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How very specious of you. You know damn well 99% of folks, including you and your URL, call it GIMP (with or without capitalization). I agree with Matt's rhetorical question, would you have the same response if it were the New Image Gnu Graphics Editing Routine?

Facts: the name is offensive to some people (disclaimer: not me), and you've known this for at least 6 years. Rather than issuing belligerent Bush-like denials, you'd be MUCH better off by saying "we're sorry you're offended, but that's not our intent".

WRT: "It's simpler than that, actually, if you don't mind the program being inaccessible for a few milliseconds. "

Problem is, say, when you're swapping out versions of libc (used by 'mv'). The link method doesn't obliterate the prior version, and the process succeeds. Time was (and I haven't tried this lately) that when 'mv'ing rather than relinking libraries, you could get yourself into a pretty sad state.

The same problem doesn't exist for executables, as an in-use file retains a file handle until it's no longer in use. Users of the old (replaced) file won't see any change until they restart their application.

Well. In theory. With more complex tools, external executable dependencies may mean some tools don't work right if some of their infrastructure's been swapped out from under them.

But yeah, in balance, worlds easier than dealing with 'Doze upgrades.

Nice list of relative features. I'd done "bet you can't do this..." listing a ways back on the SVLUG mailing list: http://lists.svlug.org/pipermail/svlug/2005-June/0 50088.html

Launch Win98... on a Rocket!: http://www.svlug.org/events/launch98.shtml

Silicon Valley Tea Party: http://marc.merlins.org/linux/teaparty/

The Great Linux Revolt of '98: http://linuxmafia.com/svlug/

Of course attacks against BSDs weren't as public and were mostly discussed in private for strategies on how to 'deal' with them.

I've helped a friend do this in the past. This posting more or less describes what to do:

http://lists.svlug.org/pipermail/svlug/2002-Februa ry/039538.html

From what I recally, it worked quite well.

Actually, it's slightly more complicated.

Document stylesheet trumps user. Unless the user specifies the "!important" modifier, in which case user trumps document. I find this very useful, and use it to override a lot of b0rkeness on the Web.

Also, in some browsers (Galeon among them) it's possible to create a set of stylesheets which can be applied to any arbitrary page, only when specified. I actually use this to tweak the "light" Slash code to format it more like the default. Fun thing is you can apply it to default websites. Screenshots linked from http://lists.svlug.org/pipermail/svlug/2005-Januar y/048897.html

This and other userContent.css tricks at UserContentCSS TWikIWeThey page.

There's also the greasemonkey Firefox extension, which extends this concept somewhat.

this articles a good read so take the time to go through it as it summarises innovation from the early internet years to date.

innovation. The trick is finding that one crazy idea. The problem with crazy ideas, though, is that for every one good crazy idea, there's a thousand bad crazy ideas

the eternal quest for an idea. you better start with a good idea. if you don't, no matter how hard you try it wont pan out.

the Internet community back then, the key technical people, didn't want the Internet to become easy to use or graphical, ... Only smart people could use the Internet ...so we needed to keep it hard to use

what other examples can you think of right now?... only smart people can use [insert you own example]

Mosaic started with 12 users in February 1993. It had 1,000 users within three or four weeks. About 10,000 users by spring. It was up to 1 million by early 1994

Posters who question why Andreessen has such prominence should reflect on this. No Mosaic (mozilla), no Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE Based on NCSA Mosaic code base licensed from Spyglass), no World Wide Web in the early to mid 90's. No doubt someone else may have invented the browser but how much longer would it have taken?

At first that makes you like a little bunny rabbit ... Everybody wants to play with you ....within a year ... fearsome competitors shooting at your head with high-powered ammunition

Larry, Sergi do you feel the hot breath of the MS juggernaut as you approach your IPO. Will google will be a repeat of Netscape/MS tussle?

Oracle database was a huge success ... Larry's spent the last 25 years trying to come up with the next product

it sure helps when the government (CIA) is your preferred backer. Why does oracle feel the need to keep trying to re-innovate or create the next best idea?

innovation comes from companies that are 2 years old, populated by 19-year-olds ... preposterous that Marc should think that innovation is .. the province of little entrepreneurial companies.

In fact it's both. The technical revolution was spurred on the back of the transistor. This was the combined effort of Bardeen, Brattain and shockley at Bell Labs - no small comany there ... but look at Intel, though a big company now, it was started with the (not so young) Noyce, Moore and Grove. What about the Linux kernel, third person shooters and that other search engine, Yahoo?

also was launched into space (or near?), even by linux fans. Sky is not as far as it used to be.

SVLUG had enough of his abusive treatment of just about anyone on-list, and forced him to cease contact with the list.

I simply stopped having time for the SVLUG list in mid-2001, the list often suffering high volume and a serious S/N problem, but do lurk and post there on occasion.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

The first refund day was a disaster. It got little coverage, no one got a refund, and the most memorable image was someone dressed like Obiwan Kenobe...

Microsoft condescendingly had a banner that said "Microsoft Welcomes the Linux Community" and offered free lemonade.

Of course, Katz disagreed.

Pictures here.

W

Wednesday, April 3rd., 2002, 7PM-9PM
Speaker: Larry Wall
at Cisco Building 9, the land of numbers.
Topic: An Evening with Larry Wall

And even if you're not in Silicon Valley, you should take a look at the directions they put up to this building: Cisco 9. Truly amazing, anal-geek overkill.

Nazi frogmen

I'm chrisd. I also go by Chris DiBona and Gamara on IRC. You can find me online that way pretty easily. A lot more about me can be found on my Webpage. Feel free to check that out. I work for OSDN. I used to work on the VA side of the house since late 1998. I've worked with Linux International for about 3 years too, I was the president of SVLUG for about a year and VP for about 2. I've been around slashdot for a long time as a poster and story author. I've done reviews of science fiction for /. and have written for Linux Journal, Linux Magazine and a buncho f other publications, both online and off.

Chris

(In all fairness to them, they do provide source alongside the pre-compiled binaries, so the security-conscious can audit the code and recompile.)

This reminds me a lot of a rant or two by Rick Moen of SVLUG fame. The main problem is sysadmin inexperience. Granted, you can still trash your own files (and lose all your user data), but the system will be safe. So just run untrusted executables as a different, non-privileged user, if you must run them at all.

No offense, but the odds of you finding one thousand computer users willing to keep Linux on their desktop for everyday use is also next to ZERO.

Gee, it would probably take me so long to look up a few Linux Users Group pages and ask who uses Linux for a desktop. There can't be any of them out there ...

We've been considering both Visual Source Safe (which we've had good luck with, but find it feature-poor) and CVS. I'd love any feedback anyone has comparing the two on a fairly large project, particularily where we have two sets of developers working off-site through slow IP links.

PVCS was appallingly bad. Random corruption, files perpetually locked by others. RCS was feature-poor. CMS was actually pretty good, especially if you didn't want to branch anything. I used to like CVS.

Then I landed in a shop where they use Perforce, and grumbled for a while that it wasn't CVS. Pretty quickly I was a convert. Perforce is like CVS except that:

• branching is understandable
• the commands and options are regular and systematic, so it's possible to remember what they all do
• it has lots of reporting commands, so you don't have to maintain a ChangeLog by hand

Then I discovered how much fun scripting it was!

There's tension in that it's not free software, but then Perforce the software and Perforce the company are a joy to deal with, so you don't begrudge them all that much. Their user base is largely a free software-like rabid bunch of happy advocates, so something must be right.

I'm looking forward to next week's SVLUG talk about Subversion, which might be Perforce's first real competition for a while in the "it's not ClearCase -- thank God" category.

Over the slow IP links: by all accounts, Source Safe is terrible. On our large projects worked on from half a dozen sites, Perforce works well. The GCC folks can probably tell you how well CVS works in that situation: I suspect the answer is pretty reasonably well too.

Amoung other things he described how it emitted submarine-like acoustic "pings" for proximity sensors on his lawn and very detailed Caller ID identification of incoming phone calls. It had different sounds or music for common people (e.g., Tom Christiansen, or Randal Schwartz), the city or state of unrecognised calls where spoken.

That might be a valid criticism if my article had included any sort of chronology. But it did not

Let me point you to where I, at least, got the impression that you did include a basic chronology.

One fine day, grad student Keith Bostic came to the BSD lead developers, inspired by Richard M. Stallman's (remember him?) GNU Project, and suggested replacing BSD's remaining AT&T work to create a truly free BSD. Dreading the confrontation likely to result with AT&T, they tried to stall by assigning Bostic the difficult part of this task, rewriting some key BSD utilities. This back-fired when he promptly did exactly that. So, they grumbled but then completed the job, and tried to prevent AT&T from noticing what they had done.

AT&T did notice, panicked, and sued. That, too, is a long story best omitted. Under the stress of the lawsuit, freeware BSD split into three camps (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). But there were also several proprietary branches, made possible because U.C. Berkeley's "BSD License" allowed creation of those: Sun Microsystems' SunOS, Tenon Intersystems' MachTen, BSDI's BSD OS, and NeXT Computer's NeXTStep OS all came out for sale without public access to source, and were all based on the Berkeley BSD source code.

.. later on you imply.

A third reason for forking also exists, and may hit the GNU/Linux community eventually: specialization. You may recall that this is what ultimately happened with the three free BSD variants -- although stress from the clash-of-the-titans AT&T v. U.C. Berkeley lawsuit arguably made that situation unique.

That statement I bolded is entirely incorrect. We know from the time-table that FreeBSD and NetBSD were derived from 386BSD, which came before the lawsuit. We also know from Theo's archive that OpenBSD splitting from NetBSD had nothing to do with the lawsuit. Where the camps had trouble, which I'll point you straight to SVLUG's history page, is that the lawsuit created tension. My understanding is that the free BSD derivatives where substantially better than Linux, but because their future was rocky, many supporters embraced Linux instead.

Also, the old tale is that AT&T sued because BSDI used 1-800-ITS-UNIX, and UCB was sued as a result. I'm not sure if that's true, since its all 3rd or 4th hand knowledge (not even close to 2nd hand :-).

wow.. what a load. I think the two earlier replies strongly defeated your claims, and pointed out the weaknesses to your argument. But it was a good argument.

I just have two points to add:

I believe the *bsd group should go gnu to compete with linux.

Please tell me how this makes any sense? I keep hearing this, but I really don't see the point in the argument.

First, even it might be impossible to track down all of the people who contributed and somehow get them all to agree to a new license. Do you think Linux could do the same? Everyone must agree, and then even after that there's likely some other legal tidbits to work out. Its just crazy.

I remember when GNU/RMS and others attacked free *BSDs, especially FreeBSD, saying they were unstable as the group could just go closed source, and exploit its user base to buy upgrades. That's just as illogical. Even if FreeBSD, Inc. tried to do that, its code is still BSD'd, and enough programmers would split and take over. That was just creating FUD, and saying BSD needs to GPL itself to compete is just more FUD.

Oh, and lets not forget another catch. Why would you want all these OSes under a GPL? That competes with Linux, and as Linux is the hype, it makes absolutely no sense for BSDs. If you claim BSD's would thus get more programmers, how? Lots of BSD hackers like the BSDL better, and BSD would lose much of its community, as many companies use BSD code in their products. Microsoft uses BSD networking code, as a small example. Would they if it were GPL, nope. Would small startups based on networking use it? Nope. Would Sun have ever used it, back in the day. I doubt it.

So, please tell me where any shread of logic is in this statement. I really would like to know, honestly. I can't figure out why so many Linux users say this. Is it just monkey-do, monkey-see, or is there some twisted (or untwisted) logic to it? And please, don't say 'because I like the GPL better.' That doesn't explain why its a good stratigy.

Secondly,

Linux is accelerating faster then *bsd while the community scoffed and ignored linux and now like the rabbit in the story it may be too late for freebsd unless it radically changes.

Again, I beg to differ. The community that scoffed was mostly the Windows/Mac/OS2 and commercial UNIX/non-UNIX (server/workstation) community. Sure, BSD hackers had some ego on their part, they deserved it, they were mostly proffesional programmers verse a mixture of proffesional and non-proffestionals. The community was a bit kinder to BSD because of its license and academic background. That's about it.

Shall we create some affirmative action plan because Linux at one point was 'scoffed' at? Maybe we need to start trading developers, saying every 10 bad remark ever said.. wait, ever thought against Linux deserves to force 1 BSD developer to convert. Nah, wouldn't work. And this is all beside the point, because calling Linux the underdog isn't all that accurate either.

I'd actually incline to say that line has no relevant meaning at all. Here's a bit from SVLUG's history, back in the day when it reformed its UNIX SIG into a free UNIX SIG, and tried to pick which brand to support...

"The fight for which system was best continued through 1993. In December we had a combined meeting with SVNet where we had speakers comparing Linux, NetBSD and Coherent. By then 386BSD itself was drifting away because of the lack of updates, and the 2 groups, NetBSD and FreeBSD, were fighting for control. At the same time there were many happy users of Coherent that were willing to spend $99 for a system that had a number you could call for support. 1993 was also the year Linux on CD-ROM became popular. Linux won over *BSD because of the "fear, uncertainty and doubt" about putting Net/2 on a CD-ROM and getting sued. In 1993 we lost the Cupertino library and moved to the meeting room attached to the Carl's Jr restaurant at First and Trimble in North San Jose.

"In Februrary 1994 we had a meeting discussing the newly released NetBSD 0.9. In August 1994 SVNet had a meeting where Bill and Lynn Jolitz demostrated their 386BSD Release 1.0. There were a few *BSD holdouts, but by this time the rest of the group had all gone with Linux. In December our listing in the Mercury News (which was the only announcement that month) was changed from "PC Unix SIG" to "PC Unix/Linux SIG", and our attendance jumped from 12 to 20. It became clear that the community interest was in Linux, and we should probably change our name."

Maybe I should mention SVLUG is the oldest, debated as the largest, and is definately one of the most active LUGs. Just take a glance at it, and you'll see many of the old and new media blitzes that revolved around Linux users came through their handywork. The Burn all Gifs day was the most recent, started by a member. They did a good job on the Refund Day (I believe it was a few LUGs working together), etc. Many splended things, and many great members.

But please.. can someone explain the GPL thing. It really boggles me.

Hopefully this will find both Rob and the other moderators.

The Moderator's Dilemma is that, as moderators, we are unable to discuss aspects of the moderation system without also violating the rules under which we are allowed to moderate. I've been thinking all evening of whether I want to post this under my own ID or as an AC, and I'm taking the Coward's way out for now, but I'm not happy about it.

The other two alternatives are for the moderators to post under their /. login (and lose their moderator status as we've seen), or for Rob to set up a private chat area for moderators to discuss issues. I really dislike the second suggestion -- it turns moderation into some sort of a star chamber. For the 75k - 407 of you who aren't moderators, realize that those of us who are don't know who the other mods are (other than Taco & Co.) either.

Of all the possible problems with the system (and I've been bumping up many of the posts pointing out issues as I find them), the most pernicious one is that a person aquires two moderator IDs and creates a cabal for themselves. A bot programmed to be reasonable and interesting might be able to pull this off. For an example of what bots can do, start here and follow the links.

It's not clear to me why Rob is insisting on moderator anonymity. This isn't a job I asked for, though it is somewhat interesting. I don't spend as much time on Slashdot as I had in the past, partly because of the AC issue, partly because there are alternate sites (LinuxToday, LWN, the revived RedHat, and SVLUG to name a few), and, well, I've got a real paying job.

There's also the fact that /. discussions are very short lived -- once off the front page, a day at most, they're effectively dead. It makes meaningful discussion very difficult. Despite the flameage, it is possible to carry on a real discussion for days or weeks in Usenet or mailing lists. This just isn't possible with the current /. setup, and contributes IMO to the fractured, opinionated, rash, nature of many posts here. It's not that there aren't pearls, it's just very hard to cultivate them.

I'm past the age where I'd score a lot of points bragging about my /. moderator status. Most of the people I know don't know what /. is. It's not going to impress my clients or my girlfriend, and Mom & Dad never understand all this computer junk anyway. If it's the threat of being mailbombed, well, my address has been posted here anyway, and if I wanted to disable its display, I could.

Why do I think moderators ought to be able to identify themselves?

1. Accountability. As a moderator, I'm making decisions that reflect how Slashdot appears. I think the fact that I am doing so should be public knowledge. Maybe not my phone and street address, but at least my /. login. Barring this, if I want to mention I am a moderator, I don't see why I shoud be barred from doing so. Frankly, the fact that I cannot do so makes me question the whole system.

2. Feedback. As moderators we get to see both sides of the system. FWIW, it's a set of radio buttons, (-)(0)(+)(++), and an article ID, next to each post. There's a 'Moderate' button at the bottom of the page. I'd like to be able to discuss what is good or bad about the system, and I don't particularly think this ought to be a private conversation between myself and Rob. I think that dropping Roy's status was inappropriate for what were some legitimate, well reasoned, and real issues with the moderation system. This is my protest vote, as a fellow moderator.

3. I can't quit. There's no 'I resign' button on the user accounts screen (where the basic "you're a moderator" info is). I suppose Rob would be able to deactivate me (there's a pleasent thought) if I sent an email request -- which would promptly get lost with the 500 other messages he gets daily.... I'm not criticising Rob, I'm just saying he gets a lot of mail. My other alternative is to say, "My user id is xxx and I'm a moderator", and hope that the Taco is feeling mean that day.

4. Living in fear. I've sent email to the wrong person, left my resume in the printer (or worse: copier <g>), had that girl sent the cutest reply back to me...and everyone else on the distribution list, shot my mouth (fingers) off in USENET and other fora. I've done a lot of things I've regretted. Cruising through this page, scoring and commenting, I've had to weigh very carefully what I've said for fear of losing my status. While it's possible to log out and post AC, you have to remember to do so, and as an AC, there is no credibility or authentication. I've already seen one challenge "how do we know you're a Moderator". It's a Catch-22. I really don't like living this way. It cramps my style.

With that off my chest, the system looks pretty good. I set prefs low (you can edit the threshhold value directly in the URL to some rediculous value). In this first forum, there are only 9 posts with negative values, the lowest is -2 (my threshhold is -10000). Searching for "(Score:-" will turn up all "underwater" posts. There are two possibly relevent posts which are thwacked, two gibberish posts, three '...sucks', and the rest are way off topic (taxes, skiing ??). It's working OK.

It would be nice to have a way of quickly reviewing negative posts. A 'max score' filter would do this. Several non-moderators have requested this as well. It would be a useful feature.

The highest ranked post has a score of 6. It's recommending an NNTP server. I've got my own arguments in favor of this as well. The second most favorably scored post calls into question the whole moderation concept. This is also healthy -- the system is not only tolerating criticism, it considers it important.

There's a real issue surrounding controversial posts. These would have low aggregate scores, but a large number of moderators. I would like to see a secondary moderation attribute on posts indicating the number of times a post has been moderated.

WRT losing threads under thwacked posts (I refer to positive scores as "bumps" and negatives as "thwacks" or "drops"), this tends to happen if you read in flat mode. If you are reading threaded, you'll tend to see threads beneath posts, and if you open threads in a new window (my MO), you'll get all posts at your default threshhold underneath.

I'm spending my points really quickly. Down to 2 left. All but one were bumps. I don't know if I ought to have more points to grant or if I should be more sparing in how I rate stuff, I'll have to see how this plays out and how quickly points refresh.

The concept behind moderation, and on the selecting of moderators, is good. It's a lot like Google. Though the definition is circular -- good sites are sites that good sites point to -- good posters are posters that good posters like -- it bootstraps well. I think it also avoids cliquishness. You just won't get one mindset. This is one of the better systems I've seen. It's not perfect but it's a damned good start. I think it's got everything in it it needs to be great.

The moderator guidelines are posted. (Rob: is this the same page Mods see -- I think it is but I can't check right now without logging in, which I can't do until I finish this post. Another Catch-22. Mods and Plebes should see the exact same guidelines -- the rules should be open).

Note among other things the math: there are four points granted per post (one point to each of 400 moderators per 100 posts). Your average article will see four votes cast if all points are spent. This is unlikely at best.

Signed, Anonymous Moderator :-(

Linux and free-software publicity events seem to stir more than the usual quota of flame wars, not that I've been keeping close track. All I can say is that this is one of the more pluralistic communities I know of, and if you disagree with the methods or the message put forth by some, nothing stops you from having your own rally, press conference, etc. From one of the t-shirts I saw: "The linux philosophy is laugh in the face of danger. Oops, wrong one. 'Do it yourself,' that's it" -L. Torvalds. By the way, I'm John Beale, I took the photos on SVLUG's page about the event.

http://www.dibona.com/

>2 Sam Ockman

http://www.penguincomputing.com/

>3 Mark Stone

http://shell.nanospace.com/~markst/

All members of the infamous...

Silicon Valley Linux User Group

You can get an upgrade shopping list at a page somewhere on http://www.svlug.org/. Look for something written by Rick Moen, and mentioning Linux 2.2. It should be hard to miss.

The article is, in part, an outgrowth of SVLUG's "Silicon Valley Tea Party" at Microsoft's Palo Alto office, which the reporter attended. She has also interviewed many prominent open source people, and my guess is that she'll be writing more articles on the subject.