Big difference is, netscape wasn't synonymous with web browsing.
Oh, but it was, back in the day...
It may not have been verbified like "google",
but back before Netscape 4 started its long decline
into instability and ultimate irrelevancy, it had as much of the market (~65%)
as Google does now.
Just because they fixed it before it was reported doesn't
mean it never existed -- or that it was never quietly
exploited.
This sort of semantic game detracts from the hard
work that goes into OpenBSD.
It may be no worse than the sort of word games used to
market other software, but in an area like security where
trust is paramount it needlessly raises suspicion.
I think some folks would disagree that libthr wasn't successful -- libkse seemed for all intents and purposes stalled until libthr came along and gave it a kick in the pants. In addition, libthr helped show how the KSE mechanism had a clean enough separation of policy and implementation to support alternative models. If at some point it's decided that the M:N model doesn't work out -- even for just a limited number of applications -- an alternative could quickly be made available. Although KSE's still aren't entirely without controversy (they complicates development and upkeep in several areas of the kernel), libthr did a lot to calm people's fears at a critical point.
"Kernel threads" will now be the default instead of "user threads."
(Many BSDers cringe at this use of the term "kernel threads," since to them it represents the misapplication of a term apropriate only to a thread that runs entirely within the kernel.
But the above is a usage common in the Linux world.)
This is a key step on the way to finishing the work for
FreeBSD 5 and moving on to FreeBSD 6.
It incorporates a highly sophisticated (some would say over-sophisticated) M:N threading
system; this is where a new kernel-scheduled context is
created only for threads that the userland scheduler thinks
may block as opposed to having a kernel context for each
thread like Linux does.
It remains to be seen if the theoretical advantages of this
approach will be turned into real-world advantages.
I suspect that it will be a while before we know;
although libkse has proven stable of late, there will
be lots of additional
experience acquired now that it is the default and no
doubt this will result in further tuning.
Congrats to the FreeBSD team! This and the (not entirely
unrelated) SMPng subsystem were the biggest steps on the way
to getting FreeBSD 5 ready to take the FreeBSD mantle.
It was a gamble going this route rather than the "safe"
alternative of a 1:1 model, and there were times
when a number of folks wondered if libkse would ever
be finished.
Well, now it is!
My most vivid Yugo recollection was seeing the transmission
on a new one sieze up in the middle of an intersection --
during a test drive.
The look on the car salesman's face was priceless...
as was the consternation of the guy driving it.
This box, along with three others like it with similar
loads and uptimes, has been up
since it was moved into its present datacenter.
I could have had the OS upgraded to 4.3-STABLE at
that time, but these systems had been so reliable in their previous
datacenter that we just left them alone.
You're right about it being a cartoon based on the famous
statue of planting the flag at Iwo Jima.
But in your rush to bash "cultural bias" you failed
to consider that US veterans might be similarly
offended.
That statue has deep significance to WW-II veterans,
and the NetBSD logo trivializes it.
I can buy the really cool bands that I listened to as a young teenager.
Sigh.
Most of the artists on Warp weren't even born when I was
a young teenager.
But unlike the grandparent post, I've heard of
(and heard) most of them.
The influence of Warp artists on electronic music
is second to none, and no one can claim knowledge of
the genre who hasn't heard of them.
And given the influence electronic music now has on
popular music in general, I'd say that Warp has importance
far beyond its size.
Brittany may never have heard of Autechre, but you can
bet that several of the producers on her last
album have.
I had a 21-inch CRT monitor that drew 65-100 watts,
depending upon brightness setting, scan rates, and what was being
displayed.
I replaced it with a 20-inch LCD, which draws 35-55 watts,
depending solely upon brightness setting -- the majority of
that power no doubt goes to the backlight.
These numbers are pretty typical (at least among folks I've
loaned my power metter to).
If there were no copyright, there would be no need for the copyleft -- it would be the default.
You're being silly.
Without copyright the "default" would be the public
domain, which would mean that anyone could modify
sourcecode, base a product on it, and keep their
modifications secret.
They wouldn't even have to give credit.
RMS's original motivation for the GPL, to prevent
vendors from hoarding the sourcecode used
in their products, would be
utterly unfulfilled without a mechanism to
compel the revelation of that code.
The GPL limits copying, just like any other copyright-based
instrument - it's not a "hack" of copyright.
Perhaps the fact that the GPL's terms are contrary
to those usually applied by copyright holders
blinds you to this.
The limits it puts on copying -- roughly, if you make
copies of GPL'd software you must agree to make
modifications available under the GPL's terms -- fall
squarely into the realm of copyright.
This is the
right of authors or assignees to limit copying to those
circumstances they desire (which often is no copying
at all, subject to "fair use" limits, but could be
nearly any set of limitations or lack thereof).
I'm not denying that copyright holders do harm with
over-restrictive terms, or that the copyright law
itself should be overhauled or legal extensions
to copyright like the DCMA should be eliminated.
But copyright itself, as the essential source of
the legal rights of authors, isn't in itself a bad
thing.
Abolish it only if you have found a better way
to secure those rights (or believe that authors
shouldn't have them).
I've been through enough corporate presentations that
were a hairsbreadth from Saturday Night Live skits
that it's no surprise people won't see the point of a satire of them.
Satire is becoming a dead form, anyway.
We're in an age where the rantings of pundits on the Left
and the Right are indistinguishable from satire.
So it's no surprise that even people who RTFA'd missed
Byrne's intent.
Humans are the ones most responsible for finding these cures, not "nature" (if you can even really seperate the two concepts).
Yes, of course humans are part of nature.
The grandparent subject represents one of the more pernicious
misconceptions people commonly hold (that humans are
somehow outside of nature, whether above, below, or beyond
it).
But take your thought one step further: nature is
parsimonious -- it tends to reuse molecules (not by any
"intent," but because of the physical chemistry of DNA and
proteins).
So the molecules we find in other plants and animals
are far from randomly related to those in our own bodies.
That's why a molecule of chlorophyl and a molecule of
hemoglobin have a lot of structural similarities.
That's why there are plant proteins that behave like
human hormones.
So the original poster may be wrong-headed, but he's
not altogether wrong.
Plants and animals are a rich vein of potentially
pharmacologically useful molecules (and of genes
encoding those molecules). And even though we've come
a long, long way in molecular biology, we still have
a long, long way to go before we can replicate what
several billion years of nature has "discovered."
You'd think someone would market a tablet with integrated
LCD monitor for designers and graphic artists.
In many cases you don't need to put those watt-sucking, heat-spewing
CPU's and GPU's inside the damn tablet.
Of 23 comments currently at score 0 or above, perhaps
three have something relevant to say about the sysctl
subsystem in NetBSD, and only one of these
has any technical content.
Around half of the Score 0 comments are trolls.
I'd estimate that now, a full day after the article was
posted, only about half of the needed mod points have been
expended.
Yes, downrating AC's eliminates much of the noise,
but it also eliminates a significant fraction of
any useful content.
I don't consider it a solution.
About a year and a half ago, before the trolls got the
upper hand, it wouldn't have been at all surprising to
have the author of something like the sysctl rework
post several responses (usually as an AC), and a
fruitful technical
discussion would ensue.
Such people now don't bother, even when someone like me
bothers to tell them that there is a story on Slashdot
about their project.
Moderation is too little and too late for this situation.
Here's another way that moderation can create a hostile
environment: it is frequently used to enforce the majority view
or to suppress dissent.
(Just ask anyone who tries to say something even
remotely positive about Microsoft.)
Thus it has a lot to do with the development of a
peer-pressure-based herd mentality.
There are as many posts as there ever were, but in my
humble opinion fewer and fewer of them have anything
interesting to say.
The Slashdot take on a given subject is often so one-dimensional
that it is almost entirely predictable.
I blame moderation for this.
For a BSD example, consider what the accepted Slashdot
wisdom is concerning the BSD license:
it allows code to be "stolen" and tied up inside
proprietary systems.
Consider this recent post.
I'll not bother to refute it here; see my response to it.
My point concerns the fact that it got upmodded four times (and if you spend some time going through the
rest of the discussion you'll see that it's hardly
an isolated case).
This kind of Slashdottiness is just another example of
how moderation is broken and simply adds to the
frustration of groups like BSD fans rather than
helping clear the air for them.
Well, that's enough commentary on this for this year.
(And at this point I'm really not expecting there to
be a next year; Slashdot has become of marginal use
to me, with its BSD hostility being only a minor factor but a pretty stark example of what's broken.)
Moderators are selected from the Slashdot community, and
so have the same biases.
Six months ago I would have said that the Slashdot
BSD section had a trolling problem.
I think it's pretty clear now that Slashdot itself is
a good part of the problem.
Slashdot has taken the
attitude that the BSD community is responsible for
cleaning up the problem via moderation, and failure to
do so means that the community doesn't care.
Since the community doesn't care enough, the reasoning goes,
BSD really is, in some sense, dying and not worth saving.
But this makes two assumptions that are easily shown to
be false:
If the BSD community
(or other small community within Slashdot) cares to
use it, moderation can effectively
clean up the trolls, crap floods,
and so forth.
This ignores the asymmetry of the situation.
A crapflooder with a dialup connection and an idle
hour or two can post dozens of messages.
For this, several community members have to use up
all of their weekly (if they're lucky) mod points,
knowing full well
that the same misfit can come back and do it again
minutes later.
There aren't that many more trolls or crap flooders in
the more popular sections but there are a lot more
moderators, so no one has to blow their entire
allotment of mod points dealing with miscreants.
(And I might note that all the complaints about
trolls and crapflooding here indicate a community
that would deal with the situation if it had the mod
points to do it.)
Moderation is self-regulating.
The fallacy of this belief was brought home to
me not long ago when I was metamoderated "unfair"
twice in succession for down-moderating obvious trolls in
the BSD section.
And, as many of us have noted lately, there are
an increasing number of irrelevant postings and even
blatant trolls getting positive mods.
Once again, the supposed self-correcting nature of
moderation fails for lower-trafficked sections.
This is actually just the tip of an iceberg which
threatens to smash Slashdot into a chaotic free-for-all;
I don't think the BSD section is likely to be an
isolated case for long (if this is even the case now).
Just skim through the postings on nearly any technophile
(i.e. geeky) subject, and see how little interest there
is for true "News for Nerds" any more.
At least the half the posts will be "Who the hell thinks
this is interesting enough for an article?" or
"Hasn't this been done before?"
There is little moderation and it can take some time before
the trolls and crapfloods get mopped up.
On the other hand, each tidbit from the SCO or RIAA affairs
gets many hundreds
of highly-moderated "Ain't it awful" posts, and at least
for the first several hours obvious
trolls get squashed in minutes.
(This despite the fact that very little is
newly Insightful or Informative any more
on thse subjects, or even much left that is
Interesting.)
I'm sure that Slashdot gets loads of ad impressions when
they run these stories, however, and perhaps the cynics
who claim that this is the reason Slashdot runs
them are right.
But that's irrelevant; the fact is that as a result of
these stories Slashdot's
content is getting softer and softer, and therefore
the average Slashdotter is more likely to be only a camp
follower of
the technophile community, driven by peer influence
rather than an actual passion for computers and technology.
This is all grossly off-topic (except in the sense that
Slashdot is a proper topic for a posting on Slashdot),
and I expect some Offtopic moderations as a result.
But over the years I've seen Slashdot becoming a bloated
caricature of its former self, and this seemed as good
a time as any to speak up.
This is pure FUD.
No one can make BSD code proprietary.
Yes, they can add their own stuff to it, and keep their
version to themselves.
But the origial code is as free as it ever was.
The only way for a competitor to "freeze you out"
is for them to enhance the codebase to such an extent
that you can't do so yourself.
And at that point I think there might be a credible
argument that the creator of those enhancements
deserves to profit from them if they wish.
You may argue differently -- I've no problem with
folks who want to exclude this option, or with the GPL
itself.
But the fact remains, BSD-licensed code remains free
no matter what someone makes out of it, contrary to
what some people claim.
The ifconfig thread is interesting from a number of
perspectives.
Given that ifconfig is perhaps the
command-line utility embodying BSD's decades-old
networking legacy, it takes some courage to propose a radical
reworking of it.
Using a formal grammar rather than the ad hoc
accretion of command-line options that 95% of Unix/Linux
utilities use is another bold step.
And opening the way to added functionality (one of the
motivations for this project) adds to the interest.
Sure, just looking at the surface it's easy to say
"so they're changing some arguments to some crufty
old Unix command -- ho hum."
But it may well represent the initial step
in a complete rethinking of how
networking is administered at the host level.
Even if it doesn't pan out that way,
it's worth taking notice.
BTW,
I don't moderate BSD stories any more.
When I mod down the trolls, I tend to get slammed in metamod.
(Talk about a hostile environment!)
Hope springs eternal, though -- I keep thinking that/. will eventually start doing some housekeeping.
You forgot a microwave, toaster oven, coffee maker --
all essential dorm-room gear; it's easy to draw 2000 watts
during breakfast with these three things alone.
Also, don't forget that this is/., so it's unlikely
that there's just one computer.
I think this is in reference to the System V/Linux
compatibility library Caldera had developed,
which was based on System V code and allowed
System V software to run on Linux.
(Last I checked, SCO was still marketing this
product.)
They wanted to make it so that the only
way to run System V software on Linux was to
license this library.
("Sure, you can drop SCO for Linux while preserving
your software base, but it will cost you...")
Even this is controversial since it relies on the
claim that the independent re-implementations of the
System V ABI (which both Linux and BSD had) were
illegal.
But McBride and Company thought they could take
this a whole lot farther, as we've seen...
If you feel that way, install the CUPS port and be happy.
When it works for a given situation
(about 85% of the time) CUPS is
simple and fast to set up.
But when things go wrong, you'll see just how complicated
CUPS really is.
It's nice to have a simpler (implementation-wise) method
available to deal with such situations.
Your post is so typical of what I see on Slashdot
these days.
Why use BSD when you have Linux?
Why use some other processor when you have Intel?
Why use another browser when you have Mozilla?
It's the high-school herd mentality.
It's "geek chic."
It's a lazy way to avoid learning in depth and developing
your own base of experiences and opinions.
I'm not on your list, but you've motivated me to drag out
the drive and do some tests -- when I have the spare time
(which might not be until 2004).
You probably feel the same way about Yamaha's that I do
about HP's (I've had two of the latter fail right around
warranty expiration).
I suspected heat problems killed the first drive
so I made sure that the second HP and the Yamaha
were installed in a case that was cool and had good airflow
over the drive area.
Given that the Yamaha burned a few hundred CD-R's with nary a coaster over two years I've some doubt that it was on the
verge of dying, but you may be right...
Don't be silly.
I'm the reason Leno's announcer had to add the extra D.
But here's some friendly advice: if your name really is
"Edd Hall" you better be ready to add a third "d" by
the time Edd's and my lawyers are through with you.
I once had nearly an entire 25 pack of Memorex CDRW's that were crap right out of the store.
I had a similar experience (or so I thought at the time).
About 50% of a spindle of cheap 10x CD-RW's simply failed
even after repeated attempts to blank and reburn them.
Fortunately, I threw all the CD-RW's that failed into
my coaster pile rather than the trash, since about a year
later after I had replaced my CD burner I discovered that
every single one of them worked fine.
The failing burner was a Yamaha SCSI unit that I
paid about $200 for four years ago; it was (and
probably still would be) quite reliable with other media,
but it was only a 24x8x8x unit, which is why I replaced
it.
Its replacement, a Sony 48x24x48x IDE unit (rumored
to be a rebadged Liteon), cost $50 on sale.
It, too, seems to work with everything I throw at it --
including those CD-RW's the Yamaha couldn't deal with.
I suspect that drive/media incompatibility is more common
than most people think.
Some reports of failing media may be due to media that was
marginally recorded to begin with due to such
incompatibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, but it was, back in the day... It may not have been verbified like "google", but back before Netscape 4 started its long decline into instability and ultimate irrelevancy, it had as much of the market (~65%) as Google does now.
Don't be silly. Kid's toys use mountains of them.
Just because they fixed it before it was reported doesn't mean it never existed -- or that it was never quietly exploited. This sort of semantic game detracts from the hard work that goes into OpenBSD. It may be no worse than the sort of word games used to market other software, but in an area like security where trust is paramount it needlessly raises suspicion.
I think some folks would disagree that libthr wasn't successful -- libkse seemed for all intents and purposes stalled until libthr came along and gave it a kick in the pants. In addition, libthr helped show how the KSE mechanism had a clean enough separation of policy and implementation to support alternative models. If at some point it's decided that the M:N model doesn't work out -- even for just a limited number of applications -- an alternative could quickly be made available. Although KSE's still aren't entirely without controversy (they complicates development and upkeep in several areas of the kernel), libthr did a lot to calm people's fears at a critical point.
"Kernel threads" will now be the default instead of "user threads." (Many BSDers cringe at this use of the term "kernel threads," since to them it represents the misapplication of a term apropriate only to a thread that runs entirely within the kernel. But the above is a usage common in the Linux world.)
This is a key step on the way to finishing the work for FreeBSD 5 and moving on to FreeBSD 6. It incorporates a highly sophisticated (some would say over-sophisticated) M:N threading system; this is where a new kernel-scheduled context is created only for threads that the userland scheduler thinks may block as opposed to having a kernel context for each thread like Linux does. It remains to be seen if the theoretical advantages of this approach will be turned into real-world advantages. I suspect that it will be a while before we know; although libkse has proven stable of late, there will be lots of additional experience acquired now that it is the default and no doubt this will result in further tuning.
Congrats to the FreeBSD team! This and the (not entirely unrelated) SMPng subsystem were the biggest steps on the way to getting FreeBSD 5 ready to take the FreeBSD mantle. It was a gamble going this route rather than the "safe" alternative of a 1:1 model, and there were times when a number of folks wondered if libkse would ever be finished. Well, now it is!
My most vivid Yugo recollection was seeing the transmission on a new one sieze up in the middle of an intersection -- during a test drive. The look on the car salesman's face was priceless... as was the consternation of the guy driving it.
That's nothing. This is a server that averages 12 million hits a day, updating a custom database on each hit:
This box, along with three others like it with similar loads and uptimes, has been up since it was moved into its present datacenter. I could have had the OS upgraded to 4.3-STABLE at that time, but these systems had been so reliable in their previous datacenter that we just left them alone.
You're right about it being a cartoon based on the famous statue of planting the flag at Iwo Jima. But in your rush to bash "cultural bias" you failed to consider that US veterans might be similarly offended. That statue has deep significance to WW-II veterans, and the NetBSD logo trivializes it.
Sigh. Most of the artists on Warp weren't even born when I was a young teenager. But unlike the grandparent post, I've heard of (and heard) most of them. The influence of Warp artists on electronic music is second to none, and no one can claim knowledge of the genre who hasn't heard of them. And given the influence electronic music now has on popular music in general, I'd say that Warp has importance far beyond its size. Brittany may never have heard of Autechre, but you can bet that several of the producers on her last album have.
I had a 21-inch CRT monitor that drew 65-100 watts, depending upon brightness setting, scan rates, and what was being displayed. I replaced it with a 20-inch LCD, which draws 35-55 watts, depending solely upon brightness setting -- the majority of that power no doubt goes to the backlight. These numbers are pretty typical (at least among folks I've loaned my power metter to).
You're being silly. Without copyright the "default" would be the public domain, which would mean that anyone could modify sourcecode, base a product on it, and keep their modifications secret. They wouldn't even have to give credit. RMS's original motivation for the GPL, to prevent vendors from hoarding the sourcecode used in their products, would be utterly unfulfilled without a mechanism to compel the revelation of that code.
The GPL limits copying, just like any other copyright-based instrument - it's not a "hack" of copyright. Perhaps the fact that the GPL's terms are contrary to those usually applied by copyright holders blinds you to this. The limits it puts on copying -- roughly, if you make copies of GPL'd software you must agree to make modifications available under the GPL's terms -- fall squarely into the realm of copyright. This is the right of authors or assignees to limit copying to those circumstances they desire (which often is no copying at all, subject to "fair use" limits, but could be nearly any set of limitations or lack thereof).
I'm not denying that copyright holders do harm with over-restrictive terms, or that the copyright law itself should be overhauled or legal extensions to copyright like the DCMA should be eliminated. But copyright itself, as the essential source of the legal rights of authors, isn't in itself a bad thing. Abolish it only if you have found a better way to secure those rights (or believe that authors shouldn't have them).
I've been through enough corporate presentations that were a hairsbreadth from Saturday Night Live skits that it's no surprise people won't see the point of a satire of them. Satire is becoming a dead form, anyway. We're in an age where the rantings of pundits on the Left and the Right are indistinguishable from satire. So it's no surprise that even people who RTFA'd missed Byrne's intent.
Yes, of course humans are part of nature. The grandparent subject represents one of the more pernicious misconceptions people commonly hold (that humans are somehow outside of nature, whether above, below, or beyond it). But take your thought one step further: nature is parsimonious -- it tends to reuse molecules (not by any "intent," but because of the physical chemistry of DNA and proteins). So the molecules we find in other plants and animals are far from randomly related to those in our own bodies. That's why a molecule of chlorophyl and a molecule of hemoglobin have a lot of structural similarities. That's why there are plant proteins that behave like human hormones.
So the original poster may be wrong-headed, but he's not altogether wrong. Plants and animals are a rich vein of potentially pharmacologically useful molecules (and of genes encoding those molecules). And even though we've come a long, long way in molecular biology, we still have a long, long way to go before we can replicate what several billion years of nature has "discovered."
You've never known someone with terminal cancer, have you? Cancers differ, but most of them are a pretty damn painful and lingering death.
You'd think someone would market a tablet with integrated LCD monitor for designers and graphic artists. In many cases you don't need to put those watt-sucking, heat-spewing CPU's and GPU's inside the damn tablet.
Of 23 comments currently at score 0 or above, perhaps three have something relevant to say about the sysctl subsystem in NetBSD, and only one of these has any technical content. Around half of the Score 0 comments are trolls. I'd estimate that now, a full day after the article was posted, only about half of the needed mod points have been expended.
Yes, downrating AC's eliminates much of the noise, but it also eliminates a significant fraction of any useful content. I don't consider it a solution.About a year and a half ago, before the trolls got the upper hand, it wouldn't have been at all surprising to have the author of something like the sysctl rework post several responses (usually as an AC), and a fruitful technical discussion would ensue. Such people now don't bother, even when someone like me bothers to tell them that there is a story on Slashdot about their project.
Moderation is too little and too late for this situation.
Here's another way that moderation can create a hostile environment: it is frequently used to enforce the majority view or to suppress dissent. (Just ask anyone who tries to say something even remotely positive about Microsoft.) Thus it has a lot to do with the development of a peer-pressure-based herd mentality. There are as many posts as there ever were, but in my humble opinion fewer and fewer of them have anything interesting to say. The Slashdot take on a given subject is often so one-dimensional that it is almost entirely predictable. I blame moderation for this.
For a BSD example, consider what the accepted Slashdot wisdom is concerning the BSD license: it allows code to be "stolen" and tied up inside proprietary systems. Consider this recent post. I'll not bother to refute it here; see my response to it. My point concerns the fact that it got upmodded four times (and if you spend some time going through the rest of the discussion you'll see that it's hardly an isolated case). This kind of Slashdottiness is just another example of how moderation is broken and simply adds to the frustration of groups like BSD fans rather than helping clear the air for them.
Well, that's enough commentary on this for this year. (And at this point I'm really not expecting there to be a next year; Slashdot has become of marginal use to me, with its BSD hostility being only a minor factor but a pretty stark example of what's broken.)
Moderators are selected from the Slashdot community, and so have the same biases. Six months ago I would have said that the Slashdot BSD section had a trolling problem. I think it's pretty clear now that Slashdot itself is a good part of the problem.
Slashdot has taken the attitude that the BSD community is responsible for cleaning up the problem via moderation, and failure to do so means that the community doesn't care. Since the community doesn't care enough, the reasoning goes, BSD really is, in some sense, dying and not worth saving. But this makes two assumptions that are easily shown to be false:
This ignores the asymmetry of the situation. A crapflooder with a dialup connection and an idle hour or two can post dozens of messages. For this, several community members have to use up all of their weekly (if they're lucky) mod points, knowing full well that the same misfit can come back and do it again minutes later.
There aren't that many more trolls or crap flooders in the more popular sections but there are a lot more moderators, so no one has to blow their entire allotment of mod points dealing with miscreants. (And I might note that all the complaints about trolls and crapflooding here indicate a community that would deal with the situation if it had the mod points to do it.)
The fallacy of this belief was brought home to me not long ago when I was metamoderated "unfair" twice in succession for down-moderating obvious trolls in the BSD section. And, as many of us have noted lately, there are an increasing number of irrelevant postings and even blatant trolls getting positive mods. Once again, the supposed self-correcting nature of moderation fails for lower-trafficked sections.
This is actually just the tip of an iceberg which threatens to smash Slashdot into a chaotic free-for-all; I don't think the BSD section is likely to be an isolated case for long (if this is even the case now). Just skim through the postings on nearly any technophile (i.e. geeky) subject, and see how little interest there is for true "News for Nerds" any more. At least the half the posts will be "Who the hell thinks this is interesting enough for an article?" or "Hasn't this been done before?" There is little moderation and it can take some time before the trolls and crapfloods get mopped up.
On the other hand, each tidbit from the SCO or RIAA affairs gets many hundreds of highly-moderated "Ain't it awful" posts, and at least for the first several hours obvious trolls get squashed in minutes. (This despite the fact that very little is newly Insightful or Informative any more on thse subjects, or even much left that is Interesting.) I'm sure that Slashdot gets loads of ad impressions when they run these stories, however, and perhaps the cynics who claim that this is the reason Slashdot runs them are right. But that's irrelevant; the fact is that as a result of these stories Slashdot's content is getting softer and softer, and therefore the average Slashdotter is more likely to be only a camp follower of the technophile community, driven by peer influence rather than an actual passion for computers and technology.
This is all grossly off-topic (except in the sense that Slashdot is a proper topic for a posting on Slashdot), and I expect some Offtopic moderations as a result. But over the years I've seen Slashdot becoming a bloated caricature of its former self, and this seemed as good a time as any to speak up.
This is pure FUD. No one can make BSD code proprietary. Yes, they can add their own stuff to it, and keep their version to themselves. But the origial code is as free as it ever was. The only way for a competitor to "freeze you out" is for them to enhance the codebase to such an extent that you can't do so yourself. And at that point I think there might be a credible argument that the creator of those enhancements deserves to profit from them if they wish. You may argue differently -- I've no problem with folks who want to exclude this option, or with the GPL itself. But the fact remains, BSD-licensed code remains free no matter what someone makes out of it, contrary to what some people claim.
The ifconfig thread is interesting from a number of perspectives. Given that ifconfig is perhaps the command-line utility embodying BSD's decades-old networking legacy, it takes some courage to propose a radical reworking of it. Using a formal grammar rather than the ad hoc accretion of command-line options that 95% of Unix/Linux utilities use is another bold step. And opening the way to added functionality (one of the motivations for this project) adds to the interest. Sure, just looking at the surface it's easy to say "so they're changing some arguments to some crufty old Unix command -- ho hum." But it may well represent the initial step in a complete rethinking of how networking is administered at the host level. Even if it doesn't pan out that way, it's worth taking notice.
BTW, I don't moderate BSD stories any more. When I mod down the trolls, I tend to get slammed in metamod. (Talk about a hostile environment!) Hope springs eternal, though -- I keep thinking that /. will eventually start doing some housekeeping.
You forgot a microwave, toaster oven, coffee maker -- all essential dorm-room gear; it's easy to draw 2000 watts during breakfast with these three things alone. Also, don't forget that this is /., so it's unlikely
that there's just one computer.
I think this is in reference to the System V/Linux compatibility library Caldera had developed, which was based on System V code and allowed System V software to run on Linux. (Last I checked, SCO was still marketing this product.) They wanted to make it so that the only way to run System V software on Linux was to license this library. ("Sure, you can drop SCO for Linux while preserving your software base, but it will cost you...")
Even this is controversial since it relies on the claim that the independent re-implementations of the System V ABI (which both Linux and BSD had) were illegal. But McBride and Company thought they could take this a whole lot farther, as we've seen...
If you feel that way, install the CUPS port and be happy. When it works for a given situation (about 85% of the time) CUPS is simple and fast to set up. But when things go wrong, you'll see just how complicated CUPS really is. It's nice to have a simpler (implementation-wise) method available to deal with such situations.
Your post is so typical of what I see on Slashdot these days. Why use BSD when you have Linux? Why use some other processor when you have Intel? Why use another browser when you have Mozilla? It's the high-school herd mentality. It's "geek chic." It's a lazy way to avoid learning in depth and developing your own base of experiences and opinions.
It's depressing.
I'm not on your list, but you've motivated me to drag out the drive and do some tests -- when I have the spare time (which might not be until 2004).
You probably feel the same way about Yamaha's that I do about HP's (I've had two of the latter fail right around warranty expiration). I suspected heat problems killed the first drive so I made sure that the second HP and the Yamaha were installed in a case that was cool and had good airflow over the drive area. Given that the Yamaha burned a few hundred CD-R's with nary a coaster over two years I've some doubt that it was on the verge of dying, but you may be right...
Don't be silly. I'm the reason Leno's announcer had to add the extra D. But here's some friendly advice: if your name really is "Edd Hall" you better be ready to add a third "d" by the time Edd's and my lawyers are through with you.
I had a similar experience (or so I thought at the time). About 50% of a spindle of cheap 10x CD-RW's simply failed even after repeated attempts to blank and reburn them. Fortunately, I threw all the CD-RW's that failed into my coaster pile rather than the trash, since about a year later after I had replaced my CD burner I discovered that every single one of them worked fine.
The failing burner was a Yamaha SCSI unit that I paid about $200 for four years ago; it was (and probably still would be) quite reliable with other media, but it was only a 24x8x8x unit, which is why I replaced it. Its replacement, a Sony 48x24x48x IDE unit (rumored to be a rebadged Liteon), cost $50 on sale. It, too, seems to work with everything I throw at it -- including those CD-RW's the Yamaha couldn't deal with.
I suspect that drive/media incompatibility is more common than most people think. Some reports of failing media may be due to media that was marginally recorded to begin with due to such incompatibility.