they'll be flexible. Of course, there will also _always_ be people who are upset about some niggly detail--you can't please everybody--but I think Apple will be able to provide decent value to the majority of people.

One thing that I find interesting that nobody else has mentioned. By open sourcing this stuff, they now have over 100 people working exclusively on code that is open source. Are there any other commercial entities which have thay many developers paid to work solely on open source? It is fascinating to think about how different the Apple of today is from the Apple of even just two years ago; like any large body there is a lot of inertia, but there are also some striking changes. I hope the community is willing to allow Apple to change and willing to give them a chance.

While Apple is certainly going through a learning process, you have to give them credit for having the guts to actually start the process. They certaionly didn't _have_ to do Darwin. Now I dearly hope that the community follows through...if we all work with Apple and ease them through the learning process, we will probably succeed in not only changing Apple, but also in transforming the entire industry. That's a cool thought...

--
Later,
Don Yacktman
don@misckit.com

Here's a classic usenet post where Mr. Gates states his company could have the responsibility of being big brother and turn people in when they were caught doing bad things, say, pirating software!

I have my own gripes about the pricing for the ORA conference, but I don't know there is much that can be done. This year it is in Monterey, which will be even more expensive, I think. But realize that the ORA conference is not for hackers, it is for businesses. The market the Perl Conference is aimed at, it seems, is used to paying that kind of fee for a conference. And hey, it helps pay for www.perl.com, so it can't be all bad. :)

That guy has some serious issues.

In one post, he's explaining that he doesn't want to bother doing some things in a really robust way, because perl won't do it for him -- he seems to be hoping that somebody will add something to perl in C, to save him the trouble of having to write real code in perl. It's weird. I guess I mostly use ANSI C, and there's just no way anybody's gonna come along at this point and change the language to save me the trouble of coding something hard -- so I just get on with it, and lo and behold, good heavens, it's not that tough . . . "Doing block reads backwards form the end and parsing into lines with carry is somewhat nontrivial." Oh, yeah? Well, that does sound like a little bit of a hassle in C, but even if it were a real bastard, so what? If you have to write it, you have to write it! Now I know what he hates about GNU: They take the time to write the damn code so it works.

"somewhat nontrivial"


And then in another post, he explains why he can't be bothered to make his great port of the unix utils actually USABLE on any platforms that won't do all the work for him (those being, of course, exactly the platforms that he needs to port these things to).

"not my problem"


What a loser. I really don't need some cocky, slapdash bonehead like this writing utilities for me. Of course, I don't have to use his utilities; GNU has been ported to every platform I use (more platforms than perl, probably :) Yeah, it would be a nifty idea, if it were done right. But he's not gonna do it right. He just doesn't get it. There's a weird mentality gap between people who write scripts, and people who write in compiled languages. Script people always seem to think, "oh, that's good enough, they can edit the script if it breaks", while C people more often think it'd just better work.

Hell, I myself have written scripts, and when I do that, I think the same way I'm accusing script-writers of thinking! It's nothing about them, I guess (when i put it that way, it seems pretty obvious!); it's just the nature of the language, and how we (all) relate to it. Or something.

That guy has some serious issues.

In one post, he's explaining that he doesn't want to bother doing some things in a really robust way, because perl won't do it for him -- he seems to be hoping that somebody will add something to perl in C, to save him the trouble of having to write real code in perl. It's weird. I guess I mostly use ANSI C, and there's just no way anybody's gonna come along at this point and change the language to save me the trouble of coding something hard -- so I just get on with it, and lo and behold, good heavens, it's not that tough . . . "Doing block reads backwards form the end and parsing into lines with carry is somewhat nontrivial." Oh, yeah? Well, that does sound like a little bit of a hassle in C, but even if it were a real bastard, so what? If you have to write it, you have to write it! Now I know what he hates about GNU: They take the time to write the damn code so it works.

"somewhat nontrivial"


And then in another post, he explains why he can't be bothered to make his great port of the unix utils actually USABLE on any platforms that won't do all the work for him (those being, of course, exactly the platforms that he needs to port these things to).

"not my problem"


What a loser. I really don't need some cocky, slapdash bonehead like this writing utilities for me. Of course, I don't have to use his utilities; GNU has been ported to every platform I use (more platforms than perl, probably :) Yeah, it would be a nifty idea, if it were done right. But he's not gonna do it right. He just doesn't get it. There's a weird mentality gap between people who write scripts, and people who write in compiled languages. Script people always seem to think, "oh, that's good enough, they can edit the script if it breaks", while C people more often think it'd just better work.

Hell, I myself have written scripts, and when I do that, I think the same way I'm accusing script-writers of thinking! It's nothing about them, I guess (when i put it that way, it seems pretty obvious!); it's just the nature of the language, and how we (all) relate to it. Or something.

Randal Schwartz, yet another big Perl name, posted a response to Tom's announcement. Tom did not like this; his counter-response can be found here. Be warned; it's quite a rant. I know that since I'm posting as an AC, my words don't carry much weight, but Tom's proven once again he's not my kind of people.

Uh, clue: www.dejanews.com runs Linux! And it is a LOT more impressive than cdrom.com serving up static files. Any half-decent PC can do do that. Dejanews has forever changing content and requires much more horse power.