If you want only mozilla loaded in memory, and not IE, use 98lite to remove IE from your system. As the documentation describes, it de-integrates IE, so that you can install it again without it becoming your file manager/shell (and thus being loaded at all times).
Personally, I think that FF6 is one of the best games ever made. Some people disagree with me, and say that their favourite is FF4, but none of us are picking any of the first few games they made.
With FF7 and FF8, Square showed people what could be done on the Playstation, and took the game in a different direction. In fact, no Final Fantasy game has been related to the plot of another (except for a few summon monsters/Espers/GFs/Eidelons that Square didn't make up anyway (Odin, Ifrit, Shiva, etc.), and a few side references thrown in for amusement purposes). And with FF9, they've responded to fan's pining for the lightheartedness of FF6.
FF4 had the standard Black + White mages, Fighters, etc. FF5 introduced the Jobs system, where anyone could take on a different role and learn those skills, then combine them in unique ways. FF6 had characters that were slightly more unified, though some were better spellcasters/fighters than others, they each had their own type of armour/weapons (Sabin's claws), and there were a few specialty characters (Gogo, Gau, Shadow, Umaro, etc.). They also brought in the Espers for the purpose of learning magic and summoning (available to all). With FF7, it was still "everyone can use magic and has their own type of weapon", but they did away with armour, and introduced Materia, which was _somewhat_ similar to Espers, but still very different. FF8 introduced the Junction system, which I really like, and GFs, which are not quite Espers nor Materia. It also had a very complex card game. FF9 has Eidelons, which are similar to Espers, except that we're back to only certain people using certain skills now. And also Abilities, which are excellent, and the way Espers _should_ have worked in FF6. I haven't played Tactics, but it's apparently a Shining Force-ish sort of battle system, and you have generic comrades who can actually die. All very different, while keeping enough elements in common to make them easily playable by fans.
Don't get me wrong; I play nearly every Working Designs title, and sometimes buy them just because they were done by WD. But with Final Fantasy, Square has produced a stream of games which, since FF4, have never failed to entertain me. "Final Fantasy" is more like a brand than a string of movie sequels (speaking of which, the movie has nothing in common, plot-wise, with any of the games...just like the games themselves).
has a Flash plugin that works perfectly well, and is licensed under the GPL. If it doesn't already work on the PPC, there's no reason it can't be ported.
pricewatch.com does have ads for "bare bones" laptops that, IIRC, go as stripped down as "screen,case,mobo,power supply." Add your own HDD, RAM, etc. With laptops, the case and mobo are usually designed together (I'm not aware of a standard), and the video/sound pretty much have to be onboard, so it'd be tough to buy less than that.
The first is at the Retriever Weekly, the college newspaper for UMBC. We have 3 P-90s w/ 16M RAM and S3 virge cards running as X-terminals from a P-II 300 w/ 128M RAM. It works great; they run KDE, StarOffice, Mozilla, etc. with no troubles. The same machines were unusable with Win98 on them.
The second is in a volunteer computer lab in Baltimore city at the Agape house (http://linux.umbc.edu/gits). Most of the machines there are 486s with 16M RAM, so they use IceWM and work just fine from a dual Celeron 400 w/ 256M RAM. Jeff Covey, the main person behind this lab, has set them up to netboot using the Linux Terminal Server Project (http://www.ltsp.org). The difference in noise level between 8 486s running with and without hard drives is very noticable! I'm hoping to set up the machines at the newspaper this way soon.
College radio stations aren't like this. All of the ones I know shun the music the big radio stations are playing. College radio stations also gave bands like R.E.M. and Radiohead their start.
And while acts like Brittany Spears may be really big now, where will they be in a couple of years? In contrast They Might Be Giants have been going strong for years and years now, and I suspect they'll continue to do so until they don't feel like it any more.
Every one of the bands mentioned in it are still major label bands, with the same giant corporations behind them as bubblegum, substance-less stuff like Brittany Spears.
Whenever most people here on/. say something regarding music, it's the same story. It boggles the mind how people could use such different software than the mainstream, and listen to the same junk (then again, all my indie music friends seem to like Windows...hmmm...)
I'm afraid that even if we did have a database of recommendations, all of the independant music would be overshadowed by the major label stuff, just like it always happens.
If you follow my homepage link, you'll see that it's a college radio station. We specifically instruct our DJs to _avoid_ playing major label bands that can be heard on the radio. Ever hear of Black Box Recorder? Linus of Hollywood? Built to Spill? Looper? Probably not, and that's a damn shame, because these (and dozens of other bands) are leaps above anything I ever heard on the local "modern rock" station.
Since WMBC is at a university, we feel it's part of our goal to "educate" people about _real_ alternative music. Since UMBC is a big geeky school, the radio station computers run on Linux, and WMBC has more computer functionality than your typical station. We keep track of our CDs using a database written in PHP and MySQL. Each CD has a review, which tracks are recommended and which are profane (and unsuitable for airplay), and frequently some "for fans of" text. This same database also keeps track of our spins, ie what each DJ plays. Listeners can check out the last 10 songs played on the radio, or search the database for all the songs played in the past year.
(Yes, I'm going to be releasing this code as soon as I make a few more fixes. Yes, it will submitted to Freshmeat--I mean, I _work_ there:) And I would love it if this code expanded into the sort of thing Jamie envisions above [although for anything more complicated, I'll probably move it to Postgres])
It's a shame that this/. article was put up over the summer, because being a college station, WMBC is pretty much down+out at the moment. But please, if you'd like to expand your horizons, bookmark our site and come back in mid-September. Hey, bookmark almost _any_ college radio site; I don't want to sound too much like I'm pushing ours (though I happen to like it:) College/Independant radio is good for you.
One problem is that, currently, PGP keys require a password in order to use them for signing or encrypting email. People don't consider having to type in a password "easy to use." However, if you create a MUA that remembers the password, you've reduced the security, because now whoever can get at the machine can get at the key. This is the same old tradeoff between security and ease-of-use.
Also, if I understand it correctly, you can really only send an encrypted message to one person at a time, because you're encrypting it with their public key (so that their private key decrypts it). So PGP is not really a solution for, say, mailing lists.
So, even though Mutt has great GNUPG support, and so is relatively easy to use for someone like me, I can't really make use of it too terribly often, except for signing my mail.
What would help a great deal is if the mail could be encrypted between the mail servers, thus limiting snooping to localhost exploits. I know that there are protocols available, but with so many people out there running old, insecure, years old versions of Sendmail, I am rather pessimistic about the rate at which we could get people to switch over (much like IPv6, which will help network security in general with its support for IPSEC). Does anyone know of an MTA-to-MTA encryption protocol which satisfies any (or all!) of these:
1. Mail server agnostic
2. Falls back to cleartext if encryption isn't supported at the other end
2a. Gives a warning on this fallback.
3. Uses existing algorithms, rather than trying to invent a new one, and can intelligently support more than one at once (sort of like SSH with IDEA and Blowfish).
Well, if we want to have the "standard" language be "Chinese", you'll first have to decide which one you want.
China has 7 main dialects, according to my Chinese language class teacher. People in Shanghai speak a language that can almost be considered completely different than the one in Beijing. They use the same characters for writing, but use them to mean different things. At the very least, you have Mandarin and Cantonese.
Also, while Chinese is a grammatically simple language (no conjugation, no pluralisation, etc.), it is less fun to write, because there is no alphabet. Yes, there is a different character for every word. Yes, there is a rhyme/reason to the characters, but that doesn't make it all that much less difficult to learn all of them. Oh, and you have to decide whether you want simplified or traditional Chinese characters to be the "standard", too.
Finally, while the population of China is certainly the largest in the world, do they really have the most people _online_? I have no statistics, I'm actually curious.
You're thinking of the community-developed drivers that come with XFree86 4.x. However, those drivers don't have some of the features of nVidia's commercial drivers, and do NOT have OpenGL accelleration. The commercial nVidia drivers, while evil, are the best performing video drivers for Linux today. And since part of those drivers is a Linux kernel module, they won't work on anything other then x86 Linux.
Of course, if you _are_ using x86 Linux, the drivers rock. It's disappointing that they're closed source, but _for_now_, nVidia is doing a very good job keeping them up to date (they used to be terrible at this, and could conceivably become terribly about it in the future, which is why I hope ATI or Matrox does something worthy).
First, he is not implying that anyone is actually saying "Does C++ matter anymore? We have C#." Just as Theo, in his comments referenced in another/. article today, probably can't think of any software projects offhand which specifically deal with baby-muching. The poster was making an analogy to demonstrate the fallacy of the original comment. Yeesh.
You've also completely and utterly dismissed this statement in its entirety:
"Please be aware that most of the software you use every day on your Linux box is pre-1.0. Even then, it's often better and more stable than any MS product."
Let's examine this statement:
1. "...most of the software you use every day on your Linux box is pre-1.0" Perhaps such a versioning scheme is silly, but it is what is. The output of dpkg -l on my system shows that at least half the installed software has a version starting with 0, and most of the stuff that doesn't is a library.
2. "Even then, it's often better and more stable than any MS product." OK, this should have been worded better, but at least he used "often." However, I have found that _counterpart_ products are often better than those on the Win32 platform. I think that XChat is much nicer than mIRC, fidelio is better than the official Hotline client, and everybuddy is better than the official AIM client. And even you surely cannot argue that the command-line portion of Linux does not far outshine any MS "equivalent", or that Microsoft does not still have problems with stability (which they are taking steps to lessen). OK, fine, I'm one of those people who mostly uses X-windows to manage my Eterms (with a few GUI apps). But it works better for me, or I wouldn't be using it.
As for the "bleeding edge" comment, I think that my post is long enough already, so I'll try to be brief. We can all name the Linux/*nix projects that are too similar to their MS counterparts. Fine, but there are plenty that are not, and are even traveling in new directions (enlightenment with its OpenGL file manager, for example). Linux also had Kerberos and IPSEC long before Windows did, so I don't want to hear about any coattail following from the MS crowd (and NFS might be nasty at times, but SMB is just ooook.) And for being "on the edge", what about IPv6? Microsoft still doesn't have native support for it in any OS, and Cisco only got around to support for it a little while ago. Linux has had it in 2.2 for quite some time.
Did you really read all of that? Go play outside now!:)
A search on Freshmeat for "debian reiser" reveals 2 projects (actually, I already knew they were there:)
These are not, however, with the 2.4 kernel, but the important part is that you can do the installation with Reiserfs as your filesystem. It's much easier to compile a new kernel (I'd be doing that anyway) than to deal with converting from ext2 to Reiser.
From what I've read (I do _not_ use Windows for my email...), and what I've seen setting things up for my former employer, The Bat! might be a better choice. Reviewers seem to really like it (even the people at The Register talk about it from time to time, and use it as their standard e-mail client). There are also reports about the latest version of Eudora not quite living up to its reputation. But from dealing with supporting it, I can definitely say that Outlook is a pain. Unfortunately, I left the company before I could try to instate The Bat! (yes, the ! is part of the name, like Yahoo!)
As far as *nix mail clients go, after having used Pine for 2 years and Mutt for the past year, I'm completely sold. Folder notification, list reply, hooks, proper MIME (makes GPG happy!)...it's just great. I'd suggest you give it a try.
That's what the debian menu system does. Every window manager package, by default, uses the Debian menus, which contain every X application you've installed (and are, of course, updated when you install new ones.). This is one of the many benefits of having all packages follow a strict set of guidelines.
One of my roommates describes MOSIX as "SMP writ large", and that's essentially true. The people behind MOSIX describe it as a "fork and forget" server. Basically, it divides processes amongst nodes the same way SMP under linux divides processes amongst CPUs. Except that with MOSIX, you can make provisions for some nodes being faster than others (x86 mobos would barf with multiple different CPUs in them). So, MOSIX is great for CPU-intesive stuff that can be forked (LAME, gcc come to mind).
For a "web cluster", you want something like this:
http://linuxvirtualserver.org/
This is a combination of load balancing and high availability. Machine A load-balances web traffic between machines C,D,E, and F. Machine B monitors machine A, and takes over for it if it goes down for more than 4 seconds. They've got various algorithms for load balancing.
There are 2 projects, both of which provide Debian installer disks with support for Reiserfs. Yes, they're Potato disks, but there are no "woody" disks yet anyway; you'll have to install potato and apt-get dist-upgrade no matter what.
Woody(testing) does have XFree 4.02, and glibc 2.2. And while there are no kernel-image packages for 2.4, the kernel certainly works just fine (and really, I wouldn't use anything other than a custom-compiled kernel anyway).
That being said, I see Progeny as a definite Good Thing. Personally, I don't have any problems with the Debian installer, but I understand that some people do; different people approach things from different directions(thus explaining the many window managers in the *nix world). From my experience, Debian is much easier to keep up-to-date once it is installed than any RPM-based distribution, and if more people find that it's also easy to install, great.
Tell me, have you used Debian? Perhaps you are not a troll, but merely ill-informed. So:
When I install an RPM, it is a toss of the coin whether it will decide to keep my configuration files, or move them to "foo.config.rpmsave", possibly disrupting my services. I have to list the files in the RPM to figure out where they stuck the config files, and go edit them by hand.
When I do "apt-get install postgresql", it asks the necessary questions WHEN IT INSTALLS, with a nice graphical (or text; you set this preference when you install debconf [generally when you install the distro]) menu system. My roommate runs postgresql, and he really doesn't know how to add users to it, because Debian helped him do it once, and that was it.
Upgrading is great. Apt will ALWAYS ask what to do when a question of config files comes up; you can keep yours (theirs will be installed as foo.config.dpkg-dist), take the new one, show differences in the two, or background the process to do whatever you need. Also, anyone who does this:
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
every few days will be up-to-date on their security and bug fixes; no need to read mailing lists, go download RPMs, and pray that they install correctly, having to resolve any package conflicts YOURSELF. Apt will resolve all dependencies, hold back on upgrades for certain reasons when called for, etc.
And when a new version is released, you simply edit/etc/apt.sources, change "potato" to "woody", and:
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade.
Your distribution is upgraded while it runs. All services which might need to be restarted will be after the upgrade is complete.
The reason Debian is so easy is because nearly everything under the sun is "in Debian"; ie, you don't have to go hunting for it, you can fire up a nice graphical apt front-end like GnomeAPT or aptitude, browse through the packages, and have it install whatever you need (again, automatically resolving dependencies and versions). Porting apt to RPM will not necessarily fix this, nor will any of the pretty tools which are beginning to emerge. All of the 4,000+ packages in Debian are strictly controlled so that they will work together. THAT is the "secret". Until RPMs are unified like this, they will be hopeless.
I would never recommend anything else to a newbie.
As another poster pointed out, the window manager (KDE, GNOME, E, Win98) is responsible for standardising the interface (like alt-f4 being "destroy this window" in Windows).
And as for KMail, it is, IMHO, being evil. For years, *NIX has used the "highlight is copy, middle button is paste" philosophy. Ctrl-C is "kill"!! Why did the developer of KMail decide that they had to emulate Windows? StarOffice is also bad in this respect.
File open dialogs, OTOH, are totally the realm of the application developer, and in the Linux world, that means that everyone will probably write a dialog that works the way they want it to work. It would be interesting if the WM would provide hooks for something like that, where any app could call a standard "File Open" dialog; unfortunately, this would probably be different for every WM. Another case of one of the things that makes Free Software great (choice) working against it at the same time (it's easy to make everything shiny and smooth, if you're Apple and you control hardware + software tightly).
>Maybe what we need is some generic tool for installing binaries (like Installshield) that can detect what it needs.
Oh, you mean like apt? Not that you're going to be able to "apt-get install oracle" any time soon:)
However, something like apt, which intelligently manages package dependancies (if the packagers and packaging system intelligently SET package dependancies) can see which versions of glibc, Perl, SDL, $WHATEVER exist on a system and determine what needs to happen in order to install a program.
What would be interesting is if distributors of binary packages (not counting those included in distributions such as Debian) could have those packages attempt to use libraries other than the exact ones for which they were compiled, if those libraries stood a reasonable chance of working. For example, I have a symlink in my/lib directory because the people at mozilla.org compile mozilla for Linux against a slightly older libc++ than the one I have. If it could have detected that and said "Oh, that libc++ is the same major version, it'll probably work", and simply run with a warning or something, that might be nice. (It does work perfectly, BTW).
As for where oracle should put its stuff, it should probably use/opt.
We don't need government funding to make a difference in the inner city. It can be done with donations.
http://agape.qis.net
http://linux.umbc.edu/gits
The list of current hardware is a bit outdated; we have 8 workstations for the kids, all X-terminals from a beefy machine (dual celeron 400). All of the workstations are donated 486s or low-end Pentiums.
I've been using IMP, the webmail portion of HORDE, for quite some time now (no, not me personally; I use mutt. My _users_ have been using it). It's a very nice webmail client, especially with a few patches (for things like importing Outlook address books), and looks similar to Yahoo! mail (apparently; I've not used Yahoo! mail).
Though IMP is the most mature component, they also have Kronolith, which does calendaring. You have to get the code from CVS at the moment, but it is apparently in use in the Real World. Yes, it's a bit simple at the moment, but it's under development, so it _is_ happening.
Note that HORDE is entirely done with PHP, so it _does_ work on MS platforms (the server part, obviously; the client part is a web browser:)
The best part about providing users with webmail is that there is NO configuration. This is especially good when you are in Baltimore, and a good chunk of your users are in Chicago. You tell them on the phone, "Here is your username/password and the URL, go log in."
LAME _has_ improved upon it. The LAME encoder can do VBR correctly, something which almost no other encoder (including the commercial ones) can do. VBR, when done correctly, is a great balance between audio quality and file size, yet most FAQs you read out there advise against it, not because the decoders can't handle it (they can), but because LAME is the only encoder that really does a nice job with it.
Newer, slightly less cheap players such as the Pine and Compro handle VBR just fine, and they also handle the entire gamut of bitrates (32-320, I believe).
I have an MPtrip (which I'm returning to buy a Pine), and it DOES handle VBR. The problem is that it can only deal with bitrates up to 192, so when the bitrate on a VBR-encoded track goes above that, _then_ the player goes wonky.
What's annoying is that players such as these almost certainly don't have upgradeable firmware, so they'll never be able to support any forthcoming formats, such as ogg.
Slashdot Mirror
/sbin/hdparm -E will set the read speed of an ATAPI (IDE interface) CD-ROM.
Sotto la panca, la capra crepa
If you want only mozilla loaded in memory, and not IE, use 98lite to remove IE from your system. As the documentation describes, it de-integrates IE, so that you can install it again without it becoming your file manager/shell (and thus being loaded at all times).
http://www.98lite.net
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I disagree.
Personally, I think that FF6 is one of the best games ever made. Some people disagree with me, and say that their favourite is FF4, but none of us are picking any of the first few games they made.
With FF7 and FF8, Square showed people what could be done on the Playstation, and took the game in a different direction. In fact, no Final Fantasy game has been related to the plot of another (except for a few summon monsters/Espers/GFs/Eidelons that Square didn't make up anyway (Odin, Ifrit, Shiva, etc.), and a few side references thrown in for amusement purposes). And with FF9, they've responded to fan's pining for the lightheartedness of FF6.
FF4 had the standard Black + White mages, Fighters, etc. FF5 introduced the Jobs system, where anyone could take on a different role and learn those skills, then combine them in unique ways. FF6 had characters that were slightly more unified, though some were better spellcasters/fighters than others, they each had their own type of armour/weapons (Sabin's claws), and there were a few specialty characters (Gogo, Gau, Shadow, Umaro, etc.). They also brought in the Espers for the purpose of learning magic and summoning (available to all). With FF7, it was still "everyone can use magic and has their own type of weapon", but they did away with armour, and introduced Materia, which was _somewhat_ similar to Espers, but still very different. FF8 introduced the Junction system, which I really like, and GFs, which are not quite Espers nor Materia. It also had a very complex card game. FF9 has Eidelons, which are similar to Espers, except that we're back to only certain people using certain skills now. And also Abilities, which are excellent, and the way Espers _should_ have worked in FF6. I haven't played Tactics, but it's apparently a Shining Force-ish sort of battle system, and you have generic comrades who can actually die. All very different, while keeping enough elements in common to make them easily playable by fans.
Don't get me wrong; I play nearly every Working Designs title, and sometimes buy them just because they were done by WD. But with Final Fantasy, Square has produced a stream of games which, since FF4, have never failed to entertain me. "Final Fantasy" is more like a brand than a string of movie sequels (speaking of which, the movie has nothing in common, plot-wise, with any of the games...just like the games themselves).
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This page:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/netscapeflashplug
has a Flash plugin that works perfectly well, and is licensed under the GPL. If it doesn't already work on the PPC, there's no reason it can't be ported.
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pricewatch.com does have ads for "bare bones" laptops that, IIRC, go as stripped down as "screen,case,mobo,power supply." Add your own HDD, RAM, etc. With laptops, the case and mobo are usually designed together (I'm not aware of a standard), and the video/sound pretty much have to be onboard, so it'd be tough to buy less than that.
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The first is at the Retriever Weekly, the college newspaper for UMBC. We have 3 P-90s w/ 16M RAM and S3 virge cards running as X-terminals from a P-II 300 w/ 128M RAM. It works great; they run KDE, StarOffice, Mozilla, etc. with no troubles. The same machines were unusable with Win98 on them.
The second is in a volunteer computer lab in Baltimore city at the Agape house (http://linux.umbc.edu/gits). Most of the machines there are 486s with 16M RAM, so they use IceWM and work just fine from a dual Celeron 400 w/ 256M RAM. Jeff Covey, the main person behind this lab, has set them up to netboot using the Linux Terminal Server Project (http://www.ltsp.org). The difference in noise level between 8 486s running with and without hard drives is very noticable! I'm hoping to set up the machines at the newspaper this way soon.
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College radio stations aren't like this. All of the ones I know shun the music the big radio stations are playing. College radio stations also gave bands like R.E.M. and Radiohead their start.
And while acts like Brittany Spears may be really big now, where will they be in a couple of years? In contrast They Might Be Giants have been going strong for years and years now, and I suspect they'll continue to do so until they don't feel like it any more.
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Every one of the bands mentioned in it are still major label bands, with the same giant corporations behind them as bubblegum, substance-less stuff like Brittany Spears.
/. say something regarding music, it's the same story. It boggles the mind how people could use such different software than the mainstream, and listen to the same junk (then again, all my indie music friends seem to like Windows...hmmm...)
:) And I would love it if this code expanded into the sort of thing Jamie envisions above [although for anything more complicated, I'll probably move it to Postgres])
/. article was put up over the summer, because being a college station, WMBC is pretty much down+out at the moment. But please, if you'd like to expand your horizons, bookmark our site and come back in mid-September. Hey, bookmark almost _any_ college radio site; I don't want to sound too much like I'm pushing ours (though I happen to like it :) College/Independant radio is good for you.
Whenever most people here on
I'm afraid that even if we did have a database of recommendations, all of the independant music would be overshadowed by the major label stuff, just like it always happens.
If you follow my homepage link, you'll see that it's a college radio station. We specifically instruct our DJs to _avoid_ playing major label bands that can be heard on the radio. Ever hear of Black Box Recorder? Linus of Hollywood? Built to Spill? Looper? Probably not, and that's a damn shame, because these (and dozens of other bands) are leaps above anything I ever heard on the local "modern rock" station.
Since WMBC is at a university, we feel it's part of our goal to "educate" people about _real_ alternative music. Since UMBC is a big geeky school, the radio station computers run on Linux, and WMBC has more computer functionality than your typical station. We keep track of our CDs using a database written in PHP and MySQL. Each CD has a review, which tracks are recommended and which are profane (and unsuitable for airplay), and frequently some "for fans of" text. This same database also keeps track of our spins, ie what each DJ plays. Listeners can check out the last 10 songs played on the radio, or search the database for all the songs played in the past year.
(Yes, I'm going to be releasing this code as soon as I make a few more fixes. Yes, it will submitted to Freshmeat--I mean, I _work_ there
It's a shame that this
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One problem is that, currently, PGP keys require a password in order to use them for signing or encrypting email. People don't consider having to type in a password "easy to use." However, if you create a MUA that remembers the password, you've reduced the security, because now whoever can get at the machine can get at the key. This is the same old tradeoff between security and ease-of-use.
Also, if I understand it correctly, you can really only send an encrypted message to one person at a time, because you're encrypting it with their public key (so that their private key decrypts it). So PGP is not really a solution for, say, mailing lists.
So, even though Mutt has great GNUPG support, and so is relatively easy to use for someone like me, I can't really make use of it too terribly often, except for signing my mail.
What would help a great deal is if the mail could be encrypted between the mail servers, thus limiting snooping to localhost exploits. I know that there are protocols available, but with so many people out there running old, insecure, years old versions of Sendmail, I am rather pessimistic about the rate at which we could get people to switch over (much like IPv6, which will help network security in general with its support for IPSEC). Does anyone know of an MTA-to-MTA encryption protocol which satisfies any (or all!) of these:
1. Mail server agnostic
2. Falls back to cleartext if encryption isn't supported at the other end
2a. Gives a warning on this fallback.
3. Uses existing algorithms, rather than trying to invent a new one, and can intelligently support more than one at once (sort of like SSH with IDEA and Blowfish).
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Well, if we want to have the "standard" language be "Chinese", you'll first have to decide which one you want.
China has 7 main dialects, according to my Chinese language class teacher. People in Shanghai speak a language that can almost be considered completely different than the one in Beijing. They use the same characters for writing, but use them to mean different things. At the very least, you have Mandarin and Cantonese.
Also, while Chinese is a grammatically simple language (no conjugation, no pluralisation, etc.), it is less fun to write, because there is no alphabet. Yes, there is a different character for every word. Yes, there is a rhyme/reason to the characters, but that doesn't make it all that much less difficult to learn all of them. Oh, and you have to decide whether you want simplified or traditional Chinese characters to be the "standard", too.
Finally, while the population of China is certainly the largest in the world, do they really have the most people _online_? I have no statistics, I'm actually curious.
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You're thinking of the community-developed drivers that come with XFree86 4.x. However, those drivers don't have some of the features of nVidia's commercial drivers, and do NOT have OpenGL accelleration. The commercial nVidia drivers, while evil, are the best performing video drivers for Linux today. And since part of those drivers is a Linux kernel module, they won't work on anything other then x86 Linux.
Of course, if you _are_ using x86 Linux, the drivers rock. It's disappointing that they're closed source, but _for_now_, nVidia is doing a very good job keeping them up to date (they used to be terrible at this, and could conceivably become terribly about it in the future, which is why I hope ATI or Matrox does something worthy).
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OK, so I'll reply rather than moderate.
/. article today, probably can't think of any software projects offhand which specifically deal with baby-muching. The poster was making an analogy to demonstrate the fallacy of the original comment. Yeesh.
:)
First, he is not implying that anyone is actually saying "Does C++ matter anymore? We have C#." Just as Theo, in his comments referenced in another
You've also completely and utterly dismissed this statement in its entirety:
"Please be aware that most of the software you use every day on your Linux box is pre-1.0. Even then, it's often better and more stable than any MS product."
Let's examine this statement:
1. "...most of the software you use every day on your Linux box is pre-1.0" Perhaps such a versioning scheme is silly, but it is what is. The output of dpkg -l on my system shows that at least half the installed software has a version starting with 0, and most of the stuff that doesn't is a library.
2. "Even then, it's often better and more stable than any MS product." OK, this should have been worded better, but at least he used "often." However, I have found that _counterpart_ products are often better than those on the Win32 platform. I think that XChat is much nicer than mIRC, fidelio is better than the official Hotline client, and everybuddy is better than the official AIM client. And even you surely cannot argue that the command-line portion of Linux does not far outshine any MS "equivalent", or that Microsoft does not still have problems with stability (which they are taking steps to lessen). OK, fine, I'm one of those people who mostly uses X-windows to manage my Eterms (with a few GUI apps). But it works better for me, or I wouldn't be using it.
As for the "bleeding edge" comment, I think that my post is long enough already, so I'll try to be brief. We can all name the Linux/*nix projects that are too similar to their MS counterparts. Fine, but there are plenty that are not, and are even traveling in new directions (enlightenment with its OpenGL file manager, for example). Linux also had Kerberos and IPSEC long before Windows did, so I don't want to hear about any coattail following from the MS crowd (and NFS might be nasty at times, but SMB is just ooook.) And for being "on the edge", what about IPv6? Microsoft still doesn't have native support for it in any OS, and Cisco only got around to support for it a little while ago. Linux has had it in 2.2 for quite some time.
Did you really read all of that? Go play outside now!
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A search on Freshmeat for "debian reiser" reveals 2 projects (actually, I already knew they were there :)
These are not, however, with the 2.4 kernel, but the important part is that you can do the installation with Reiserfs as your filesystem. It's much easier to compile a new kernel (I'd be doing that anyway) than to deal with converting from ext2 to Reiser.
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From what I've read (I do _not_ use Windows for my email...), and what I've seen setting things up for my former employer, The Bat! might be a better choice. Reviewers seem to really like it (even the people at The Register talk about it from time to time, and use it as their standard e-mail client). There are also reports about the latest version of Eudora not quite living up to its reputation. But from dealing with supporting it, I can definitely say that Outlook is a pain. Unfortunately, I left the company before I could try to instate The Bat! (yes, the ! is part of the name, like Yahoo!)
As far as *nix mail clients go, after having used Pine for 2 years and Mutt for the past year, I'm completely sold. Folder notification, list reply, hooks, proper MIME (makes GPG happy!)...it's just great. I'd suggest you give it a try.
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That's what the debian menu system does. Every window manager package, by default, uses the Debian menus, which contain every X application you've installed (and are, of course, updated when you install new ones.). This is one of the many benefits of having all packages follow a strict set of guidelines.
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One of my roommates describes MOSIX as "SMP writ large", and that's essentially true. The people behind MOSIX describe it as a "fork and forget" server. Basically, it divides processes amongst nodes the same way SMP under linux divides processes amongst CPUs. Except that with MOSIX, you can make provisions for some nodes being faster than others (x86 mobos would barf with multiple different CPUs in them). So, MOSIX is great for CPU-intesive stuff that can be forked (LAME, gcc come to mind).
For a "web cluster", you want something like this:
http://linuxvirtualserver.org/
This is a combination of load balancing and high availability. Machine A load-balances web traffic between machines C,D,E, and F. Machine B monitors machine A, and takes over for it if it goes down for more than 4 seconds. They've got various algorithms for load balancing.
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http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=debian+reiser
There are 2 projects, both of which provide Debian installer disks with support for Reiserfs. Yes, they're Potato disks, but there are no "woody" disks yet anyway; you'll have to install potato and apt-get dist-upgrade no matter what.
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Woody(testing) does have XFree 4.02, and glibc 2.2. And while there are no kernel-image packages for 2.4, the kernel certainly works just fine (and really, I wouldn't use anything other than a custom-compiled kernel anyway).
That being said, I see Progeny as a definite Good Thing. Personally, I don't have any problems with the Debian installer, but I understand that some people do; different people approach things from different directions(thus explaining the many window managers in the *nix world). From my experience, Debian is much easier to keep up-to-date once it is installed than any RPM-based distribution, and if more people find that it's also easy to install, great.
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Tell me, have you used Debian? Perhaps you are not a troll, but merely ill-informed. So:
/etc/apt.sources, change "potato" to "woody", and:
When I install an RPM, it is a toss of the coin whether it will decide to keep my configuration files, or move them to "foo.config.rpmsave", possibly disrupting my services. I have to list the files in the RPM to figure out where they stuck the config files, and go edit them by hand.
When I do "apt-get install postgresql", it asks the necessary questions WHEN IT INSTALLS, with a nice graphical (or text; you set this preference when you install debconf [generally when you install the distro]) menu system. My roommate runs postgresql, and he really doesn't know how to add users to it, because Debian helped him do it once, and that was it.
Upgrading is great. Apt will ALWAYS ask what to do when a question of config files comes up; you can keep yours (theirs will be installed as foo.config.dpkg-dist), take the new one, show differences in the two, or background the process to do whatever you need. Also, anyone who does this:
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
every few days will be up-to-date on their security and bug fixes; no need to read mailing lists, go download RPMs, and pray that they install correctly, having to resolve any package conflicts YOURSELF. Apt will resolve all dependencies, hold back on upgrades for certain reasons when called for, etc.
And when a new version is released, you simply edit
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade.
Your distribution is upgraded while it runs. All services which might need to be restarted will be after the upgrade is complete.
The reason Debian is so easy is because nearly everything under the sun is "in Debian"; ie, you don't have to go hunting for it, you can fire up a nice graphical apt front-end like GnomeAPT or aptitude, browse through the packages, and have it install whatever you need (again, automatically resolving dependencies and versions). Porting apt to RPM will not necessarily fix this, nor will any of the pretty tools which are beginning to emerge. All of the 4,000+ packages in Debian are strictly controlled so that they will work together. THAT is the "secret". Until RPMs are unified like this, they will be hopeless.
I would never recommend anything else to a newbie.
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As another poster pointed out, the window manager (KDE, GNOME, E, Win98) is responsible for standardising the interface (like alt-f4 being "destroy this window" in Windows).
And as for KMail, it is, IMHO, being evil. For years, *NIX has used the "highlight is copy, middle button is paste" philosophy. Ctrl-C is "kill"!! Why did the developer of KMail decide that they had to emulate Windows? StarOffice is also bad in this respect.
File open dialogs, OTOH, are totally the realm of the application developer, and in the Linux world, that means that everyone will probably write a dialog that works the way they want it to work. It would be interesting if the WM would provide hooks for something like that, where any app could call a standard "File Open" dialog; unfortunately, this would probably be different for every WM. Another case of one of the things that makes Free Software great (choice) working against it at the same time (it's easy to make everything shiny and smooth, if you're Apple and you control hardware + software tightly).
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>Maybe what we need is some generic tool for installing binaries (like Installshield) that can detect what it needs.
:)
/lib directory because the people at mozilla.org compile mozilla for Linux against a slightly older libc++ than the one I have. If it could have detected that and said "Oh, that libc++ is the same major version, it'll probably work", and simply run with a warning or something, that might be nice. (It does work perfectly, BTW).
/opt.
Oh, you mean like apt? Not that you're going to be able to "apt-get install oracle" any time soon
However, something like apt, which intelligently manages package dependancies (if the packagers and packaging system intelligently SET package dependancies) can see which versions of glibc, Perl, SDL, $WHATEVER exist on a system and determine what needs to happen in order to install a program.
What would be interesting is if distributors of binary packages (not counting those included in distributions such as Debian) could have those packages attempt to use libraries other than the exact ones for which they were compiled, if those libraries stood a reasonable chance of working. For example, I have a symlink in my
As for where oracle should put its stuff, it should probably use
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We don't need government funding to make a difference in the inner city. It can be done with donations.
http://agape.qis.net
http://linux.umbc.edu/gits
The list of current hardware is a bit outdated; we have 8 workstations for the kids, all X-terminals from a beefy machine (dual celeron 400). All of the workstations are donated 486s or low-end Pentiums.
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http://www.horde.org/projects.php
:)
I've been using IMP, the webmail portion of HORDE, for quite some time now (no, not me personally; I use mutt. My _users_ have been using it). It's a very nice webmail client, especially with a few patches (for things like importing Outlook address books), and looks similar to Yahoo! mail (apparently; I've not used Yahoo! mail).
Though IMP is the most mature component, they also have Kronolith, which does calendaring. You have to get the code from CVS at the moment, but it is apparently in use in the Real World. Yes, it's a bit simple at the moment, but it's under development, so it _is_ happening.
Note that HORDE is entirely done with PHP, so it _does_ work on MS platforms (the server part, obviously; the client part is a web browser
The best part about providing users with webmail is that there is NO configuration. This is especially good when you are in Baltimore, and a good chunk of your users are in Chicago. You tell them on the phone, "Here is your username/password and the URL, go log in."
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LAME _has_ improved upon it. The LAME encoder can do VBR correctly, something which almost no other encoder (including the commercial ones) can do. VBR, when done correctly, is a great balance between audio quality and file size, yet most FAQs you read out there advise against it, not because the decoders can't handle it (they can), but because LAME is the only encoder that really does a nice job with it.
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Well, sort of.
Newer, slightly less cheap players such as the Pine and Compro handle VBR just fine, and they also handle the entire gamut of bitrates (32-320, I believe).
I have an MPtrip (which I'm returning to buy a Pine), and it DOES handle VBR. The problem is that it can only deal with bitrates up to 192, so when the bitrate on a VBR-encoded track goes above that, _then_ the player goes wonky.
What's annoying is that players such as these almost certainly don't have upgradeable firmware, so they'll never be able to support any forthcoming formats, such as ogg.
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