I did not want to start a gun control debate, I wanted to mention that ESR abuses (yes, I think he abuses) his status as a celebrity of the "open source movement" to promote his views on unrelated issues, such as gun-control.
Anyway, yes, I am against guns. Since discussion is usually futile on this subject, I won't go into it. Let me just say that I think your American gun laws are plain and simply crazy and that these laws are the main reason why I do not want to live in the US.
That said, the point of the last paragraph in my post was that you can paraphrase ESR's argument to: being anti-gun-control means you are more sexually mature. You can spin his argument right back - people own (and show off) guns because they think it makes them more potent, which is one of the lame standard arguments that anti-gun folks use.
ESR responds: "FYI, I fully intend to `abuse' my position in this manner as often as the
demands of effective publicity will allow." LWN, yet another next week
(* What I find funny about ESR's signature: He claims that pro-gun people are convinced that they sexually more mature than anti-gun folks. Somehow I think this argument can shoot backwards...)
If you want the product, you don't need an ad for it. Advertisement is about making you want a product you either a) did not know that it existed or b) don't need or did not want before.
If Microsoft has anything to say about the matter, every Windows user will be forced to pay an annual fee for the privilage.
Seriously, I would *want* to see an annual fee for software. Just imagine if you could rent a piece of software like that, on an annual or monthly basis:
As a customer, I could make a point by cancelling the contract and using a different company's product. I wouldn't have to buy an expensive office suite without being sure that it actually serves my needs.
The developers will actually have a reason to fix bugs, streamline the product and honor requests - instead of trying to make flashy upgrades or version updates that try to trick customers into buying it.
The developers could be much more relaxed about their user base - as mentioned before, they have "their" users to care about. They can be sure that as long as they keep their users happy, money will come. They don't have to reinvent again and again to find new customers, but can work for their existing customers and still make money.
I'd think that a "software for rent" system has its advantages.
About 2 years ago, I heard anecdotical reference that 50% of the incoming mail load at AOL is spam, being filtered before it reaches the recipient. I used to think that was unrealistic. Of course, I cannot proof it, but now, being a postmaster of a small public server, I don't think it's unrealistic, anymore.
Think about it: E-Mail spam will rise. It will become much much much worse than it is now. Email spam is just too cheap and too easy to do. Anyone with a sub-500$ PC and a modem can do it. No printing of bulk paper mailings, no call center agents to hire for telemarketing, no expensive address lists (just harvest Usenet or discussion sites like Slashdot).
This is only the beginning of a networked age. Once every business man in the world has the power to send spam to millions of unwilling recipients, just imagine how it will be like to "just hit delete" on 90% of your daily incoming email.
But then again, you're probably American, where Telemarketing has become one of the accepted abuses of your private phone. (I'm glad that Telemarketing is not allowed over here in Germany.)
Imagine more than dozens of telemarketing calls per day, every day, every week, every year, with steady increase, more and more every month.
That's the right comparison for the email spam - not those junk mail paper ads you receive in your paper mail.
I have clicked "no" on Microsoft's web site when I signed up for a minor download.
Ever since then, I receive constant updates from Microsoft's "Freedom to Innovate Network".
Unsubscribing did not help. Complaining to my local customer support of Microsoft Germany did not help (Several German MS employees asked "What is the Freedom to Innovate Network? I never heard of that.") Complaining to the US customer support did not help. Complaining to their US internet provider did not help.
Now don't tell me about "clicking no the for the love god" when it comes about a company that is too big to even care about me wanting their PR spin or not.
I have the same problem, but to make things worse, I am in Germany. It is virtually impossible to buy a single item on the embedded devices / settop devices market as an end user for a *reasonable* price.
Sure, I could get a few thousands of these boxes, but all I want is one. If anyone out there can recommend me a German distributor of this or similar devices where I can buy a single box, please let me know.
Note that not everyone has a big internet pipe at home.
While it's true that doing additional installs over the net is easy in Debian, the fact that some packages are not included in the Official CD Set is worth mentioning.
But as I already noted in another article here, the DukeofURL guys aren't exactly the brightest and write about it as if you as a user had no chance to help yourself about the "missing" packages.
The documentation specifically notes that install may be run several times from dselect before everything is installed.
If I run [I]nstall, nothing is installed. Only if I enter [S]elect before doing so (and choose nothing), suddenly some packages are mysteriously selected and appear in the next [I]nstall run.
The reason is that during the install some packages couldn't be installed because the stuff they depend on wasn't there.
This is not meant as a flame, but: Why isn't this necessairy on other Linux distributions? Suse and Redhat both install in a single process.
It's a nuisance, but you can't exactly say it's the most evil thing you've ever encountered.
Hmm. I don't find it a nuisance, I just thinks it isn't logical. People told me that Debian is the Linux where nothing happens behind your back. But now things happen behind my back even right during installation...
You mean after installing the packages pointed to by the task-* packages?
Yes, during the standard installation process, tasksel will ask what tasks to install. I choose none and right after that, the installation will install a number of packages and finish.
Then I login for the first time and do as described in my original post.
Thanks for the clarification, though.
However, why is emacs, tetex and xfree part of the Debian minimal system when using the "simple" tasksel process?
Also, why do I have to enter [S]elect first for that? And why is there no prompt informing me about these packages?
If I enter dselect and go directly to [I]nstall without [S]elect on a fresh system, no packages at all are being installed. Shouldn't the packages you mentioned be marked for install by tasksel already?
[I have posted a similar article in a German Linux user group today, but folks haven't really been able to explain the following curious behaviour, either.]
I am a longtime Suse user and have tried Redhat with equal success. Because of a few things that I disliked about Suse and Redhat, I wanted to give Debian a try.
Downloaded the official potato CD set ISOs, burned them, ran install, used the default options. Used the "simple" option for tasksel during installation, chose *no* additional task packages, finished installation.
Logged in as root for the first time. Started dselect. Went to [S]elect, but chose nothing. Instead, immediately left the package selection menu with [Q] (*).
Went to [I]nstall: Boom, *69* additional packages are to be installed, among them binutils, emacs, tetex, gpm.
Where are these selections coming from? I haven't selected them and dselect did not prompt me for them.
And no, if I use [Enter] instead of [Q] at (*), the same happens. Automatic selection of additonal packages without any information, prompt or query about it.
CeBIT and Creative were argueing about the target audience. MP3 and copyright issues were *not* the problem, a very loud consumer-oriented booth was. CeBIT wants to become a business fair (again), but Creative wants to attract consumers.
As someone who has worked on CeBIT as booth personnel, let me tell you that multimedia booths are a real problem. There are regulations against too loud exhibitors, but many companies on CeBIT don't care. The organizers are now trying to enforce these rules a little bit more.
CeBIT did *not* ban Creative, but *Creative* decided not to be there. Instead, Creative will be on next years' largest German consumer fair, the "Funkausstellung". This fair is not a specific IT business fair, but targets your average TV / vcr / dvd / stereo / videogame consumer.
I *am* getting a bit nervous about Slashdot's namecalling recently.
I'm with a research project that used Wap extensively. Not myself, but my fellow students. Pity them. They kept swearing and swearing and swearing.
Note: This is is not my personal experience. I am only rehashing what they told me:
Poor device support. Constantly crashing Nokia phones. Very limited page sizes (there is a fixed maximum in the most common Nokia phone). Every phone provider offeres a completely different Wap gateway. Each of them has its own set of bugs. Try to type text in a WAP phone when you search something without making you want to scream out loud. Try to fit some actual informational response on a typical phone's screen. And of course, the costs are astronomical here in Germany.
So no, they told me that it does not live up the hype.
I don't know about the situation in the US but Toshiba once sold a series of portables called Libretto in Europe.
I owned a 50ct (until my hotel room got robbed on January 1st, thank you). It was a great machine (fully Linux compatible), but its battery was far too small.
Despite having only a Pentium 75, the machine didn't run very much longer than 1.5 hours while on battery, with APM activated in the Linux Kernel. In Windows 95, the machine would often run less than an hour.
There is an extra large battery available for the 50ct, but it is hideously overpriced and so I did not buy it.
Still, I liked that machine and recommend it to anyone who needs ultra-portability. It isn't much bigger than a pocket calculator and looks like a keyboard-PDA, with less than 900 gramms in weight. I am a touch-typer and of course, the keyboard was tough to use, but hey.
The thing I always enjoyed were fellow passenger on German rail asking me about my computer.
"So this is what Windows CE looks like? Do you like it?"
"No, that's Linux. It's called KDE."
"Oooh."
Since we're into anecdotes now, I prefer ultra-small and -light laptops and as I said in another post, my current machine is a Fujitsu Lifebook that is also smaller than usual. As often as people ask me about it while on the traing, I should carry small business cards with my laptop's spec list with me. The fun thing is that one can afford to put huge hard disks and memory into these critters these days, yet few people can imagine that my subnotebook runs on 160 MB Ram and 12 Gigs of harddisk, with three operating systems installed.
What I *really* don't understand is why no manufacturer is releasing a Pentium-200-based laptop.
I totally agree. By the way, I own an outdated Fujitsu Lifebook B112 (Pentium MMX 233). It *does* run up to 4 hours when used for not too CPU intensive tasks. (Usually, it is around 2 to 3 hours.) So yes, it can be done and if developers would take advantage of running an underclocked CPU, long-running laptops with acceptable computing power would be reality *now*.
Seriously, I am looking for a historical perspective on programming languages.
(Yes, call me lazy now & you'd be right. All I did so far was an extensive search on the net, but I plan to do some more serious research in my CS library at University.)
I mean, Perl, Python, Java etc. surely have a different perspective on development and on what a developer should concentrate on than C had.
What I'm looking for is a historical timeline with an explanation of "inventions" that made software development easier. Maybe a formal classification.
If you know a few book suggestions, I'd be thankful for them.:-)
They are doing this since decades over here and the story above is about how they want to extend this from copiers, tape recorders and fax machines to computers and mp3.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh sigh.
I did not want to start a gun control debate, I wanted to mention that ESR abuses (yes, I think he abuses) his status as a celebrity of the "open source movement" to promote his views on unrelated issues, such as gun-control.
Anyway, yes, I am against guns. Since discussion is usually futile on this subject, I won't go into it. Let me just say that I think your American gun laws are plain and simply crazy and that these laws are the main reason why I do not want to live in the US.
That said, the point of the last paragraph in my post was that you can paraphrase ESR's argument to: being anti-gun-control means you are more sexually mature. You can spin his argument right back - people own (and show off) guns because they think it makes them more potent, which is one of the lame standard arguments that anti-gun folks use.
------------------
That's true.
ESR has (intelligently) kept his personal politics completely seperate from his business life/advocacy.
That's not true. Definitely not.
See this discussion for an example of ESR keeping his personal politics closely tied to his advocacy:
demands of effective publicity will allow." LWN, yet another next week
(* What I find funny about ESR's signature: He claims that pro-gun people are convinced that they sexually more mature than anti-gun folks. Somehow I think this argument can shoot backwards...)
------------------
If you want the product, you don't need an ad for it. Advertisement is about making you want a product you either a) did not know that it existed or b) don't need or did not want before.
------------------
Seriously, I would *want* to see an annual fee for software. Just imagine if you could rent a piece of software like that, on an annual or monthly basis:
I'd think that a "software for rent" system has its advantages.
------------------
About 2 years ago, I heard anecdotical reference that 50% of the incoming mail load at AOL is spam, being filtered before it reaches the recipient. I used to think that was unrealistic. Of course, I cannot proof it, but now, being a postmaster of a small public server, I don't think it's unrealistic, anymore.
Think about it: E-Mail spam will rise. It will become much much much worse than it is now. Email spam is just too cheap and too easy to do. Anyone with a sub-500$ PC and a modem can do it. No printing of bulk paper mailings, no call center agents to hire for telemarketing, no expensive address lists (just harvest Usenet or discussion sites like Slashdot).
This is only the beginning of a networked age. Once every business man in the world has the power to send spam to millions of unwilling recipients, just imagine how it will be like to "just hit delete" on 90% of your daily incoming email.
But then again, you're probably American, where Telemarketing has become one of the accepted abuses of your private phone. (I'm glad that Telemarketing is not allowed over here in Germany.)
Imagine more than dozens of telemarketing calls per day, every day, every week, every year, with steady increase, more and more every month.
That's the right comparison for the email spam - not those junk mail paper ads you receive in your paper mail.
That's why spam has to be stopped.
------------------
I have clicked "no" on Microsoft's web site when I signed up for a minor download.
Ever since then, I receive constant updates from Microsoft's "Freedom to Innovate Network".
Unsubscribing did not help. Complaining to my local customer support of Microsoft Germany did not help (Several German MS employees asked "What is the Freedom to Innovate Network? I never heard of that.") Complaining to the US customer support did not help. Complaining to their US internet provider did not help.
Now don't tell me about "clicking no the for the love god" when it comes about a company that is too big to even care about me wanting their PR spin or not.
------------------
I have the same problem, but to make things worse, I am in Germany. It is virtually impossible to buy a single item on the embedded devices / settop devices market as an end user for a *reasonable* price.
Sure, I could get a few thousands of these boxes, but all I want is one. If anyone out there can recommend me a German distributor of this or similar devices where I can buy a single box, please let me know.
------------------
Hmm. But dselect doesn't tell me about it, that's what I wonder about.
------------------
Note that not everyone has a big internet pipe at home.
While it's true that doing additional installs over the net is easy in Debian, the fact that some packages are not included in the Official CD Set is worth mentioning.
But as I already noted in another article here, the DukeofURL guys aren't exactly the brightest and write about it as if you as a user had no chance to help yourself about the "missing" packages.
------------------
The documentation specifically notes that install may be run several times from dselect before everything is installed.
If I run [I]nstall, nothing is installed. Only if I enter [S]elect before doing so (and choose nothing), suddenly some packages are mysteriously selected and appear in the next [I]nstall run.
The reason is that during the install some packages couldn't be installed because the stuff they depend on wasn't there.
This is not meant as a flame, but: Why isn't this necessairy on other Linux distributions? Suse and Redhat both install in a single process.
It's a nuisance, but you can't exactly say it's the most evil thing you've ever encountered.
Hmm. I don't find it a nuisance, I just thinks it isn't logical. People told me that Debian is the Linux where nothing happens behind your back. But now things happen behind my back even right during installation...
------------------
You mean after installing the packages pointed to by the task-* packages?
Yes, during the standard installation process, tasksel will ask what tasks to install. I choose none and right after that, the installation will install a number of packages and finish.
Then I login for the first time and do as described in my original post.
Thanks for the clarification, though.
However, why is emacs, tetex and xfree part of the Debian minimal system when using the "simple" tasksel process?
Also, why do I have to enter [S]elect first for that? And why is there no prompt informing me about these packages?
If I enter dselect and go directly to [I]nstall without [S]elect on a fresh system, no packages at all are being installed. Shouldn't the packages you mentioned be marked for install by tasksel already?
------------------
[I have posted a similar article in a German Linux user group today, but folks haven't really been able to explain the following curious behaviour, either.]
I am a longtime Suse user and have tried Redhat with equal success. Because of a few things that I disliked about Suse and Redhat, I wanted to give Debian a try.
Downloaded the official potato CD set ISOs, burned them, ran install, used the default options. Used the "simple" option for tasksel during installation, chose *no* additional task packages, finished installation.
Logged in as root for the first time. Started dselect. Went to [S]elect, but chose nothing. Instead, immediately left the package selection menu with [Q] (*).
Went to [I]nstall: Boom, *69* additional packages are to be installed, among them binutils, emacs, tetex, gpm.
Where are these selections coming from? I haven't selected them and dselect did not prompt me for them.
And no, if I use [Enter] instead of [Q] at (*), the same happens. Automatic selection of additonal packages without any information, prompt or query about it.
What's going on there?
------------------
Yet another shallow review.
DukeofURL should start doing actual reviews, not just another "look, I can copy a feature list" article.
So far, every DukeofURL review linked to from Slashdot has been a bore.
This isn't a flame, but an opinion.
------------------
wget does both http and ftp, and both equally simple. The use of wget is no advantage or reason to favour http.
------------------
Carpet and clothes are sources of lint. There's lots of lint in every corner that my vacuum cleaner fails to reach in my appartment.
------------------
CeBIT and Creative were argueing about the target audience. MP3 and copyright issues were *not* the problem, a very loud consumer-oriented booth was. CeBIT wants to become a business fair (again), but Creative wants to attract consumers.
As someone who has worked on CeBIT as booth personnel, let me tell you that multimedia booths are a real problem. There are regulations against too loud exhibitors, but many companies on CeBIT don't care. The organizers are now trying to enforce these rules a little bit more.
CeBIT did *not* ban Creative, but *Creative* decided not to be there. Instead, Creative will be on next years' largest German consumer fair, the "Funkausstellung". This fair is not a specific IT business fair, but targets your average TV / vcr / dvd / stereo / videogame consumer.
I *am* getting a bit nervous about Slashdot's namecalling recently.
------------------
As for price, I can't speak for Germany, but in the US unlimited basic WAP service through AT&T is free as in beer.
Here it's 40 Pfennig per Minute (20 cents)
------------------
I'm with a research project that used Wap extensively. Not myself, but my fellow students. Pity them. They kept swearing and swearing and swearing.
Note: This is is not my personal experience. I am only rehashing what they told me:
Poor device support. Constantly crashing Nokia phones. Very limited page sizes (there is a fixed maximum in the most common Nokia phone). Every phone provider offeres a completely different Wap gateway. Each of them has its own set of bugs. Try to type text in a WAP phone when you search something without making you want to scream out loud. Try to fit some actual informational response on a typical phone's screen. And of course, the costs are astronomical here in Germany.
So no, they told me that it does not live up the hype.
------------------
I don't know about the situation in the US but Toshiba once sold a series of portables called Libretto in Europe.
:-)
I owned a 50ct (until my hotel room got robbed on January 1st, thank you). It was a great machine (fully Linux compatible), but its battery was far too small.
Despite having only a Pentium 75, the machine didn't run very much longer than 1.5 hours while on battery, with APM activated in the Linux Kernel. In Windows 95, the machine would often run less than an hour.
There is an extra large battery available for the 50ct, but it is hideously overpriced and so I did not buy it.
Still, I liked that machine and recommend it to anyone who needs ultra-portability. It isn't much bigger than a pocket calculator and looks like a keyboard-PDA, with less than 900 gramms in weight. I am a touch-typer and of course, the keyboard was tough to use, but hey.
The thing I always enjoyed were fellow passenger on German rail asking me about my computer.
"So this is what Windows CE looks like? Do you like it?"
"No, that's Linux. It's called KDE."
"Oooh."
Since we're into anecdotes now, I prefer ultra-small and -light laptops and as I said in another post, my current machine is a Fujitsu Lifebook that is also smaller than usual. As often as people ask me about it while on the traing, I should carry small business cards with my laptop's spec list with me. The fun thing is that one can afford to put huge hard disks and memory into these critters these days, yet few people can imagine that my subnotebook runs on 160 MB Ram and 12 Gigs of harddisk, with three operating systems installed.
Ok, enough bragging.
------------------
What I *really* don't understand is why no manufacturer is releasing a Pentium-200-based laptop.
I totally agree. By the way, I own an outdated Fujitsu Lifebook B112 (Pentium MMX 233). It *does* run up to 4 hours when used for not too CPU intensive tasks. (Usually, it is around 2 to 3 hours.) So yes, it can be done and if developers would take advantage of running an underclocked CPU, long-running laptops with acceptable computing power would be reality *now*.
------------------
Don't email. Email is easily ignored. Send a letter on actual paper.
------------------
Seriously, I am looking for a historical perspective on programming languages.
:-)
(Yes, call me lazy now & you'd be right. All I did so far was an extensive search on the net, but I plan to do some more serious research in my CS library at University.)
I mean, Perl, Python, Java etc. surely have a different perspective on development and on what a developer should concentrate on than C had.
What I'm looking for is a historical timeline with an explanation of "inventions" that made software development easier. Maybe a formal classification.
If you know a few book suggestions, I'd be thankful for them.
------------------
They are doing this since decades over here and the story above is about how they want to extend this from copiers, tape recorders and fax machines to computers and mp3.
------------------
Is he hiding? I don't think so. He doesn't flame or troll.
If you don't like Anonymous Cowards, you certainly have the power to disable this feature, right?
------------------
We don't like Hasselhoff. But we *love* Yanni.
------------------