Re:english translation of the interview
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RMS The Coder
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· Score: 2
As is common with interviews, it was most likely a transcript of a recorded conversation; the mistakes are those of the person who retyped it. (See the earlier comment about the error in RMS's statement regarding the #pragma hack.)
Re:Idea: Bring RMS and Theo de Raadt together!
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 2
Something like the Richter scale (in which an increase of 1 indicates that the earthquake was thirty times more powerful)?
Let's call it the Stallman scale, then. RMS is a 10-Stallman; Theo is about an 8-Stallman, I would guess; Linus varies between a 3-Stallman and a 6-Stallman; Alan Cox is a 1-Stallman; Tom Christiansen is a 7-Stallman.
Logarithmic, of course, so RMS is about 100 times more difficult than Theo, and about 1000 million times more difficult than AC;)
Don't you just hate geek impulse buying? Last week, I saw a 600MHz Alpha workstation for $1600 and bought it on the spur of the moment. My wife's gonna kill me...
Well, since your friend likes IBM keyboards enough to be using one for more than five years, it's probably a good idea to get him a new one of the same or similar type.
I picked up two genuine IBM keyboards (with the clicky keys!) at Unicomp (www.pckeyboard.com), which is located in Lexington. At the time, I paid $49 for each, which might seem a little expensive, but these things last forever.
Be warned that Unicomp's home page can be unavailable; the easiest way to order from them is through Yahoo. Try looking here for the classic IBM keyboard, or check out their whole range from the top page here.
This debate has been going on for a long time - TV was a big offender in the 70s and early 80s, movies got a lot more violent in the 80s and caught their share of flak, and from the end of the 80s it's been common for people to point the finger at videogames/computer games. It still doesn't change the fact that there has never been any hard evidence for a relationship between fantasy violence and real violence.
Personally speaking, I believe that there is a link; but it takes two to tango, and you need someone who is already on a hair-trigger for them to be stimulated enough by a game to injure or kill someone else.
I saw a similar device demonstrated on Japanese TV the other day, except that it could automatically return to its charging station when it was finished vacuuming.
And what is the f*?k is wrong with him putting extra features into the ac tree? It's his fork - you know, as allowed under the GPL (perhaps you've heard of that?) - so he can do whatever the hell he likes with it.
Plenty of vendors have opted to put extra patches into the kernels they use (e.g., the latest RAID patches); there's nothing at all unusual about it, and it gives them a way to distinguish themselves from other distributions.
Anyway, where the hell do you get off bitching about all the work that Alan's put into the kernel? Prepared to stack your list of kernel contributions up against his?
Well, considering that Alan has had that acronym for more than twenty-five years longer than any Anonymous Coward, Cowards shoould consider themselves lucky to be allowed to use it...
BTW, if you meant that last remark as a joke, it ain't very funny.
Almost all the PCs in Japan come with a JIS keyboard --- QWERTY keys have two or three symbols, number keys have three or four, and punctuation keys have four. (For example, the minus key has minus [-], equals [=], a pound sign (pounds sterling, not lbs), and the hiragana "ho".) Not to mention the dreaded Henkan/Muhenkan keys on either side of the spacebar, reducing its width down to about an inch and a half. On the bottom row of the keyboard I'm using now, there's no less than eleven keys - Ctrl, Windows key, Alt, Muhenkan, Space, Henkan, Hiragana/Katakana key, Alt, Windows key, Menu key, Ctrl.
Of course, at home I use only standard AT keyboards with the Ctrl and CapsLock in the proper positions.
As I understand it, it's perfectly legal under Canadian law to rebroadcast anything that was originally broadcast publically as long as you don't make any changes to the signal (e.g., adding advertisements). Whether charging for it makes a difference, I don't know - but the rebroadcasting itself is not a copyright violation.
Tracksticks work well once you get used to them, but good luck finding one on anything that isn't a laptop.
I have a mini-keyboard (without a number pad) with a trackstick in the usual position. It uses a double connector to hook into both PS/2 ports, but it does provide a pass-through port to use a mouse if you want to. As a bonus, you can attach a mouse and use both it and the trackstick (but only one will work if you try moving both of them at the same time, not that most people would...)
WindowMaker allows you to switch virtual screens with ALT+1, ALT+2, ALT+3,... You can also change focus between windows using ALT+TAB, and the settings allow for automatically raising a window when switching to it with the keyboard.
The HURD is the FSF-developed kernel that was originally supposed to form the central part of the GNU system. Unfortunately(?), the Linux kernel came out, and development shifted focus from HURD to Linux.
As I understand it, one of the major differences is that the HURD is basically a microkernel architecture, so the kernel itself provides only basic I/O and memory management, with everything else provided by "servers" running between the basic kernel and userspace.
I'd wait and see what sort of encryption they're going to use for this before jumping on the bandwagon. I wouldn't particularly like to have my data broadcast all over the city if all they offer is XOR "encryption"...
All the Macs now, unless specifically ordered in a SCSI configuration, use IDE.
The model you're referring to is probably the LC/Quadra 630, which was indeed the first desktop Mac to use IDE. It's not that long ago - as I recall, the 630 came out in '94 or thereabouts.
My Toshiba notebook loses its sound interrupt after suspending, but it's not too hard to set up apmd to rmmod stuff that doesn't handle suspend well, and then modprobe for it when you come back from suspend. Give it a try - worked fine for me.
I have only vague memories of the Slackware97 installer, but the current one is, I believe, very similar (I know for certain that it hasn't changed significantly in 3.5, 3.6, 4.0 or 7.0), and I find it very easy to use.
It's also very flexible; I installed 3.6 and then 4.0 on a IBM PC110 (486SX, 8MB RAM, 20MB flash for/, 260MB PCMCIA type III hard disk for swap,/tmp,/var,/home and/usr) that required all sorts of acrobatics (e.g. special disk geometry and ext2fs block size on the flash, special disk geometry for the HD, swap as a file rather than a partition, main install via NFS over a PCMCIA NIC), and it went in just fine. Try doing that with RH;)
I know about that - see my comment about the AT&T dispute earlier in this discussion.
However, the original poster didn't make clear in what way he thought the *BSDs to be late; too many people seem to think that Linux was the first free OS.
I should have been clearer - the "bastard" comment was not specifically referring to either Theo or Tom.
That said, Theo has never had much patience with anyone (more politely put, he does not suffer fools gladly), and his replies on the OpenBSD mailing lists tend to be rather terse. Tom tends to be a bit "inflammatory" in his comments about the GPL, and don't try and tell me that he doesn't get emotional about that particular subject.
As for the flamewar thing - I didn't say that the previous poster was starting one; I just didn't want to say anything that would be picked up by some frothing GPL/BSD/Artistic/etc. maniac and turned into a flamewar.
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As is common with interviews, it was most likely a transcript of a recorded conversation; the mistakes are those of the person who retyped it. (See the earlier comment about the error in RMS's statement regarding the #pragma hack.)
Something like the Richter scale (in which an increase of 1 indicates that the earthquake was thirty times more powerful)?
;)
Let's call it the Stallman scale, then. RMS is a 10-Stallman; Theo is about an 8-Stallman, I would guess; Linus varies between a 3-Stallman and a 6-Stallman; Alan Cox is a 1-Stallman; Tom Christiansen is a 7-Stallman.
Logarithmic, of course, so RMS is about 100 times more difficult than Theo, and about 1000 million times more difficult than AC
Don't you just hate geek impulse buying? Last week, I saw a 600MHz Alpha workstation for $1600 and bought it on the spur of the moment. My wife's gonna kill me...
Well, since your friend likes IBM keyboards enough to be using one for more than five years, it's probably a good idea to get him a new one of the same or similar type.
I picked up two genuine IBM keyboards (with the clicky keys!) at Unicomp (www.pckeyboard.com), which is located in Lexington. At the time, I paid $49 for each, which might seem a little expensive, but these things last forever.
Be warned that Unicomp's home page can be unavailable; the easiest way to order from them is through Yahoo. Try looking here for the classic IBM keyboard, or check out their whole range from the top page here.
This debate has been going on for a long time - TV was a big offender in the 70s and early 80s, movies got a lot more violent in the 80s and caught their share of flak, and from the end of the 80s it's been common for people to point the finger at videogames/computer games. It still doesn't change the fact that there has never been any hard evidence for a relationship between fantasy violence and real violence.
Personally speaking, I believe that there is a link; but it takes two to tango, and you need someone who is already on a hair-trigger for them to be stimulated enough by a game to injure or kill someone else.
I saw a similar device demonstrated on Japanese TV the other day, except that it could automatically return to its charging station when it was finished vacuuming.
Well, Microsoft tried to recruit him once...
And what is the f*?k is wrong with him putting extra features into the ac tree? It's his fork - you know, as allowed under the GPL (perhaps you've heard of that?) - so he can do whatever the hell he likes with it.
Plenty of vendors have opted to put extra patches into the kernels they use (e.g., the latest RAID patches); there's nothing at all unusual about it, and it gives them a way to distinguish themselves from other distributions.
Anyway, where the hell do you get off bitching about all the work that Alan's put into the kernel? Prepared to stack your list of kernel contributions up against his?
I didn't think so.
No, he's right. Question the integrity of RH before even thinking about impugning Alan's reputation.
Well, considering that Alan has had that acronym for more than twenty-five years longer than any Anonymous Coward, Cowards shoould consider themselves lucky to be allowed to use it...
BTW, if you meant that last remark as a joke, it ain't very funny.
Interestingly enough, their minimum CPU specification is a 200MHz PII... pity that there's no such thing. The PII started off at 233MHz.
Not to mention "very cool"...
Only two letters per key? Ha!
Almost all the PCs in Japan come with a JIS keyboard --- QWERTY keys have two or three symbols, number keys have three or four, and punctuation keys have four. (For example, the minus key has minus [-], equals [=], a pound sign (pounds sterling, not lbs), and the hiragana "ho".) Not to mention the dreaded Henkan/Muhenkan keys on either side of the spacebar, reducing its width down to about an inch and a half. On the bottom row of the keyboard I'm using now, there's no less than eleven keys - Ctrl, Windows key, Alt, Muhenkan, Space, Henkan, Hiragana/Katakana key, Alt, Windows key, Menu key, Ctrl.
Of course, at home I use only standard AT keyboards with the Ctrl and CapsLock in the proper positions.
As I understand it, it's perfectly legal under Canadian law to rebroadcast anything that was originally broadcast publically as long as you don't make any changes to the signal (e.g., adding advertisements). Whether charging for it makes a difference, I don't know - but the rebroadcasting itself is not a copyright violation.
Tracksticks work well once you get used to them, but good luck finding one on anything that isn't a laptop.
I have a mini-keyboard (without a number pad) with a trackstick in the usual position. It uses a double connector to hook into both PS/2 ports, but it does provide a pass-through port to use a mouse if you want to. As a bonus, you can attach a mouse and use both it and the trackstick (but only one will work if you try moving both of them at the same time, not that most people would...)
WindowMaker allows you to switch virtual screens with ALT+1, ALT+2, ALT+3,...
You can also change focus between windows using ALT+TAB, and the settings allow for automatically raising a window when switching to it with the keyboard.
The HURD is the FSF-developed kernel that was originally supposed to form the central part of the GNU system. Unfortunately(?), the Linux kernel came out, and development shifted focus from HURD to Linux.
As I understand it, one of the major differences is that the HURD is basically a microkernel architecture, so the kernel itself provides only basic I/O and memory management, with everything else provided by "servers" running between the basic kernel and userspace.
I'd wait and see what sort of encryption they're going to use for this before jumping on the bandwagon. I wouldn't particularly like to have my data broadcast all over the city if all they offer is XOR "encryption"...
All the Macs now, unless specifically ordered in a SCSI configuration, use IDE.
The model you're referring to is probably the LC/Quadra 630, which was indeed the first desktop Mac to use IDE. It's not that long ago - as I recall, the 630 came out in '94 or thereabouts.
My Toshiba notebook loses its sound interrupt after suspending, but it's not too hard to set up apmd to rmmod stuff that doesn't handle suspend well, and then modprobe for it when you come back from suspend. Give it a try - worked fine for me.
I have only vague memories of the Slackware97 installer, but the current one is, I believe, very similar (I know for certain that it hasn't changed significantly in 3.5, 3.6, 4.0 or 7.0), and I find it very easy to use.
/, 260MB PCMCIA type III hard disk for swap, /tmp, /var, /home and /usr) that required all sorts of acrobatics (e.g. special disk geometry and ext2fs block size on the flash, special disk geometry for the HD, swap as a file rather than a partition, main install via NFS over a PCMCIA NIC), and it went in just fine. Try doing that with RH ;)
It's also very flexible; I installed 3.6 and then 4.0 on a IBM PC110 (486SX, 8MB RAM, 20MB flash for
Um... I may be wrong here, but IIRC, the USB support originally included with Linux/PPC was based on NetBSD's USB support.
*Sigh*
I know about that - see my comment about the AT&T dispute earlier in this discussion.
However, the original poster didn't make clear in what way he thought the *BSDs to be late; too many people seem to think that Linux was the first free OS.
I should have been clearer - the "bastard" comment was not specifically referring to either Theo or Tom.
That said, Theo has never had much patience with anyone (more politely put, he does not suffer fools gladly), and his replies on the OpenBSD mailing lists tend to be rather terse. Tom tends to be a bit "inflammatory" in his comments about the GPL, and don't try and tell me that he doesn't get emotional about that particular subject.
As for the flamewar thing - I didn't say that the previous poster was starting one; I just didn't want to say anything that would be picked up by some frothing GPL/BSD/Artistic/etc. maniac and turned into a flamewar.
Oh, shit. Didn't catch that on preview, either...