It's so nice to have market-loving, freedom-creating, innovation-pushing Republicans in power. And we all know Republicans are all for limiting the size, scope, and expense of government.
Wait - you're saying they added regulation that limits busineses' freedoms to innovate with broadband and adds invisible costs to the consumer? I thought that was what commies and big-government Democrats do!
I was going to reply to this with, "Well, I can tunnel my connections via SSH to add instant magic security powder," but then I realized - the server I'd be doing the tunneling *to* is on a cable modem, and it'll have all the same backdoors.
I wonder if I can trust my university's networks; maybe I should SSH tunnel to my computer science department account.
I'm not a Debian developer, just a user. Debian uses fakeroot plus a chroot or User-Mode Linux. All this applies to Ubuntu, too, of course.
The standard way is to compile and build using "fakeroot". This program lets the installer chown and chmod all it wants and remembers it until fakeroot exits even though it's being run as an unprivileged user. It sets up PREFIX to be a subdirectory of sourcepackage-n.nn/debian/.
In addition, Debian developers install using a chroot system. There is a package called 'pbuilder' that automates this setup. That way, they get to insulate their system from brokenness, as well as from security holes; they can nuke and re-create the chroot; and they can have multiple chroots for different distribution versions.
In addition to that, there is a uml pbuilder system uses User-Mode Linux instead of a chroot. Combined with copy-on-write filesystems, this can give a package the most pristine environment possible. Pristine environments are important for strict quality control, both of built binary packages and of dependencies.
(I'd avoid flaming Gentoo, but I can't resist; the thing that drive me NUTS was the horrible package quality of Qt and MythTV. The MythTV ebuild didn't force a recompilation of Qt with MySQL support, so it segfaulted on run. Debian has a feature called "Build-depends" and "Depends" that makes (1) compilation of MythTV fail without Qt's MySQL support, and (2) installation of the resulting package fail without Qt's MySQL support. I ran screaming back to Debian after that wasted a day.)
They did release the.config file used to build their kernel. If you don't want to download their whole "fLinux" source tree just to look at it, I put it up on my web space. Give it a look-over; I imagine this would be the easiest component of the device to replace. Modify the kernel with e.g. Sebek and you should be able to get a good idea of what's going on under the hood.
Also, the GNU_Source_Code.zip includes fLinux.tar.gz and games.tar.gz, so if you get the zip file the other two are redundant.
Mr. Grant also said VoIP will open up the telephone services market to greater competition. "Ten years ago, you needed a trillion dollars to get into this business -- now you need $20,000."
The Johns Hopkins University is also replacing its old (old!) Slowaris boxes in the undergraduate computing lab with new Dell workstations running Fedora Core 3.
The old Suns run SunOS 5.6, also called Solaris 2.6. That's before Sun started really running with the Solaris trademark. They had 128 megabytes of RAM, slow-as-molasses X, and could hardly run mozilla. They had SSH version 1 installed.
The new machines have two Pentium 4 chips at 2.80GHz. They have 1024KB of cache. They have 1.5 gigabytes of RAM. I would like to emphasize, they are fast. And they have modern software, which makes life much easier.
Hooray:-). GNU/Linux enables commodity PCs to be useful computer science workstations. In fact, CS hired another administrator with Linux experience to set these up since the primary admin has enough work.
That's why I created a separate account on my server for my and my parents' bookmark files.
That way, if someone does get this password, the worst they can do is change or delete our bookmarks. "The agony!" So the security problems is solved by limiting privileges to ones I don't care all that much about.
I've made a similar project called "Friedfox". This is for when you (1) don't want to carry your Firefox around all the time and (2) can download from the Internet fairly fast. It's also for people like me who just don't believe in hardware. It is a small Firefox installer that installs to a Windows user's profile rather than the system, so it doesn't require Administrator-level access.
In addition, I've streamlined the installer so it's a total of two clicks to install it. Since IE will let you "Open" programs from the web, you can instant-launch the installer by going to http://friedfox.mozdev.org/go . You can check out my cheesy web site for it.
I also have an Internet2-connected machine as the primary mirror for university students.
If you can boot off other media, you can do this easily.
There's always convertfs, which will convert any Linux filesystem to any other (so long as the target supports sparse files): http://tzukanov.narod.ru/convertfs/
And, of course, ext3 being a simple addition to ext2, you can use tune2fs -j to add a journal to any ext2 filesystem. ("Why wait!? Tune2fs today!") Googling for 'convert+ext2+ext3' will tell you all about that.
I've made a similar project called "Friedfox". This is for when you (1) don't want to carry your Firefox around all the time and (2) can download from the Internet fairly fast. It is a small Firefox installer that installs to a Windows user's profile rather than the system, so it doesn't require Administrator-level access. In addition, I've streamlined the installer so it's a total of two clicks to install it.
Okay, so that's not quite enough rationale. But if you think about it, it might be worth offloading the cost to them when you just have develop once: for standards-compliant browsers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla points out that the name "Mozilla" stood for "Mosaic killer" (or Mosaic killa). But IE is the one (of the two) that has this message in Help-> About:
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
You might be interested in checking out "IE7", a CSS and JavaScript package that, when put on a page, pushes IE 5.5 and above into standards compliance. It ranks very high on my neat-hack list. See here: dean.edwards.name/IE7/
I've been running Linux since 1999, and I've never been impressed by the major GUI distributions - they always feel quickly-put-together, like they're elaborate constructions of balsa wood. So, I used Debian, which gave me the power to control the system and high-quality packages to build it into what I wanted.
Lately, I've been using Ubuntu on my laptop, and I love it. It's a clean, simple-to-install, simple-to-administer GNOME-based Debian fork where things just work. Give it a look-over if you're ever in the market for a distribution for other family members. (Karma bonus declined because this is not very on topic.)
When the Eleventh Circuit Court ruled (correctly, in my judgement;-) that "mass, warrantless suspicionless searches" were unacceptable, EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer pointed out on her blog that
I guess I'm thinking more in terms of minute-level response, rather than day-level response, even if just by sharing the washingtonpost.com stream dumps. But it's good to know that suprnova did have them eventually.
(Think back to the '90s: "Political talk on Internet time"!)
After I saw the first debate, I chatted with friends for a while about getting a video of it. Granted, I should have just taped it myself, but I don't have a MythTV setup ready at our new house yet. I considered streamdumping the Washington Post's stream of the event, and that's what I did in the end. But it took ages - streamdumping typically operates at "1x", so this time it took an hour and a half. And anyone else who wanted it would have to do the same slow thing.
My question is, Where can one find political torrents? The debates and this Jon Stewart-on-Crossfire are good examples. Until I saw this on Slashdot, I had no idea where to get this, either. Is there a central repository for these kinds of things, or some other blog I should be reading for links?
Slashdot Mirror
It's so nice to have market-loving, freedom-creating, innovation-pushing Republicans in power. And we all know Republicans are all for limiting the size, scope, and expense of government.
Wait - you're saying they added regulation that limits busineses' freedoms to innovate with broadband and adds invisible costs to the consumer? I thought that was what commies and big-government Democrats do!
I was going to reply to this with, "Well, I can tunnel my connections via SSH to add instant magic security powder," but then I realized - the server I'd be doing the tunneling *to* is on a cable modem, and it'll have all the same backdoors.
I wonder if I can trust my university's networks; maybe I should SSH tunnel to my computer science department account.
Huh.
Slashdot had an article about IE7 in March 2004. You can find more info in the first Google hit for IE7.
I'm curious - what is it like being a lifeguard *and* an IT manager? Does the pay compare?
In fact, slashdot's trolls have more well-informed opinions.
Dvorak hasn't said anything interesting in years. At least the trolls on Slashdot come up with new jokes from time to time.
I'm an INFJ, you insensitive clod!
I'm not a Debian developer, just a user. Debian uses fakeroot plus a chroot or User-Mode Linux. All this applies to Ubuntu, too, of course.
The standard way is to compile and build using "fakeroot". This program lets the installer chown and chmod all it wants and remembers it until fakeroot exits even though it's being run as an unprivileged user. It sets up PREFIX to be a subdirectory of sourcepackage-n.nn/debian/.
In addition, Debian developers install using a chroot system. There is a package called 'pbuilder' that automates this setup. That way, they get to insulate their system from brokenness, as well as from security holes; they can nuke and re-create the chroot; and they can have multiple chroots for different distribution versions.
In addition to that, there is a uml pbuilder system uses User-Mode Linux instead of a chroot. Combined with copy-on-write filesystems, this can give a package the most pristine environment possible. Pristine environments are important for strict quality control, both of built binary packages and of dependencies.
(I'd avoid flaming Gentoo, but I can't resist; the thing that drive me NUTS was the horrible package quality of Qt and MythTV. The MythTV ebuild didn't force a recompilation of Qt with MySQL support, so it segfaulted on run. Debian has a feature called "Build-depends" and "Depends" that makes (1) compilation of MythTV fail without Qt's MySQL support, and (2) installation of the resulting package fail without Qt's MySQL support. I ran screaming back to Debian after that wasted a day.)
They did release the .config file used to build their kernel. If you don't want to download their whole "fLinux" source tree just to look at it, I put it up on my web space. Give it a look-over; I imagine this would be the easiest component of the device to replace. Modify the kernel with e.g. Sebek and you should be able to get a good idea of what's going on under the hood.
Also, the GNU_Source_Code.zip includes fLinux.tar.gz and games.tar.gz, so if you get the zip file the other two are redundant.
I'm curious why you're not using OpenOffice.org so you can worry less about clippy and file formats.
The Johns Hopkins University is also replacing its old (old!) Slowaris boxes in the undergraduate computing lab with new Dell workstations running Fedora Core 3.
:-). GNU/Linux enables commodity PCs to be useful computer science workstations. In fact, CS hired another administrator with Linux experience to set these up since the primary admin has enough work.
The old Suns run SunOS 5.6, also called Solaris 2.6. That's before Sun started really running with the Solaris trademark. They had 128 megabytes of RAM, slow-as-molasses X, and could hardly run mozilla. They had SSH version 1 installed.
The new machines have two Pentium 4 chips at 2.80GHz. They have 1024KB of cache. They have 1.5 gigabytes of RAM. I would like to emphasize, they are fast. And they have modern software, which makes life much easier.
Hooray
That's why I created a separate account on my server for my and my parents' bookmark files.
That way, if someone does get this password, the worst they can do is change or delete our bookmarks. "The agony!" So the security problems is solved by limiting privileges to ones I don't care all that much about.
I've made a similar project called "Friedfox". This is for when you (1) don't want to carry your Firefox around all the time and (2) can download from the Internet fairly fast. It's also for people like me who just don't believe in hardware. It is a small Firefox installer that installs to a Windows user's profile rather than the system, so it doesn't require Administrator-level access.
In addition, I've streamlined the installer so it's a total of two clicks to install it. Since IE will let you "Open" programs from the web, you can instant-launch the installer by going to http://friedfox.mozdev.org/go . You can check out my cheesy web site for it.
I also have an Internet2-connected machine as the primary mirror for university students.
If you can boot off other media, you can do this easily.
There's always convertfs, which will convert any Linux filesystem to any other (so long as the target supports sparse files): http://tzukanov.narod.ru/convertfs/
And, of course, ext3 being a simple addition to ext2, you can use tune2fs -j to add a journal to any ext2 filesystem. ("Why wait!? Tune2fs today!") Googling for 'convert+ext2+ext3' will tell you all about that.
I've made a similar project called "Friedfox". This is for when you (1) don't want to carry your Firefox around all the time and (2) can download from the Internet fairly fast. It is a small Firefox installer that installs to a Windows user's profile rather than the system, so it doesn't require Administrator-level access. In addition, I've streamlined the installer so it's a total of two clicks to install it.
Since IE will let you "Open" programs from the web, you can instant-launch the installer by going to http://friedfox.mozdev.org/go.
You can check out my cheesy web site for it.
I plan to set up a separate Internet2 mirror for college students soon. I'll announce this on the mailing list within a week or two.
* paulproteus ducks
Okay, so that's not quite enough rationale. But if you think about it, it might be worth offloading the cost to them when you just have develop once: for standards-compliant browsers.
http://ieview.mozdev.org/ has a Firefox extension that lets you "Right-click -> Open in IE".
You might be interested in checking out "IE7", a CSS and JavaScript package that, when put on a page, pushes IE 5.5 and above into standards compliance. It ranks very high on my neat-hack list. See here: dean.edwards.name/IE7/
I've been running Linux since 1999, and I've never been impressed by the major GUI distributions - they always feel quickly-put-together, like they're elaborate constructions of balsa wood. So, I used Debian, which gave me the power to control the system and high-quality packages to build it into what I wanted.
Lately, I've been using Ubuntu on my laptop, and I love it. It's a clean, simple-to-install, simple-to-administer GNOME-based Debian fork where things just work. Give it a look-over if you're ever in the market for a distribution for other family members. (Karma bonus declined because this is not very on topic.)
(Now, granted, it's fair game to make fun of him for his spelling of encyclypedia.)
I believe that's now the worst part of your weekend.
I guess I'm thinking more in terms of minute-level response, rather than day-level response, even if just by sharing the washingtonpost.com stream dumps. But it's good to know that suprnova did have them eventually.
(Think back to the '90s: "Political talk on Internet time"!)
After I saw the first debate, I chatted with friends for a while about getting a video of it. Granted, I should have just taped it myself, but I don't have a MythTV setup ready at our new house yet. I considered streamdumping the Washington Post's stream of the event, and that's what I did in the end. But it took ages - streamdumping typically operates at "1x", so this time it took an hour and a half. And anyone else who wanted it would have to do the same slow thing.
My question is, Where can one find political torrents? The debates and this Jon Stewart-on-Crossfire are good examples. Until I saw this on Slashdot, I had no idea where to get this, either. Is there a central repository for these kinds of things, or some other blog I should be reading for links?