Why is it everyone is obsessed with reverse-engineering OSCAR? Perhaps I'm missing something, but what advantages does it have over TOC? I can talk, I can transfer files, I can do group chats, all the features one would use in AIM.
I can do everything I want to do with gaim's TOC implementation - projects based on libfaim, like naim and the god-awful jabber server transport break constantly, especially the latter. I wish folks would stick to what works.
As for the md5 checking, install AIM on a windows box, tar it up, and move it over. Place it somewhere on your unix box so that when a request comes over OSCAR it can use it. Admittedly, I haven't looked extensively at the problem, but I don't see why anyone would need to do it anyhow.
Ok, so the movements from your head correspond to the movements on the screen, presumably a FPS. Sounds like a great idea, but of course, the sensitivity of your movement needs to be amplified, like a mouse, so you can turn all the way around (180 deg.) without being the Exorcist chick.
That's all fine and well, but many people have problems with motion sickness with FPS's - the generally accepted theory afaik is that if since your perceived vision doesn't correspond to your body movements, you're likely under the influence of a poison and start to feel ill. The only time you think you're moving when you're not tends to be under the influence of a lot poison - drink too much alcohol, room spins, makes you vomit, etc.
Imagine how much it would screw you up to turn your head 10 degrees and do a 360 - I imagine that this wouldn't be that far from normal usage, because you still need to be able to see the screen while you're doing all this head-wagging. Now you don't just have the discrepancy between movement and sight - you actually are moving your head and seeing your FOV change, but in a wildly exaggerated way, in both speed and accelleration.
I don't normally have any game sickness, but I think that would make me puke pretty quick. Oh yeah - also, picture what RSI would be like in a world where people used their heads as pointing devices instead of their hands:)
It's faster, more stable, and inherently superior. It's also authentic NOME, not some piddly work-a-like. It's also way more obscure, which makes it very 31337.
All I can do here is give my personal perspective, and point out that this is all based on a very small part of the original post I wrote.
I'm a long time BSD user, who's also tried the top 10 Linux distros at various points. The only ones I even came close to liking were Slackware and SuSE. SuSE is very commercialized, and it's hard to get ISOs for, so I don't mess with it much.
But I do know that the various times I've played with Linux over the years, it's proven to be quite a bit less stable(first time I installed redhat, it locked up after the first reboot, redhat, caldera, debian and corel all failed to install and boot on a rather flaky p166, whereas FreeBSD did flawlessly), far behind in terms of package management, i.e., rpm(I know about apt, and I think it's cool, but that's one Linux distro, and one I don't dig on much), and fragmented(even though this is what people say about the BSDs, the different distros are very dissimilar, and are quite large in number).
These are the things that have made me stick with BSD over the years. I get my OS from a central location, worked on people in an actual team environment with democracy and accountability, released under a license which is truly free, is easy to get ahold of and install(many linuces didn't have install over ftp for years, some still don't), they have great package management, great performance, great support, and great stability. I'm not saying there's no place for Linux, but given the reasons that I've just mentioned, why would I want to use it?
Anyhow, that's all just my opinon, and you expressed yours. What I *do* take issue with is the "never caught up" bit. In what way is any given BSD distrobution not equal or superior to Linux?
I said early 90s, not 1991. You're telling me that Linux was stable and usable in 91? I never ran into *anyone* running a server doing serious work on Linux before 95.
Itanium: Linux has an Itanium emulator written specifically for it, by Intel, I believe. That makes it kind of easier. Besides that, BSD does boot on the Itanium, even though they were severely impeded by lack of tools.
PPC64: It was ported by a corporation, fuckwit. A corporation with more resources than a non-profit organization could ever put towards porting to a platform, porting Linux to run on their own hardware, whereas NetBSD is an independent effort. They can't just run out and get a PPC64 box for themselves.
S/390: Same story.
UltraSPARC: Both run on UltraSparc, but I don't know dates of when they first booted, or the extent of Linux/Sparc support. This might actually be...a *relevant point*!
And then you call this stuff "mainstream, state of the art hardware". For all but the UltraSPARC, it's impossible for a normal person to even lay hands on one of those machines. Even in the case of corporations, how many do you know that are running Linux on IBM boxes instead of AIX? Why the hell would anyone want to, seeing as how AIX generally outperforms it anyhow?
In any event, how about high-end hardware that people can actually buy? NetBSD was the first to be running on the Alpha, for instance, a high performance platform that actually matters. First on SGI boxes. How about i386, the architecture everyone uses? In the early 90s, NetBSD was far more complete and usable than Linux, and to this day has very complete hardware support for the platform. One could also point out that Linux has been lagging behind on new technologies, like IPv6. Might want to take that into account when you're tallying up the final "Score".
Yeah, that jumped out at me. Some people have difficulty with the concept there are other UNIces than Linux(for which bash seems to be really common - after all, it's GNU).
No one is supposed to be standing at your machine. Physical security is important too.
What he means by the first bit is that a user must be in group wheel to su - this means if someone grabs a random account, chances are they won't be able to su to root, whereas in linux and other systems, anyone can, leaving you more open to brute force attacks. RMS described it in the GNU su documentation as being "fascist". I think he was being a moron.
a) You can always get the newest version of apache and php for bsd. Get a current version of the ports tree(use cvsup), cd/usr/ports/www/apache;make install. That's it. The current version is available within several days of the release.
b) You can't ssh in as root because it's a *really* stupid thing to allow people to do. The BSDs, IMO, come with a far more sensible security setup than Linuxen and other SysV style Unices, e.g. group wheel, jail(), kernel security levels, etc. Security tends to make doing stupid things harder, that's pretty much the idea.
I love to do this kind of stuff - I don't normally tresspass in places that are posted offlimits, but there have been some times...there was an old military base that I was just *dying* to go look around in, but I was somewhat paranoid that it might be monitored in one way or another. Does anyone know how common that is, monitoring abandoned places?
/* Slackware says - rudely - that 7.2 isn't released yet. This situation - confusion about what is released and what is not - is one that most software developers avoid by utilizing new-fangled conventions such as "beta". */
Why shouldn't they be rude? Some linux-kiddie site presumes to announce their releases for them, when they're still working on it - I think it's reasonable to tell them to get lost. And what most software developers do is make a new-fangled "release announcement" when the release is ready. If slashdot would put even the *slightest* effort into verifying stories before they run them, these things wouldn't happen. Fuckwit.
women generally have better things to do. if there were a female involved here, that'd be one hell of a pathetic example of the species. Women aren't known for trying to prove how big their dick is.
Sigh. First off, that was years ago, most people have gotten over it quite a while back. No one cares anymore. Yes, Theo's a bit of an ass (though not so much as he used to be), but Linus is rather a prick himself.
Secondly, NetBSD and OpenBSD are hardly the whole of the BSD community, in fact I imagine that they don't even have the combined userbase of FreeBSD. Considering that BSD usage and press coverage in general has spiked enormously during this year, and seeing that BSDI is getting massive funding and making great progress on the FBSD 5.x branch, I think BSD hardly has one foot in the grave.
Moderators, give this guy the flamebait rating he deserves. Simply because someone writes a lot of words doesn't mean they have anything to say.
Why is everyone so convinced that Linux has to be prettied up, promoted, and made palatable to the masses? If people want graphical boot screens, let them use an OS designed for people who like graphical boot screens. Everyone seems to think they're RedHat's unpaid marketing department, and that it's imperative some greater purpose be fulfilled by getting people to use an OS that's probably not the best one for them in the first place.
The other thing that's "vital for desktop acceptance" is an office suite of the caliber of MS Office 2000, which isn't going to happen unless they decide to port it - and it's a lot more vital than covering up kernel messages.
The weather - bleah. Couldn't you guys annex the US or something? Or just California? Or conquer the whole country? I'd love to live in Canada, but the problem is that it's in the wrong spot.
Well, I don't think Linux-heads like Hemos really keep an eye out for BeOS games in general, so it's not surprising. NWN running on BeOS was mentioned by the company what must have been almost a year ago. And I think Lionhead could be counted as a major company, seeing as how it's on almost every game rag's list for being one of the most promising upcoming games, and has Peter Molyneux there.
/* The full version for Linux will be freely available for download, so I don't see the project's commercialisation as being a major factor here. */
I do - I don't use Linux, I use another UNIX-style OS, but I'd like to give this a try. Those of us who don't fall into the Linux herd can't do anything with it, and that's why commercialization is bad for me. I don't have any moral problems with it, it's just a matter of practicality - I can't use StarOffice at the moment either, although it's free.
http://www.sega-dreams.com/hardware/peripherals/et hernet/main.html
http://dreamcast.ign.com/news/19906.html
There, just the first 2 links that popped up in a search, both say the same thing. Look around more and I'm sure ou'll be able to find all the info you need.
-lx
It would have been nice if Sega had thought about it a little more beforehand. See, the network layer isn't transparent to developers - you have to actually write seperate code and include drivers for both a modem *and* an ethernet card in your game if you want to support both, instead of just making your game TCP/IP capable. So all those Dreamcast modem-capable games you have now aren't going to work with it. Just a little word of caution.
On the other hand, while it makes things nice for the Linux port, it's good for the NetBSD port as well...
Hehe, that's exactly the thing that screwed with me for like half an hour after installing fbsd 4.2. Is there a good way to start xdm and still have the security level at 1? It doesn't seem to work starting it from/usr/local/etc/rc.d...haven't tried/etc/ttys yet. Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out that something is failing due to good security practices, though.
It's true that people place a lot of trust in programmers, but there's really not much of an alternative - I'm not good enough a programmer to be able to audit OS code beter than the people who write it. In any event, I'm really looking forward to fbsd5.0, with some of the new TrustedBSD extensions, and more in the future - finally, a trusted OS that will actually be *free*. Woo!
Slashdot Mirror
That's all probably true, but I do know you can transfer files over TOC...
-lx
Why is it everyone is obsessed with reverse-engineering OSCAR? Perhaps I'm missing something, but what advantages does it have over TOC? I can talk, I can transfer files, I can do group chats, all the features one would use in AIM.
I can do everything I want to do with gaim's TOC implementation - projects based on libfaim, like naim and the god-awful jabber server transport break constantly, especially the latter. I wish folks would stick to what works.
As for the md5 checking, install AIM on a windows box, tar it up, and move it over. Place it somewhere on your unix box so that when a request comes over OSCAR it can use it. Admittedly, I haven't looked extensively at the problem, but I don't see why anyone would need to do it anyhow.
-lx
Ok, so the movements from your head correspond to the movements on the screen, presumably a FPS. Sounds like a great idea, but of course, the sensitivity of your movement needs to be amplified, like a mouse, so you can turn all the way around (180 deg.) without being the Exorcist chick.
:)
That's all fine and well, but many people have problems with motion sickness with FPS's - the generally accepted theory afaik is that if since your perceived vision doesn't correspond to your body movements, you're likely under the influence of a poison and start to feel ill. The only time you think you're moving when you're not tends to be under the influence of a lot poison - drink too much alcohol, room spins, makes you vomit, etc.
Imagine how much it would screw you up to turn your head 10 degrees and do a 360 - I imagine that this wouldn't be that far from normal usage, because you still need to be able to see the screen while you're doing all this head-wagging. Now you don't just have the discrepancy between movement and sight - you actually are moving your head and seeing your FOV change, but in a wildly exaggerated way, in both speed and accelleration.
I don't normally have any game sickness, but I think that would make me puke pretty quick. Oh yeah - also, picture what RSI would be like in a world where people used their heads as pointing devices instead of their hands
-lx
Personally, I use BNOME.
It's faster, more stable, and inherently superior. It's also authentic NOME, not some piddly work-a-like. It's also way more obscure, which makes it very 31337.
-lx
All I can do here is give my personal perspective, and point out that this is all based on a very small part of the original post I wrote.
I'm a long time BSD user, who's also tried the top 10 Linux distros at various points. The only ones I even came close to liking were Slackware and SuSE. SuSE is very commercialized, and it's hard to get ISOs for, so I don't mess with it much.
But I do know that the various times I've played with Linux over the years, it's proven to be quite a bit less stable(first time I installed redhat, it locked up after the first reboot, redhat, caldera, debian and corel all failed to install and boot on a rather flaky p166, whereas FreeBSD did flawlessly), far behind in terms of package management, i.e., rpm(I know about apt, and I think it's cool, but that's one Linux distro, and one I don't dig on much), and fragmented(even though this is what people say about the BSDs, the different distros are very dissimilar, and are quite large in number).
These are the things that have made me stick with BSD over the years. I get my OS from a central location, worked on people in an actual team environment with democracy and accountability, released under a license which is truly free, is easy to get ahold of and install(many linuces didn't have install over ftp for years, some still don't), they have great package management, great performance, great support, and great stability. I'm not saying there's no place for Linux, but given the reasons that I've just mentioned, why would I want to use it?
Anyhow, that's all just my opinon, and you expressed yours. What I *do* take issue with is the "never caught up" bit. In what way is any given BSD distrobution not equal or superior to Linux?
-lx
I said early 90s, not 1991. You're telling me that Linux was stable and usable in 91? I never ran into *anyone* running a server doing serious work on Linux before 95.
-lx
One word: MSNBC. Emphasis on MS.
-lx
Right. Let's take a look at this.
Itanium: Linux has an Itanium emulator written specifically for it, by Intel, I believe. That makes it kind of easier. Besides that, BSD does boot on the Itanium, even though they were severely impeded by lack of tools.
PPC64: It was ported by a corporation, fuckwit. A corporation with more resources than a non-profit organization could ever put towards porting to a platform, porting Linux to run on their own hardware, whereas NetBSD is an independent effort. They can't just run out and get a PPC64 box for themselves.
S/390: Same story.
UltraSPARC: Both run on UltraSparc, but I don't know dates of when they first booted, or the extent of Linux/Sparc support. This might actually be...a *relevant point*!
And then you call this stuff "mainstream, state of the art hardware". For all but the UltraSPARC, it's impossible for a normal person to even lay hands on one of those machines. Even in the case of corporations, how many do you know that are running Linux on IBM boxes instead of AIX? Why the hell would anyone want to, seeing as how AIX generally outperforms it anyhow?
In any event, how about high-end hardware that people can actually buy? NetBSD was the first to be running on the Alpha, for instance, a high performance platform that actually matters. First on SGI boxes. How about i386, the architecture everyone uses? In the early 90s, NetBSD was far more complete and usable than Linux, and to this day has very complete hardware support for the platform. One could also point out that Linux has been lagging behind on new technologies, like IPv6. Might want to take that into account when you're tallying up the final "Score".
Yeah, that jumped out at me. Some people have difficulty with the concept there are other UNIces than Linux(for which bash seems to be really common - after all, it's GNU).
-lx
http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/new-users/article .html
That's slightly useful for a beginner, but other than that, the Handbook is the place to be. The book "The Complete FreeBSD" is pretty good too.
-lx
No one is supposed to be standing at your machine. Physical security is important too.
What he means by the first bit is that a user must be in group wheel to su - this means if someone grabs a random account, chances are they won't be able to su to root, whereas in linux and other systems, anyone can, leaving you more open to brute force attacks. RMS described it in the GNU su documentation as being "fascist". I think he was being a moron.
-lx
2 points:
/usr/ports/www/apache;make install. That's it. The current version is available within several days of the release.
a) You can always get the newest version of apache and php for bsd. Get a current version of the ports tree(use cvsup), cd
b) You can't ssh in as root because it's a *really* stupid thing to allow people to do. The BSDs, IMO, come with a far more sensible security setup than Linuxen and other SysV style Unices, e.g. group wheel, jail(), kernel security levels, etc. Security tends to make doing stupid things harder, that's pretty much the idea.
-lx
I love to do this kind of stuff - I don't normally tresspass in places that are posted offlimits, but there have been some times...there was an old military base that I was just *dying* to go look around in, but I was somewhat paranoid that it might be monitored in one way or another. Does anyone know how common that is, monitoring abandoned places?
-lx
/* Slackware says - rudely - that 7.2 isn't released yet. This situation - confusion about what is released and what is not - is one that most software developers avoid by utilizing new-fangled conventions such as "beta". */
Why shouldn't they be rude? Some linux-kiddie site presumes to announce their releases for them, when they're still working on it - I think it's reasonable to tell them to get lost. And what most software developers do is make a new-fangled "release announcement" when the release is ready. If slashdot would put even the *slightest* effort into verifying stories before they run them, these things wouldn't happen. Fuckwit.
-lx
women generally have better things to do. if there were a female involved here, that'd be one hell of a pathetic example of the species. Women aren't known for trying to prove how big their dick is.
-lx
Actually, I believe Compaq has BeIA devices already on the market. Blue things with keyboards - far too big for an IA, IMO.
-lx
Sorry to feed the trolls, but
Sigh. First off, that was years ago, most people have gotten over it quite a while back. No one cares anymore. Yes, Theo's a bit of an ass (though not so much as he used to be), but Linus is rather a prick himself.
Secondly, NetBSD and OpenBSD are hardly the whole of the BSD community, in fact I imagine that they don't even have the combined userbase of FreeBSD. Considering that BSD usage and press coverage in general has spiked enormously during this year, and seeing that BSDI is getting massive funding and making great progress on the FBSD 5.x branch, I think BSD hardly has one foot in the grave.
Moderators, give this guy the flamebait rating he deserves. Simply because someone writes a lot of words doesn't mean they have anything to say.
-lx
No, it's *not* available. Neither is the NetBSD one. So how exactly is the linux version further along?
-lx
Why is everyone so convinced that Linux has to be prettied up, promoted, and made palatable to the masses? If people want graphical boot screens, let them use an OS designed for people who like graphical boot screens. Everyone seems to think they're RedHat's unpaid marketing department, and that it's imperative some greater purpose be fulfilled by getting people to use an OS that's probably not the best one for them in the first place.
The other thing that's "vital for desktop acceptance" is an office suite of the caliber of MS Office 2000, which isn't going to happen unless they decide to port it - and it's a lot more vital than covering up kernel messages.
-lx
The weather - bleah. Couldn't you guys annex the US or something? Or just California? Or conquer the whole country? I'd love to live in Canada, but the problem is that it's in the wrong spot.
-lx
Well, I don't think Linux-heads like Hemos really keep an eye out for BeOS games in general, so it's not surprising. NWN running on BeOS was mentioned by the company what must have been almost a year ago. And I think Lionhead could be counted as a major company, seeing as how it's on almost every game rag's list for being one of the most promising upcoming games, and has Peter Molyneux there.
-lx
/* The full version for Linux will be freely available for download, so I don't see the project's commercialisation as being a major factor here. */
I do - I don't use Linux, I use another UNIX-style OS, but I'd like to give this a try. Those of us who don't fall into the Linux herd can't do anything with it, and that's why commercialization is bad for me. I don't have any moral problems with it, it's just a matter of practicality - I can't use StarOffice at the moment either, although it's free.
-lx
http://www.sega-dreams.com/hardware/peripherals/et hernet/main.html
http://dreamcast.ign.com/news/19906.html
There, just the first 2 links that popped up in a search, both say the same thing. Look around more and I'm sure ou'll be able to find all the info you need.
-lx
It would have been nice if Sega had thought about it a little more beforehand. See, the network layer isn't transparent to developers - you have to actually write seperate code and include drivers for both a modem *and* an ethernet card in your game if you want to support both, instead of just making your game TCP/IP capable. So all those Dreamcast modem-capable games you have now aren't going to work with it. Just a little word of caution.
On the other hand, while it makes things nice for the Linux port, it's good for the NetBSD port as well...
-lx
Hehe, that's exactly the thing that screwed with me for like half an hour after installing fbsd 4.2. Is there a good way to start xdm and still have the security level at 1? It doesn't seem to work starting it from /usr/local/etc/rc.d...haven't tried /etc/ttys yet. Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out that something is failing due to good security practices, though.
It's true that people place a lot of trust in programmers, but there's really not much of an alternative - I'm not good enough a programmer to be able to audit OS code beter than the people who write it. In any event, I'm really looking forward to fbsd5.0, with some of the new TrustedBSD extensions, and more in the future - finally, a trusted OS that will actually be *free*. Woo!
-lx