The broader problem, be it with France, Germany (remember Germany and CompuServe?) or anywhere else, is that we seem to confuse a belief in the goodness of freedom of the exchange of information and ideas between individuals with the freedom of commercial services to propagate anything they wish regardless of national laws, cultures or sensibilities.
Perhaps so, but Yahoo! isn't doing this. This isn't a matter of cultural hegemony. Yahoo! doesn't permit auctions of Nazi paraphernalia on its French site, out of respect to French law and French sensibilities. This case is about what happens on the US auction site, since French citizens can access (and presumably bid on) auctions there for such paraphernalia. These items are quite legal to sell in the US but illegal to sell in France.
Without national firewalls, there just is no way to prevent French citizens from accessing a US site, with the Internet as presently constituted.
Let me suggest that the onus should be on the French citizens who are breaking French laws in France. Consider that if a French citizen bids on and wins a US auction for Nazi paraphernalia, he or she then has the problem of actually receiving the illegal merchandise. It is preventing the physical act of importation that the French should focus on. And that's their responsibility, not Yahoo!'s.
Theoretically, a dual Athlon MB could be made using the Tsunami chipset (Compaq's blindingly fast dual-processor chipset for the Alpha). Unfortunately, the chipset would then cost more than the two Athlons (about $1000), so I don't see this happening soon.
System V R4.0 was the result of merging a few parts of BSD into System V R3.2 plus providing a compatability layer for much of the rest. It was done by AT&T USG (Unix Systems Group) and Sun (under contract). (STREAMS was already part of System V R3.2, and actually had grown out of the "packet driver" work Bell Labs had started years before Berkeley sockets; Dennis Ritchie himself had devised STREAMS as a way of accommodating a variety of different proptocol stacks and network drivers, though he wasn't happy with the USG's adaptation of it.) This formed the basis for Solaris 2.x. But the USG continued, adding security and SMP features to System V and improving the VM system, resulting in System V R4.2. There was actually a considerable divergence between this system and Solaris 2; Sun did their own SMP and security enhancements starting from the System V R4.0 code base (which they ultimately bought the rights to). Unix and the OS development part of USG was sold to Novell, which marketed System V R4.2 as "Unixware." It was, IMHO, a much better system than Solaris (at the time), but Novell simply couldn't stand to support a product that competed with NetWare, and after a few years of letting Unixware wither on the vine, sold what was left of the USG and System V R4.2 to SCO. SCO wisely dumped their own System V R3.2-based technology as fast as they could, but by that time Linux was becoming a strong competitor--and we all know what's happened since.
I've used professionally every product mentioned above (with the exception of NetWare), and I've used BSD from release 2.4 (which ran on PDP-11's).
It's sad when posts composed of guesswork and half-truths get moderated up by moderators who have even less of a clue. Like one of the earlier posters on this topic, I'm just about ready to abandon Slashdot as the noise has simply drowned out the signal at this point.
You missed my point. Read the policy--it notifies you they will release your information when legally required, and doesn't say that they will notify you first. The ACLU says that they should--or must--notify you first, because of your right to privacy. I agree with the ACLU on this.
You'll see the same sort of language on credit-card agreements and all sorts of other consumer contracts. My understanding (IANAL and all that) is that from a legal standpoint you are considered "notified" when you receive a copy of the agreement for all situations described therein, except for those cases where the agreement provides for further notification.
This is based on my own reading of the policy and not based on any other information from Yahoo! or others. I assume you can say the same for your opinion. But consider this: if you are right, the case boils down to contract law, and thus won't set any precdence with regards to privacy. I doubt that you want that--the ACLU certainly doesn't. (And, yes, I've been a member.)
Re-read your own post. The clause you quote refers to what Yahoo!'s Privacy Policy document will tell you, not what Yahoo! will or won't tell somebody else. And in fact, if you take the time to read the document itself, (it's pretty long, though more readable than most legalease) you'll see that Yahoo! says they will release personal info when requested to in a legal action. It says nothing about notifying you first.
So there you have it. They have told you "with whom your information may be shared," just as they promised. They have followed their own rules to the letter. Now, you and I may not like the policy they describe; it may not even be a legal policy--I'm sure the ACLU will assert it isn't. But the only petards being hoisted here is you and the moderators who didn't bother to read this, and completely mis-construed the introductory paragraph to their policy as the policy itself.
There's *way* too much money in banner advertising for something like this to actually work.
Yes, but Netscape's parent, AOL, makes relatively more money from service fees than from ads. This feature puts them at a competative advantage to pure-Internet sites which derive a greater fraction of their revenue from ads.
It might be a bit cynical for me to say it, but it is easier to claim that AOL would want to promote this feature than to have it removed.
Unless you opted out of being listed in the Yahoo! member directory, you unfortunately made yourself visible to those nefarious folks who harvest such information. Yahoo! doesn't sell email addresses, but they--and any site with a directory, guest book, user group, chat room, or whatever--are regularly harvested for names.
When in doubt, opt out. Yahoo! at least lets you unlist yourself, though it is too late for you now...
A bit off-topic (however, see the last paragraph) but this has to be said...
No sector has declined at the rate that the Linux companies have.
No sector rose at the rate of Linux sector, either. And the Linux companies aren't doing any worse than the others who IPO'd at the same time--most are now trading at a fraction of their initial offer price, Linux or no Linux. That has more to do with overall market behavior than anything specific to Linux. In any case, companies live and die by the balance sheet, not their stock price. Recent IPO's will need to trim their sails and perhaps push toward profitability earlier than they might otherwise have done (thus settling for less growth), but some will undoubtedly thrive no matter how bearish the market turns.
You don't seem to be very familiar with these companies (or with how companies are capitalized and grown, for that matter). None of them propose selling free software as their primary source of income; rather, they sell services (integration, support, value-add, and so on). I don't pretend to know if this will wind up being a successful business model or not-- and I don't see how you could know, either. The stock market certainly doesn't--it doesn't need to be any more rational on the way down as it was on the way up.
Stampede isn't a company, but the fate befalling it is a lot like what often happens with small companies: fragmentation due to differences or difficulties in leadership and vision. Although it won't die when it runs out of cash like a company does-- in some ways cashless collaborations such as this are more resiliant-- even if it fails (and it remains to be seen if it will) it hardly reflects on other efforts involving Linux. As for whether RMS, ESR, and the like are visionaries or fools--well, at least they are willing to sign what they believe, unlike trolls and astroturfers such as yourself. And if you think the success or failure of a company or the collapsing of a bubble market has anything to do with the viability of free software-- well, I think we know who the fool is, here.
BSDI is an interesting case, given that they've just had a little encounter with the Open-Source freight train. Although I know it rankles many BSDI fans to hear it, I'm sure that more than one customer has been asking themselves why they should pay thousands of dollars for BSD/OS (or whatever BSDI is calling it thse days) when they can get FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD for free? Well, they are now beginning the process of merging their system with FreeBSD and changing their business model to something more along the lines of a Red Hat. But even then, the fortunes and misfortunes of BSDI are only peripherally related to the success of BSD in general.
The general trends are positive ones. Not only is there the BSDI/FreeBSD latchup, but sharing among the three free BSD's has been increasing, and although it might be a little while before it's reflected in marketing surveys, interest in BSD is on the rise (in part because of the Linux explosion, and in part because of the success of BSD users such as Yahoo!).
Things might be grim in your little neck of the woods. But they look pretty bright in mine.
You posted this same article four times. Yet no matter how many times you say "FreeBSD is in very deep trouble," you say absolutely nothing to support that claim. In fact, the FreeBSD team seems in better shape than it has been in ages, and their latest release, 4.0, shows it. The NetBSD and OpenBSD groups both show more life and vigor than they have in a long time.
It's all a bit like a dog who keeps returning to sniff his own vomit--both your SPAM-posting and this obsessive need you, like some others, seem to have to keep revisiting the whole Theo flame-fest. The whole incident is long in the past, but you just have to keep coming back to sniff at it. (Alas, this same behavior is shared by some of the BSD folks--including some of the participants--but fortunately many of them have been able to turn their differences into a positive force, creating useful technical distinctions and not just meaningless personal ones.)
I suspect that your real motivation is contained in your need to see BSD as somehow "losing." Losing what? This is free software. OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD aren't companies who must maintain market-share or go under--nor is Linux, for that matter. They aren't sports teams or rock bands. They don't need to cannibalize each other's user base to survive. They are all developed by teams that are actually quite a bit more stable and harmonious than most commercial software development teams (where the average developer lasts a bit over a year). They really don't need cheering sections, especially ones composed of gossips nattering away like old ladies over personalities.
This looks an awful lot like another story we've seen around here.
Sure does. That's why Nik put the exact same link in the article. The difference is that the earlier article says that Soren has a port working while this one announces that the port is available. Note the difference.
This news probably isn't very interesting to you (which explains your lack of attention), but it's pretty exciting to someone who inherited a Cobalt Qube and wants to put it to work in a way the original plug-and-go configuration didn't anticipate. That's what the 'net is all about--creating and taking advantage of new options. Not everyone with an unused Qube will want to try this (much less put it in production), but there are a lot of them around, so this release is a good thing.
Instead she puts her whole interview's credibility into question in my (and others possibly?) mind by not answering a quite straight forward question which the slashdot community wanted most answered.
Let's take this one phrase at a time.
Her credibility on matters pertaining to documentation have nothing to do with her credibility (or lack thereoff) on matters of sexual politics. It's like ESR and Guns. Most of us greatly agree with he has to say about open-source, whether or not we agree with his opinions on guns. Likewise, we should be able to respect Deb's experience and insight into documentation however we feel about her politics.
It wasn't a straightforward question. It was a loaded question which presupposed a point of view.
Four moderators (and yourself, it seems) hardly makes a "majority." I've been on Slashdot long enough to know that there is a sizable minority who loves to provoke confrontation, whether the subject is Microsoft, BSD--or the opposite sex. That they are drawn to that particular question doesn't change its appropriateness.
Wrap yourself in self-righteousness all you want. She answered all the questions she was given concerning the subject of the interview. Asking for more is simply rude, no matter how strong your desire is for an answer.
Its software, its programs, its non-gender specific.
It's also irrelevent.
Suppose Rob Malda was being interviewed about the contributions he's made to open-source projects, and the interviewer asked him to defend his support of copyright violation, system cracking, libelous accusations, bad taste, and so on, because he allows anonymous posting on Slashdot. Is that appropriate? Now, I'm sure he can defend himself quite effectively by explaining his views on free speech, and would be quick to point out that he doesn't share the views of everybody who posts to Slashdot. But that's not the purpose of the interview, and it would probably take a lot of his and our time as well as deflecting from the interview's subject. It pulls attention entirely away from the subject at hand--from the realm of information and education to the realm of politics and controversy.
Deb didn't say she would never answer the question (she already has, in other fora). Just that it wasn't appropriate for this interview. The very fact that people were so interested in that particular question--rather than the far more relevent and important issues concerning documentation--shows how much of a distraction it is. For all we know she was burning to answer it, but felt it would be entirely conterproductive to the task at hand.
I don't want a "Decent desktop experience." This isn't sex. I want to get my work done, with a minimum amount of effort and ambiguity as to the means and the result. Most folks are like that. They'll learn a few apps that are core to the tasks they want to perform, and who cares about the rest.
It's the apps, friend, not some imaginary purity of GUI essence. And Delphi is all about creating serviceable apps with reasonable GUI's, quickly and reliably.
That's why this is a very, very good thing.
As for actually using the desktop effectively, neither MS Windows, Mac, or Unices have yet to achieve, much less surpass, what was developed at PARC two decades ago. Lots more eye candy, of course, with functionless, brain-numbing animations and 3D and color. But it's still click, click, drag, de-click.
So I agree with you that "desktop experience" has a long way to go. (Why can't I just draw on my desktop and tell it to "take things like this and combine them with that and perform this and that and then put them there"? The command line lives on because desktops are so poor at exploiting natural visual metaphors.)
Actually Public Domain is a bad idea since it doesn't let the author disclaim liability or protect his good name in any way.
In a sane legal environment such a disclaimer would not be needed, nor would releasing into the public domain make it more difficult to show libel (after all, it is a person, not the software, which is damaged by libel). Releasing into the public domain should put the entire burden on the user of the software for determining the suitability of that software. So in theory, PD is about as "free" as it gets, both for the author and the user.
Alas, we don't live in a "sane legal environment."
-Ed
"Part of the fun IS the chase."
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Sound like you've not spent much time in clubs (whether Tokyo or elsewhere). Quiet conversation is impossible. Hell, some places any conversation is impossible. Appearance and "style" rule--they often are the only possible way to choose what new people to meet. A more intelligent reason for going off to a corner and having a (probably shouted) conversation with someone is a Good Thing.
"Intimacy without social interaction" is an oxymoron. Social interaction needs an initiator, especially in large groups in noisy environments. This device can provide that initiator. At that point, as always, you're on your own.
There was a time when incineration of much of the civilized world was always 20 minutes away, not 20 years. Whether secondary effects (so-called Nuclear Winter) would have led to eventual extinction or not seem rather beside the point--the world as we knew it would have ended. That it did not happen was, more than many of us realize, a matter of shear blind luck.
There were, and are, only two powers in the world who could bring about such a global catastrophe. The reason for this limitation is more a matter of the enormous cost of producing nuclear weapons than the technological difficulty of doing so. For now, and for the near future, nuclear physics is too expensive for more than just the US and Russia to put civilization at risk.
What Bill fears, I think, is the development of technologies as threatening as those which came from nuclear physics, but without the economic barriers. Consider: what if Moore's law applied to nuclear weapons as well as integrated cicuitry? What if it does apply to the next destructive technology? Or: what if a chain reaction of self-replicating agents--whether biological, nanotechnological, or self-organizing--proves much cheaper than the nuclear variety? By harnessing the existing biological, molecular, or technological environment to its ends, could a technology be created where such replication to worldwide scale came (from the creator's perspective) essentially for free?
The cheaper it becomes to develop the technical means to threaten humanity, the more likely it will be that a state, group, or even person will be insane enough to exploit it. It's the change in economics that increases the danger. Economics explains why New York isn't hip-deep in horse manure just as it explains why basement-lab nuclear weapons don't exist, even though the knowledge necessary to produce them is readily available. Cheaper, faster alternatives became available in the first case. Are we ready for such alternatives in the second case?
I think your extreme attitude helps marginalize Linux rather than support it. A future where open and closed software intertwine (for various values of closed) is not to be feared. Yes, some vendors will gain temporary advantages through concealment, but you show little faith in the power of open source if you believe that its advantages will vanish as soon as such hybrids appear. Other vendors will go the open-source route, and profit from its advantages.
You mention several advantages of open-source, such as better stability and intregration. These are real, solid advantages that potentially give one vendor a leg up over another. In the face of this, it would be unlikely that no vendor would take advantage of those things. Many won't--old habits from the MSWindows domain will die hard--but a few will, and from their success more will be encouraged to do so.
Look at it from another perspective: we're going to get vendors involved in Linux who otherwise wouldn't be involved. Then we'll convert 'em. Not all of them, but the fact remains that opening up a middle ground like this gives us more of a chance of pulling them into the open-source way of doing things than an all-or-nothing attitude will.
Assuming this is the only ISA card in your system (pretty likely on a server), none of the issues you raise are relevent. It doesn't do DMA, its IO needs are small, it doesn't need PnP, it isn't going to need to share IRQ's, parity is a non-issue, and why should the fact that it's a 5V bus make a bit of difference? All the problems you mention would be genuine issues in many other circumstances--but not this one. Once your server is actually up and running, the only thing this board draws from the bus is power. Prior to that, its performance falls squarely in the "good enough for the purpose" category.
It's a sign of a green engineer to reject a solution on irrelevent technical grounds. There are legitimate reasons to reject an ISA solution--such as the fact that newer server boards don't even support it--but the factors that make it a crappy bus for almost any other purpose just don't apply here.
After all, how do you send the three-finger salute over a serial line?
BREAK
At least that's what I use with our Intel N440BX servers. (Yes, some things never seem to change; using BREAK in this way dates back to Teletype days.)
We highly salaried, wealthy individuals are exploiting the free-or-fixed local telephony charging regime to leave our data connections nailed up for weeks at a time.
Yes, in fact some people do--from their homes. But I doubt they expect home use to be their main market. In almost all areas only residential phone service is flat-rate, while business rate is metered. Using bonded dialups is expensive, though is some cases it's all that's available. (One exception: Centrex, though even that is usage-charged in some areas; besides, since Centrex is restricted to a single CO, using it doesn't tie up inter-office trunks, which is where the highest cost of a nailed-up dialup accrue.)
It was a poor choice of phrasing, but the fact is that Senator Gore did sponsor the legislation that created NSFNET, which ultimately became what most of us think of as the Internet. At the time, DARPA was cracking down on non-military use of the ARPANET (ultimately creating the MILNET). Most University and Corporate sites (with the exception of those with large military contracts) were to be cut off or forced to pay enormous fees. NSFNET was funded by the National Science Foundation rather than the Pentagon, and although initially limited to research and education, opened the door to access by just about anybody. Commercial restrictions were gradually lifted, and the NSF played a smaller and smaller role (though it still paid for the Internet backbone until just a few years ago). And then things really started to grow like crazy...
As an engineer, what I mean when I say "create" ( == "invent" or "build") is a lot different from what a politician means when he/she says "create" ( == "pass a law" or "spend tax money"). And it was probably one of Gore's staffers and not Gore who actually "got it" on the Internet's potential (both back then and now); he's not shown himself to have any great technical savvy personally. But from his perspective as a politician, "Created the Internet" isn't that far from the truth.
We can only hope that Clinton or one of his advisors knows that this is pretty much a non-event. Remember that he has a high-level policy meeting today to discuss Internet security. I'd rather he didn't have staring in his face what on the surface looks like a blatant example of Internet insecurity.
We simply don't need the US Government's "help" in securing the Internet. I would hate to think that a simple prank like this would help to bring that nightmare upon us. Given the way CNN's competitors (especially Fox) have been making this non-event into a Big Thing, Clinton and his spinmeister friends might decide that "action" is required.
I've read the linked article twice, and I just can't see how anyone would consider it a "Blast" at Linux or the Linux development model. It's one thing to post pointers to controversial articles, but it's an entirely different thing to attempt to stir up flames with a misleading article header like this.
My respect for Roblimo, which generally has been pretty high, now has taken a serious downturn.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps so, but Yahoo! isn't doing this. This isn't a matter of cultural hegemony. Yahoo! doesn't permit auctions of Nazi paraphernalia on its French site, out of respect to French law and French sensibilities. This case is about what happens on the US auction site, since French citizens can access (and presumably bid on) auctions there for such paraphernalia. These items are quite legal to sell in the US but illegal to sell in France.
Without national firewalls, there just is no way to prevent French citizens from accessing a US site, with the Internet as presently constituted.
Let me suggest that the onus should be on the French citizens who are breaking French laws in France. Consider that if a French citizen bids on and wins a US auction for Nazi paraphernalia, he or she then has the problem of actually receiving the illegal merchandise. It is preventing the physical act of importation that the French should focus on. And that's their responsibility, not Yahoo!'s.
Theoretically, a dual Athlon MB could be made using the Tsunami chipset (Compaq's blindingly fast dual-processor chipset for the Alpha). Unfortunately, the chipset would then cost more than the two Athlons (about $1000), so I don't see this happening soon.
Well, you got closer, but still no cigar.
System V R4.0 was the result of merging a few parts of BSD into System V R3.2 plus providing a compatability layer for much of the rest. It was done by AT&T USG (Unix Systems Group) and Sun (under contract). (STREAMS was already part of System V R3.2, and actually had grown out of the "packet driver" work Bell Labs had started years before Berkeley sockets; Dennis Ritchie himself had devised STREAMS as a way of accommodating a variety of different proptocol stacks and network drivers, though he wasn't happy with the USG's adaptation of it.) This formed the basis for Solaris 2.x. But the USG continued, adding security and SMP features to System V and improving the VM system, resulting in System V R4.2. There was actually a considerable divergence between this system and Solaris 2; Sun did their own SMP and security enhancements starting from the System V R4.0 code base (which they ultimately bought the rights to). Unix and the OS development part of USG was sold to Novell, which marketed System V R4.2 as "Unixware." It was, IMHO, a much better system than Solaris (at the time), but Novell simply couldn't stand to support a product that competed with NetWare, and after a few years of letting Unixware wither on the vine, sold what was left of the USG and System V R4.2 to SCO. SCO wisely dumped their own System V R3.2-based technology as fast as they could, but by that time Linux was becoming a strong competitor--and we all know what's happened since.
I've used professionally every product mentioned above (with the exception of NetWare), and I've used BSD from release 2.4 (which ran on PDP-11's).
It's sad when posts composed of guesswork and half-truths get moderated up by moderators who have even less of a clue. Like one of the earlier posters on this topic, I'm just about ready to abandon Slashdot as the noise has simply drowned out the signal at this point.
You missed my point. Read the policy--it notifies you they will release your information when legally required, and doesn't say that they will notify you first. The ACLU says that they should--or must--notify you first, because of your right to privacy. I agree with the ACLU on this.
You'll see the same sort of language on credit-card agreements and all sorts of other consumer contracts. My understanding (IANAL and all that) is that from a legal standpoint you are considered "notified" when you receive a copy of the agreement for all situations described therein, except for those cases where the agreement provides for further notification.
This is based on my own reading of the policy and not based on any other information from Yahoo! or others. I assume you can say the same for your opinion. But consider this: if you are right, the case boils down to contract law, and thus won't set any precdence with regards to privacy. I doubt that you want that--the ACLU certainly doesn't. (And, yes, I've been a member.)
Ugh. Let me be the first to flame my own grammar. That last sentence should begin:
But the only petards being hoisted here are yours and the moderator's...
Re-read your own post. The clause you quote refers to what Yahoo!'s Privacy Policy document will tell you, not what Yahoo! will or won't tell somebody else. And in fact, if you take the time to read the document itself, (it's pretty long, though more readable than most legalease) you'll see that Yahoo! says they will release personal info when requested to in a legal action. It says nothing about notifying you first.
So there you have it. They have told you "with whom your information may be shared," just as they promised. They have followed their own rules to the letter. Now, you and I may not like the policy they describe; it may not even be a legal policy--I'm sure the ACLU will assert it isn't. But the only petards being hoisted here is you and the moderators who didn't bother to read this, and completely mis-construed the introductory paragraph to their policy as the policy itself.
Yes, but Netscape's parent, AOL, makes relatively more money from service fees than from ads. This feature puts them at a competative advantage to pure-Internet sites which derive a greater fraction of their revenue from ads.
It might be a bit cynical for me to say it, but it is easier to claim that AOL would want to promote this feature than to have it removed.
Unless you opted out of being listed in the Yahoo! member directory, you unfortunately made yourself visible to those nefarious folks who harvest such information. Yahoo! doesn't sell email addresses, but they--and any site with a directory, guest book, user group, chat room, or whatever--are regularly harvested for names.
When in doubt, opt out. Yahoo! at least lets you unlist yourself, though it is too late for you now...
A bit off-topic (however, see the last paragraph) but this has to be said...
No sector rose at the rate of Linux sector, either. And the Linux companies aren't doing any worse than the others who IPO'd at the same time--most are now trading at a fraction of their initial offer price, Linux or no Linux. That has more to do with overall market behavior than anything specific to Linux. In any case, companies live and die by the balance sheet, not their stock price. Recent IPO's will need to trim their sails and perhaps push toward profitability earlier than they might otherwise have done (thus settling for less growth), but some will undoubtedly thrive no matter how bearish the market turns.
You don't seem to be very familiar with these companies (or with how companies are capitalized and grown, for that matter). None of them propose selling free software as their primary source of income; rather, they sell services (integration, support, value-add, and so on). I don't pretend to know if this will wind up being a successful business model or not-- and I don't see how you could know, either. The stock market certainly doesn't--it doesn't need to be any more rational on the way down as it was on the way up.
Stampede isn't a company, but the fate befalling it is a lot like what often happens with small companies: fragmentation due to differences or difficulties in leadership and vision. Although it won't die when it runs out of cash like a company does-- in some ways cashless collaborations such as this are more resiliant-- even if it fails (and it remains to be seen if it will) it hardly reflects on other efforts involving Linux. As for whether RMS, ESR, and the like are visionaries or fools--well, at least they are willing to sign what they believe, unlike trolls and astroturfers such as yourself. And if you think the success or failure of a company or the collapsing of a bubble market has anything to do with the viability of free software-- well, I think we know who the fool is, here.
BSDI is an interesting case, given that they've just had a little encounter with the Open-Source freight train. Although I know it rankles many BSDI fans to hear it, I'm sure that more than one customer has been asking themselves why they should pay thousands of dollars for BSD/OS (or whatever BSDI is calling it thse days) when they can get FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD for free? Well, they are now beginning the process of merging their system with FreeBSD and changing their business model to something more along the lines of a Red Hat. But even then, the fortunes and misfortunes of BSDI are only peripherally related to the success of BSD in general.
The general trends are positive ones. Not only is there the BSDI/FreeBSD latchup, but sharing among the three free BSD's has been increasing, and although it might be a little while before it's reflected in marketing surveys, interest in BSD is on the rise (in part because of the Linux explosion, and in part because of the success of BSD users such as Yahoo!).
Things might be grim in your little neck of the woods. But they look pretty bright in mine.
You posted this same article four times. Yet no matter how many times you say "FreeBSD is in very deep trouble," you say absolutely nothing to support that claim. In fact, the FreeBSD team seems in better shape than it has been in ages, and their latest release, 4.0, shows it. The NetBSD and OpenBSD groups both show more life and vigor than they have in a long time.
It's all a bit like a dog who keeps returning to sniff his own vomit--both your SPAM-posting and this obsessive need you, like some others, seem to have to keep revisiting the whole Theo flame-fest. The whole incident is long in the past, but you just have to keep coming back to sniff at it. (Alas, this same behavior is shared by some of the BSD folks--including some of the participants--but fortunately many of them have been able to turn their differences into a positive force, creating useful technical distinctions and not just meaningless personal ones.)
I suspect that your real motivation is contained in your need to see BSD as somehow "losing." Losing what? This is free software. OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD aren't companies who must maintain market-share or go under--nor is Linux, for that matter. They aren't sports teams or rock bands. They don't need to cannibalize each other's user base to survive. They are all developed by teams that are actually quite a bit more stable and harmonious than most commercial software development teams (where the average developer lasts a bit over a year). They really don't need cheering sections, especially ones composed of gossips nattering away like old ladies over personalities.
Sure does. That's why Nik put the exact same link in the article. The difference is that the earlier article says that Soren has a port working while this one announces that the port is available. Note the difference.
This news probably isn't very interesting to you (which explains your lack of attention), but it's pretty exciting to someone who inherited a Cobalt Qube and wants to put it to work in a way the original plug-and-go configuration didn't anticipate. That's what the 'net is all about--creating and taking advantage of new options. Not everyone with an unused Qube will want to try this (much less put it in production), but there are a lot of them around, so this release is a good thing.
If you're not interested, just move along...
Let's take this one phrase at a time.
Wrap yourself in self-righteousness all you want. She answered all the questions she was given concerning the subject of the interview. Asking for more is simply rude, no matter how strong your desire is for an answer.
It's also irrelevent.
Suppose Rob Malda was being interviewed about the contributions he's made to open-source projects, and the interviewer asked him to defend his support of copyright violation, system cracking, libelous accusations, bad taste, and so on, because he allows anonymous posting on Slashdot. Is that appropriate? Now, I'm sure he can defend himself quite effectively by explaining his views on free speech, and would be quick to point out that he doesn't share the views of everybody who posts to Slashdot. But that's not the purpose of the interview, and it would probably take a lot of his and our time as well as deflecting from the interview's subject. It pulls attention entirely away from the subject at hand--from the realm of information and education to the realm of politics and controversy.
Deb didn't say she would never answer the question (she already has, in other fora). Just that it wasn't appropriate for this interview. The very fact that people were so interested in that particular question--rather than the far more relevent and important issues concerning documentation--shows how much of a distraction it is. For all we know she was burning to answer it, but felt it would be entirely conterproductive to the task at hand.
I don't want a "Decent desktop experience." This isn't sex. I want to get my work done, with a minimum amount of effort and ambiguity as to the means and the result. Most folks are like that. They'll learn a few apps that are core to the tasks they want to perform, and who cares about the rest.
It's the apps, friend, not some imaginary purity of GUI essence. And Delphi is all about creating serviceable apps with reasonable GUI's, quickly and reliably.
That's why this is a very, very good thing.
As for actually using the desktop effectively, neither MS Windows, Mac, or Unices have yet to achieve, much less surpass, what was developed at PARC two decades ago. Lots more eye candy, of course, with functionless, brain-numbing animations and 3D and color. But it's still click, click, drag, de-click.
So I agree with you that "desktop experience" has a long way to go. (Why can't I just draw on my desktop and tell it to "take things like this and combine them with that and perform this and that and then put them there"? The command line lives on because desktops are so poor at exploiting natural visual metaphors.)
But that's not the point.
In a sane legal environment such a disclaimer would not be needed, nor would releasing into the public domain make it more difficult to show libel (after all, it is a person, not the software, which is damaged by libel). Releasing into the public domain should put the entire burden on the user of the software for determining the suitability of that software. So in theory, PD is about as "free" as it gets, both for the author and the user.
Alas, we don't live in a "sane legal environment."
Sound like you've not spent much time in clubs (whether Tokyo or elsewhere). Quiet conversation is impossible. Hell, some places any conversation is impossible. Appearance and "style" rule--they often are the only possible way to choose what new people to meet. A more intelligent reason for going off to a corner and having a (probably shouted) conversation with someone is a Good Thing.
"Intimacy without social interaction" is an oxymoron. Social interaction needs an initiator, especially in large groups in noisy environments. This device can provide that initiator. At that point, as always, you're on your own.
How soon we forget.
There was a time when incineration of much of the civilized world was always 20 minutes away, not 20 years. Whether secondary effects (so-called Nuclear Winter) would have led to eventual extinction or not seem rather beside the point--the world as we knew it would have ended. That it did not happen was, more than many of us realize, a matter of shear blind luck.
There were, and are, only two powers in the world who could bring about such a global catastrophe. The reason for this limitation is more a matter of the enormous cost of producing nuclear weapons than the technological difficulty of doing so. For now, and for the near future, nuclear physics is too expensive for more than just the US and Russia to put civilization at risk.
What Bill fears, I think, is the development of technologies as threatening as those which came from nuclear physics, but without the economic barriers. Consider: what if Moore's law applied to nuclear weapons as well as integrated cicuitry? What if it does apply to the next destructive technology? Or: what if a chain reaction of self-replicating agents--whether biological, nanotechnological, or self-organizing--proves much cheaper than the nuclear variety? By harnessing the existing biological, molecular, or technological environment to its ends, could a technology be created where such replication to worldwide scale came (from the creator's perspective) essentially for free?
The cheaper it becomes to develop the technical means to threaten humanity, the more likely it will be that a state, group, or even person will be insane enough to exploit it. It's the change in economics that increases the danger. Economics explains why New York isn't hip-deep in horse manure just as it explains why basement-lab nuclear weapons don't exist, even though the knowledge necessary to produce them is readily available. Cheaper, faster alternatives became available in the first case. Are we ready for such alternatives in the second case?
I think your extreme attitude helps marginalize Linux rather than support it. A future where open and closed software intertwine (for various values of closed) is not to be feared. Yes, some vendors will gain temporary advantages through concealment, but you show little faith in the power of open source if you believe that its advantages will vanish as soon as such hybrids appear. Other vendors will go the open-source route, and profit from its advantages.
You mention several advantages of open-source, such as better stability and intregration. These are real, solid advantages that potentially give one vendor a leg up over another. In the face of this, it would be unlikely that no vendor would take advantage of those things. Many won't--old habits from the MSWindows domain will die hard--but a few will, and from their success more will be encouraged to do so.
Look at it from another perspective: we're going to get vendors involved in Linux who otherwise wouldn't be involved. Then we'll convert 'em. Not all of them, but the fact remains that opening up a middle ground like this gives us more of a chance of pulling them into the open-source way of doing things than an all-or-nothing attitude will.
Tear down the walls!
Assuming this is the only ISA card in your system (pretty likely on a server), none of the issues you raise are relevent. It doesn't do DMA, its IO needs are small, it doesn't need PnP, it isn't going to need to share IRQ's, parity is a non-issue, and why should the fact that it's a 5V bus make a bit of difference? All the problems you mention would be genuine issues in many other circumstances--but not this one. Once your server is actually up and running, the only thing this board draws from the bus is power. Prior to that, its performance falls squarely in the "good enough for the purpose" category.
It's a sign of a green engineer to reject a solution on irrelevent technical grounds. There are legitimate reasons to reject an ISA solution--such as the fact that newer server boards don't even support it--but the factors that make it a crappy bus for almost any other purpose just don't apply here.
BREAK
At least that's what I use with our Intel N440BX servers. (Yes, some things never seem to change; using BREAK in this way dates back to Teletype days.)
Yes, in fact some people do--from their homes. But I doubt they expect home use to be their main market. In almost all areas only residential phone service is flat-rate, while business rate is metered. Using bonded dialups is expensive, though is some cases it's all that's available. (One exception: Centrex, though even that is usage-charged in some areas; besides, since Centrex is restricted to a single CO, using it doesn't tie up inter-office trunks, which is where the highest cost of a nailed-up dialup accrue.)
It was a poor choice of phrasing, but the fact is that Senator Gore did sponsor the legislation that created NSFNET, which ultimately became what most of us think of as the Internet. At the time, DARPA was cracking down on non-military use of the ARPANET (ultimately creating the MILNET). Most University and Corporate sites (with the exception of those with large military contracts) were to be cut off or forced to pay enormous fees. NSFNET was funded by the National Science Foundation rather than the Pentagon, and although initially limited to research and education, opened the door to access by just about anybody. Commercial restrictions were gradually lifted, and the NSF played a smaller and smaller role (though it still paid for the Internet backbone until just a few years ago). And then things really started to grow like crazy...
As an engineer, what I mean when I say "create" ( == "invent" or "build") is a lot different from what a politician means when he/she says "create" ( == "pass a law" or "spend tax money"). And it was probably one of Gore's staffers and not Gore who actually "got it" on the Internet's potential (both back then and now); he's not shown himself to have any great technical savvy personally. But from his perspective as a politician, "Created the Internet" isn't that far from the truth.
We can only hope that Clinton or one of his advisors knows that this is pretty much a non-event. Remember that he has a high-level policy meeting today to discuss Internet security. I'd rather he didn't have staring in his face what on the surface looks like a blatant example of Internet insecurity.
We simply don't need the US Government's "help" in securing the Internet. I would hate to think that a simple prank like this would help to bring that nightmare upon us. Given the way CNN's competitors (especially Fox) have been making this non-event into a Big Thing, Clinton and his spinmeister friends might decide that "action" is required.
The cost of this prank might be very high...
I've read the linked article twice, and I just can't see how anyone would consider it a "Blast" at Linux or the Linux development model. It's one thing to post pointers to controversial articles, but it's an entirely different thing to attempt to stir up flames with a misleading article header like this.
My respect for Roblimo, which generally has been pretty high, now has taken a serious downturn.