Slashdot Mirror

Promoting someone who has no talent but just a body that would appeal to most customers in the target group (according to research) to perform songs that have neither innovative music nor significant lyrics but would appeal to most customers in the target group (according to research) is the way it should work?? Maybe these so-called artists are promoted too much with too much money?

I think there is something fundamentally wrong with a society where a business of entertaining is more profitable and respected than business of actually building something. If it pays better to be Ozzy Osbourne than Alex Wolszczan or Linus Torvalds then we have some priorities terribly wrong.

I don't know where the Torvalds family lives, but Linus seems to work in the state of California according to his home page, though it be hosted in Finland.

This is no coincidence. GNU/Linux parallels Unix because I chose that
design in 1983. It is foolish to focus on innovation when you are
starting a race with a multi-year handicap. The first task is to
catch up.

"I'd like to see a date put on this."

A quick search on google resolved this.

The quote itself isn't nearly as offensive as the entire email.

"And what, exactly, are SCO trying to imply with this?"

Simple. Like the Perens quote, they are simply showing a behavior of disrespect towards Copyright laws.

"Summary: Yet more FUD. Thanks, SCO, now please disappear off the face of the Earth."

The easiest way to discredit Open Source to the software development community is to quote Stallman, Perens. That's not SCO's problem, that's yours.

not really, more like a few milliseconds

I guess we should really come up with some standard system for measurement in news articles, the JI (Journalist Idiots) System of measurement.

Time - camera flashs
Small physical size - human hairs
Large information - Library of congresses
Meteor size - VW Bugs

Any more?

• The Internet
  
• BSD Unix (and variations)
  
• Linux
  
• The GNU project
  
• Object Oriented Programming (and, by extension, anything built using OOP principles, like Microsoft Windows)
  
• The World Wide Web

The LGPL was born to address this problem. The GNU folks argue that if you link to a GPL'd library, your code must be GPLed as well. The LGPL is not as strict, and thus many useful libraries are LGPL instead of GPL - allowing other licenses to exist on a linux system. Not everyone agrees with this interpretation, though.

And here's a List of Finnish 24h BBS'es.

1. it is difficult to setup
2. fetchmail SUCKS at IMAP and mutt SUCKS even more at it. IMAP is the way to check my inbox
3. SCREW list traffic. It sucks. It really sucks when you use mutt and IMAP alone. Pine does a much better job of this with its own inbuilt filters. However, I admit, I am using slrn and newsgroups more...

I call it "STROKING an ERECT PENIS until STUFF comes out, too.

... cat /var/log/httpd/access_log|awk '{print $2}'` ...

Congratulations, you've won an award!

Someone marked this question redundant? Guess that shows you jerks are everywhere.

Hey, I understand completely what you're saying. I for one am glad I don't have to deal with such as latency and pre-emption. In fact, here is a link to a nifty article entitled "Real Time Issues in Linux" that essentially sums up what you asked with a resounding yes.

One missing 's' is nothing but what is "University of Finland"? There's 10 to 20 universities in Finland (depending on how you count). Linus studied in Univ. of Helsinki.

I figured it would have been Finland (link) cutting the Microsoft handcuffs first! Home of Linus Torvalds, no?

Disproof by example: one Patricia Miranda Torvalds is now 5. I wonder how she feels about VM implementations....

See the press release and the PHOTOGRAPHIC PROOF.

(What, you were expecting a personal testimonial? Go browse at -1.)

3) Avoid vender extensions to the basic shell. HP has done some aweful things there in its bourne shell and they are not compatible with Sun and in some cases Linux either. I.E. Always use `cat foo` and not $(cat foo) in sh scripts. There are other things like that.

go here...

And of course, if you've been following along for a week or two, you know that this (BING!) is a Useless Use of Cat!

Rememeber, nearly all cases where you have:

cat file | some_command and its args ...

you can rewrite it as:

<file some_command and its args ...

and in some cases, such as this one, you can move the filename to the arglist as in:

some_command and its args ... file

Just another Useless Use of /.

Dangerous Backticks

A special idiom to pay attention to, because it's basically always wrong, is this:

for f in `cat file`; do
...
done

Apart from the classical Useless Use of Cat here, the backticks are outright dangerous, unless you know the result of the backticks is going to be less than or equal to how long a command line your shell can accept. (Actually, this is a kernel limitation. The constant ARG_MAX in your limits.h should tell you how much your own system can take. POSIX requires ARG_MAX to be at least 4,096 bytes.)
Incidentally, this is also one of the Very Ancient Recurring Threads in comp.unix.shell so don't make the mistake of posting anything that resembles this.

The right way to do this is

while read f; do
...
done /etc/passwd, normal find /tmp -print would output

/tmp/moo
/etc/passwd

and xargs would see two file names here. Changing the record separator to ASCII 0 means it's now valid for a file name to span multiple lines, so this becomes a non-issue.

For those who want Mozilla with anti-aliased font support.:

http://www.opiskelijakirjasto.lib.helsinki.fi/jksm lan/mozilla/

The KDE Project Ships the Third-Generation of the Leading Desktop for Linux/UNIX, Offering Enterprises, Governments, Schools, and Businesses an Outstanding Free and Open Desktop Solution

There is a couple programs to play shogi - If you are on a normal system, GNU Shogi.

People cursed to be on a windoze platform might check out Shocky

If you prefer tactile response, you may want to go here instead.

aem

Before we can accept a result from an earthquake we should be to see them in the lab. However this has not been the case. Here is an interesting result, strangelet search, setting limits on the decay of the stranglet which may contradict the earthquake results.

I said: I haven't ever used their distro

the response: So how could you possibly have a valid opinion on the subject?

More of what I said that you conveniently left off: I have read a lot about them and have helped some people that use their distro, so I do know about the subject.

If I read from countless sources that Ford Explorers with Firestone tires are dangerous to drive, hear countless stories about how accidents have been caused by such a combination, and know a friend who was in a car wreck because his Firestone tires fell apart on his Ford Explorer, then I think I would know a bit about the subject. I suppose according to you I should start driving Ford Explorers with Firestone tires just to see if I can get in an accident.

what insecurities are you talking about? I mean -- find me a Linux distro that has no exploits.

Obviously you are clueless. Read the SecurityFocus Vulns Stats note the table marked "Number of OS Vulnerabilities by Year". Now lets see you tell me that RedHat's distro is just as secure as other Linux distros. Compare the figures with MS NT/2000--they look close to me...

Qualify that. How do they do things the same way as Microsoft?

Geee...so many choices--where to begin. How about their "configurator" program. I only had to deal with it once--but it was a nasty experience. For one, everytime it was run it would reset the real settings (edited by me in the /etc directory) to whatever it's internal system said they should be--apparently from some other RedHat config file--they made it so that anyone who learned on a normal Linux system would have their settings clobbered as soon as RedHat's program started up.

How about the fact that they use a single script file for every service run at startup? This makes booting any RedHat system painfully-ass slow. That's just like when Microsoft uses single files per item for their "favorites" and cheap symbolic link substitutes.

What about the whole gcc 2.96 mess? Read about it here and here and here

Have you ever used Linux in a professional setting? Package management is essential.

Do you know anything? Slackware uses tar files for their packages--I've never seen any problem with Slackware's package management system.

It doesn't keep track of dependencies, however I usually have to do nodeps with rpms because the program only checks what it has installed--not anything compiled from source or installed through other packaging systems. However, tar could contain a package dependency file inside if it was necessary.

They don't have an apt-get, however that just checks dependencies and downloads files--it could be done using tar files if need be.

A really great packaging system would check the binaries to see what libraries they required and go from there. "This executable requires libuberssl.so.2--not present on system, but found in package ubernetlibs. Do you wish to download and install?" Unfortunately I haven't seen a packaging system like this, and I know the rpm program doesn't do this--it uses the files in /var/lib/rpm and complains if the dependencies aren't listed there.

Does this mean that you resent .debs too?

I would if nearly every Linux developer insisted on using .debs to distribute their binaries, therefore requiring me to install the packaging system on every Linux computer I use, just for the ability of installing binaries.

You can build and install tar'ed & gziped source just like with any other *nix.

Obviously you haven't tried to compile many programs from source. Not only does it take lots more time (try installing XFree86, Mozilla, or GIMP this way), there are also quite a few programs that take much time dicking around with them to even get them to compile. They'll be written for every OS under the sun and very tempormental. Or they'll have stupidly written makefiles. Or they'll have straight out errors in the makefiles/compile scripts/code that takes an hour to correct the problem. Etc. etc. etc... "./configure; make; make install" doesn't always work!

I can go on and on about how dumb your post is, and how unsubstantiated your opinion on RedHat seems to be, but its pretty clear that you're a troll and trying to get a rise out of me.

The same can be said about you. I could go on and on about how idiotic your ideas about what a decent distro is and how to run it. Like how it is bad to just add patches to the kernel for some newfangled gee-whiz buzzword and put it in a major distro. Those patches should only be added by people who really need them--everyone else can wait until the patch goes through the review process and is confirmed stable.

Protocols to mention besides OpenLDAP and OAI are Whois++ and Z39.50. OAI actually is transported over HTTP. You could do the same with EAD or others.

Projects which implemented Z39.50 for the purposes of interoperability are ONE and ONE-2, EUROPAGATE, Desire and Desire II, DECOMATE and DECOMATE II, and Renardus just to touch the surface. Don't forget OHIOLINK...

Another other older, but interesting, metadata activity have been SGML MARC, and the corresponding XML MARC.

The BYTE article was exciting to see again and could have benefited further from pointing out the relative ease of use of Dublic Core. OAI uses unqualified Dublic Core, SAFARI uses qualified Dublin Core to create an up to date index over academic research in Sweden. Shoot, since it already uses some META tags, you could even tweak htdig to use Dublic Core on your own site for those high precision searches.

With the interest in structured data (XML?) maybe well see some sites serving up not just HTML with Dublic Core, but maybe even Docbook or even TEI / TEI Lite. There are great tools for converting from Docbook to HTML, PDF, RTF, etc. and AbiWord and Kword already have partial support for docbook. If there were more, then we could see some real changes on searching the web. Coding for SGML is more difficult, so the obvious choice would be to start from Docbook XML.

I don't understand why people *care* unless they're writing something that's absolutely performance-critical (and then I suspect it'd be in perl, not in shell).

Yes, cat causes a bit of overhead. However (and I have a PII/266), it serves one excellent purpose -- if you habitually use cat, you don't have to worry about the syntax of the next command in the pipeline. Maybe it accepts a file, maybe it doesn't, maybe it's some wrapper script that doesn't accept a file...for one liners, using cat is a *good* habit to be in. You don't have to constantly check man pages, documentation, or "try it and see if it works".

I think most of the "useless use of" complaints in UNIX that USENET people like to mention to show off their UNIX leetness are just stupid. Skimming down this page, I see:

Useless Use of kill -9: Okay, you should always use TERM first. However, spending more of your valuable time trying three or four other signals before kill -9 is just stupid, however (unless it's netscape, which oddly enough can sometimes be axed with QUIT).

Useless use of echo may be more legitimate *but* you may be planning to do something more extensive:
command -options `echo $variable|seds/foo/bar/`, for example. You can't do that with just
command -options $variable

The useless use of ls * really is useless, IMHO, because it frequently has unwanted side effects...you'd need ls -d * to get equivalent behavior to ls.

They get cranky about using grep foo |wc -l instead of grep -c foo. Who *cares*? Frequently grep is not the last element in the pipeline. If you're in the habit of using wc -l, you don't have to worry about the preceding item, even if you decide to insert a new item into the pipeline before grep and wc.

The complaint about using grep + awk is just stupid. grep is significantly faster than awk, anyway.

Here in technical circles, cat | grep is known as useless use of cat =)

Hi folks,

I have been dealing with maintaining Linux in a mixture of C and Assembler for over twelve years now. While it has been a lot of fun, every day dealing with these essentially dead languages has become harder and harder for me, and other programers seem to agree.

Thus, starting with Linux 3.0 (to be released hopefully by next summer), the kernel will be completely rewritten in the easy-to-use Visual Basic language. This will eliminate all issues involving buffer overruns, as well as streamlining porting of Windows programs to Linux, since Microsoft (who will now assume ownership of Linux) assure me that Windows is written entirely in VB as well.

Microsoft has also stated that they intend to incorporate Windows features, such as the RRS (Rapid Random Shutdown) in Windows 95, into Linux 3.0.

Linus

Not only is he leaving but in this post he states that kernel 3.0 will be rewritten in Visual Basic! The email is as follows (for those too lazy to click the link):

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Mon, 1 Apr 2002 15:35:02 -0500

Hi folks,

I have been dealing with maintaining Linux in a mixture of C and Assembler for over twelve years now. While it has been a lot of fun, every day dealing with these essentially dead languages has become harder and harder for me, and other programers seem to agree.

Thus, starting with Linux 3.0 (to be released hopefully by next summer), the kernel will be completely rewritten in the easy-to-use Visual Basic language. This will eliminate all issues involving buffer overruns, as well as streamlining porting of Windows programs to Linux, since Microsoft (who will now assume ownership of Linux) assure me that Windows is written entirely in VB as well.

Microsoft has also stated that they intend to incorporate Windows features, such as the RRS (Rapid Random Shutdown) in Windows 95, into Linux 3.0.

Linus

this is a good one. the headers are forged.

This post is much more funny than the first one!

• Upcoming rewrite of kernel

Hi folks, I have been dealing with maintaining Linux in a mixture of C and Assembler for over twelve years now. While it has been a lot of fun, every day dealing with these essentially dead languages has become harder and harder for me, and other programers seem to agree.

Thus, starting with Linux 3.0 (to be released hopefully by next summer), the kernel will be completely rewritten in the easy-to-use Visual Basic language. This will eliminate all issues involving buffer overruns, as well as streamlining porting of Windows programs to Linux, since Microsoft (who will now assume ownership of Linux) assure me that Windows is written entirely in VB as well.

Microsoft has also stated that they intend to incorporate Windows features, such as the RRS (Rapid Random Shutdown) in Windows 95, into Linux 3.0.

Linus

Finally!

Linux is moving to proper development tools and will be including the latest in software technology
features

This was kinda cute. An hour later, this one came.

Here is another one from Linus: Upcoming rewrite of kernel

This was kinda cute. An hour later, this one came.

Here is another one from Linus: Upcoming rewrite of kernel

This was kinda cute. An hour later, this one came.

Here is another one from Linus: Upcoming rewrite of kernel

That's it, goddammit, I'm switching to FreeBSD. Linux and Linus are just too damned disorganized.

I'll propouse the same person Jirat has propoused.

• Linus Torvalds

Just like what he have answered here

Note: this will likely make no sense to you if you've never read Searle. A summary of the Chinese room argument can be found here.

There are plenty of decent refutations of Searle's argument. Douglas Hofstadter's is the funniest, if only because he's so hostile about it (I don't have a reference handy, but the phrase "matched in its power to annoy only by..." floats out at me).

Searle's arguement is actually pretty bad, in my opinion, and I'm only an armchair philosopher. His refutation of "the system argument" (that the combination of book, paper, and guy reading book understands Chinese) amounts basically to two points: nothing within that system understands Chinese, and systems don't understand things. But systems do understand things: I am a system of various parts, but my relevant parts (medulla oblongata, eyes, hippocampus, whatever) don't understand things. I understaxnd things: I am more than the sum of my parts.

It's ironic that Searle can accuse AI researchers as pursuing a dualist argument. Most everyone I know favoring strong AI believe wholeheartedly that, as you say, mind is a product of brain. What they don't believe is that brains are magically endowed by God to be the only things capable of producing a mind. (Note: they don't attribute this capability to rocks and stuff.) Searle goes on and on about how AI, no matter how close to human behavior it may come, will never be truly intelligent because it will not posess "intentionality" - it can tell you that 2+2=4, but it can't really understand it, can't really mean it, but he never goes on to say why. ("Why can't it understand stuff?" "Because it doesn't have intentionality." "What's that?" "The ability to understand stuff.") If that's not a dualist view, I don't know what is.

Bottom line, where I'm concerned: we still don't understand what it really means to think, to be intelligent. Searle's argument is essentially that just as a computer simulation of a rainstorm won't get you wet, a computer simulation of intelligence won't be smart. But that doesn't make sense: rainstorms involve water, while intelligence... what? What can you say about an intelligent entity that isn't based on its external characteristics? It's a fascinating question, but Searle ignores it in favor of "intentionality," something which isn't observable (except to its owner) in any way. He takes the really tough, interesting question, and slips in straw-man to knock down. And that's just, as Hofstadter said, annoying

Or save yourself a couple hundred bucks and simply use this patch. It may (or may not, depending on the whims of Our Lord And Saviour) become part of the new development series of kernels, too.

Don't you get it? They're afraid because these pirate-types are now paying the same amount for Windows XP as they are for that joint finnish/british operation to take over the world. And as with everything else, the worth of software *must* be measured by the amount you pay for it.

There is file system corruption bug in the 2.4.15
Here is a description a what to do if you are running 2.4.15 already. And here is the cure.

There is file system corruption bug in the 2.4.15
Here is a description a what to do if you are running 2.4.15 already. And here is the cure.

Apple and proprietary developers have generally gotten along well with the BSD and gcc people as far as license issues go.

What?

Recently, maybe, but take a look at this link to a copy of the 1993 g++ FAQ:

Because the legal policies of Apple threaten the long-term goals of FSF, as well as the concept of free software, no support will be lent to efforts to port GNU software to Macintosh or other Apple hardware.

The FSF didn't end the boycott of Apple until 1995, and even then, they pretty much said that unless supporting MacOS was ridiculously easy, they wouldn't bother accepting patches because that might impact their effort to produce the "GNU operating system".

If you want a quick summary of the boycott, the reasons, and how the FSF eventually "forgave" Apple the same way he "forgave" KDE, you can check out this link. Frankly, I'm surprised that the FSF and Apple are managing to get along as well as they are; it speaks volumes about Apple's commitment, and about the way the FSF has matured over the years, as well.

click here for hot pix of trolls in love!

I don't see anything in the second post (or the links that it references) that have anything to do with "Alan the responsible".

No mention of Alan or Marcelo. There is -- if you dig deeply -- a mention of the 2.4.13-ac4 kernel not having a problem with mmapping in certain situations.

But I don't see anything at all about Alan still being responsible.

It is quite possible that due to my rusty Spanish (and the fact that I'm a BSDite) that I've missed some subtle indicators, but I don't think so.

For the uninitiated, procmail is a fantastic tool. To learn more about it, check this link for how-tos, documentation, tutorials, and other spam-fighting tools.

If you compare 2.4.11 to anything, please compare it to the latest -ac kernels from Alan, where the traditional 2.4 VM is actually working very well. There's NO sense in comparing 2.4.11 to 2.4.9; the VM in 2.4.9 and its kin -- it was just plain broken.

Side note: In Rik's VM, please remember to not just look at swap used as a gauge of whether you're swapping or not. All anonymous pages are mapped to swap, so the space is simply allocated. You can create a huge image in GIMP and lots of swap will be allocated, but without a drop of disk I/O! Use vmstat and look at the 'si' and 'so' columns to see if you're actually writing pages to swap. Or look in /proc/meminfo and subtract "SwapCached" from the amount of swap you think you're using. That's the amount of *written* swap you're using (a better comparison to 2.4.10). This needs to be made sensible in 2.5, if this VM is to be resurrected.

Andrea's work has cleaned up the handling of inactive pages (which could have been done under the old system), and the new "classzone" approach and VM balancing isn't documented anywhere outside the code itself. In addition, there are very normal loads where it performs badly compared to the -ac tree. Here is a test suite that tests different aspects of aging and swapping, and the results as provided to linux-kernel. 2.4.10 (patched with Andrea's VM tweaks) swapped more pages, took longer, and had to swap more pages back in when the tests completed (i.e. it could have chosen better pages to swap out). It also caused XMMS to skip mp3 playback throughout the tests, whereas -ac didn't.

Nothing's perfect of course; a process that randomly walks through pages performs better in 2.4.10 since it's more streamlined and not trying to be as "intelligent" about page handling. Rik's code could no doubt be improved here.

That's the great thing about open source: let the best idea win! No doubt in 2.5 we'll see these two VM schemes hash it out in much more complete form (i.e. lose the remaining kernel 2.2-isms, maybe add physical page mapping, almost certainly swapfs -- mostly for Rik's scheme; I'm not sure what the next steps for Andrea's VM should be).

If you compare 2.4.11 to anything, please compare it to the latest -ac kernels from Alan, where the traditional 2.4 VM is actually working very well. There's NO sense in comparing 2.4.11 to 2.4.9; the VM in 2.4.9 and its kin -- it was just plain broken.

Side note: In Rik's VM, please remember to not just look at swap used as a gauge of whether you're swapping or not. All anonymous pages are mapped to swap, so the space is simply allocated. You can create a huge image in GIMP and lots of swap will be allocated, but without a drop of disk I/O! Use vmstat and look at the 'si' and 'so' columns to see if you're actually writing pages to swap. Or look in /proc/meminfo and subtract "SwapCached" from the amount of swap you think you're using. That's the amount of *written* swap you're using (a better comparison to 2.4.10). This needs to be made sensible in 2.5, if this VM is to be resurrected.

Andrea's work has cleaned up the handling of inactive pages (which could have been done under the old system), and the new "classzone" approach and VM balancing isn't documented anywhere outside the code itself. In addition, there are very normal loads where it performs badly compared to the -ac tree. Here is a test suite that tests different aspects of aging and swapping, and the results as provided to linux-kernel. 2.4.10 (patched with Andrea's VM tweaks) swapped more pages, took longer, and had to swap more pages back in when the tests completed (i.e. it could have chosen better pages to swap out). It also caused XMMS to skip mp3 playback throughout the tests, whereas -ac didn't.

Nothing's perfect of course; a process that randomly walks through pages performs better in 2.4.10 since it's more streamlined and not trying to be as "intelligent" about page handling. Rik's code could no doubt be improved here.

That's the great thing about open source: let the best idea win! No doubt in 2.5 we'll see these two VM schemes hash it out in much more complete form (i.e. lose the remaining kernel 2.2-isms, maybe add physical page mapping, almost certainly swapfs -- mostly for Rik's scheme; I'm not sure what the next steps for Andrea's VM should be).

The link is http://www.helsinki.fi/~pkamppur/typeschange.html.

The consumers. The consumers are the absolute highest power in the economic process. Consumers provide the money that makes the whole damn thing work. If consumers decide they don't want to spend the money, then all those musicians who are in it for the bucks are just out of luck. We as consumers have the right to force the music or whatever industry to do exactly what we want. The only trouble is getting us all organized. This guy did it. He said, "you don't have to pay for a high quality operating system", and made it happen, changing the face of the software industry.

WHY do you all persist in being such slaves to corporate power!? We all have a choice on what we want to consume an how!

Here's a quote from a webpage describing the computing facilities:

Our workstation network consists of about 500 PCs (mostly Pentium III, more than half of them with flat TFT monitors) running Linux. Windows 2000 can be used as an alternative to Linux. More than 70 of the workstations are mobile laptops that can join and leave the network dynamically.

I read somewhere that this is most likely the largest centrally administered Linux network in Finland... Being a student there, I must say that it's kinda cool :)

No, I did not count them.