Since Slashdot contains lots of dynamic contents (or rather, since it nothing but dynamic content), the Perl scripts print the appropiate HTTP headers (Pragma, No-Cache and related) to instruct what receives the pages (browsers, proxies and tunnels) not to cache them. That means that whenever you abandon the page (follow a link) the browser will discard it, so when you hit back, you will have to reload it.
I am developing an engine to create dynamic content and it does just the same thing: ask whatever receives the pages not to cache them.
It can be a pain to press the back button, but, on the other hand, you could always `open link in new window' whenever you plan to continue seeing a given page (that is, unless you are using Lynx which ignores all those headers anyway (at least until version 2.8.1rel.2)). Just in case you don't know, you can open links in new window just by clicking them with the middle button in Unix Netscape.
Why should I spend my time helping to improve prpietary software that I have to pay for and I can't share with my friends nor even modify it?
If they want us to help them make their software suck less, they should give it to us. Helping them improve their software is just working for them, getting nothing in exchange.
I would rather spend my time fixing software that, in a practical sense belongs to me; software I can really use.
Expecting me to pay for their crappy software is silly. Expecting me to help them improve it is extremely ridicolous.
I consider MS software crappy at best. And I also refuse to help them improve it, as you point out. But I consider my attitude far from being hypocrite. Does Microsoft expects me to help them improve their propietary software, that I have to pay for and can't modify nor share with my friends?
Why should I help them improve their propietary software? I would do it would they release it under the GPL or a similar license.
Expecting me to pay for their crappy software is ridicolous. Expecting me to help improve their propietary software is far more ridicolous.
Umm. I understand they do use Solaris on their SMTP servers. I did a nslookup for their MXs and then tried to use Queso and telnet to different ports but couldn't find a way to prove that has Solaris.
Well, pipelines are what allows processors to execute multiple instructions at the same time. The idea is that you can be executing say 5 different instructions at the same time. It takes you 5 clock cycles to execute a given instruction, but since you are executing 5 at the same time, it works as if you were able to execute one machine instruction in each cycle. Most modern processors have multiple pipelines, meaning they can be executing around 10 different instructions at the same time. Each instruction is broken into different stages and each of your pipelines goes executing the stages one after the other (stages are like: load instruction, decode instruction, load registers/memory, do math, store registers/memory).
Why is Amazon going to suck just by selling something more than books? What's wrong with they selling toys and other stuff?
Why does Jon Katz tell me where to buy? What makes him believe I care about his opinion on Amazon?
Katz speaks as if he was the biggest leader after Jesus. It's even worse than ESR.
Alejo.
Re:Linux fragmentation: no big deal
on
Storm Linux
·
· Score: 1
I bet you that 99% of them, if not more, use either libc5 or glibc, and they all use the same kernel. It means I can use anything standard (fork, sockets, pthreads on glibc-based, flock, fcntl...) on any of them and my programs will compile out of the tar on any of them. I doubt, for example, that the Apache guys had any difficulty getting Apache to work on GNU/Linux because of so-called 'fragmentation'.
This whole fragmentation deal is to me just FUD against GNU/Linux from both the WinNT and the BSD people.
And, in the latter case, I find it ironic since I believe that would BSD be as succesful as GNU/Linux is, we would have 50 BSD distributions. At least all GNU/Linux distributions share the kernel and the C library.
Alejo.
Re:LET THE FRAGMENTATION BEGIN!
on
Storm Linux
·
· Score: 1
Yes, it means BSDs are far less succesful. Would they be as succesful as GNU/Linux, you know there would be around 50 different BSDs.
And that is measuring success in number of users.
Alejo.
Re:LET THE FRAGMENTATION BEGIN!
on
Storm Linux
·
· Score: 1
NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi, FreeBSD... That's four. And each with a different kernel.
You know, Linux is just succesful and you are just jealous. Would FreeBSD be as succesful as Linux, you know there would be MyBSD, YourBSD, PepeBSD, JohnBSD, UltraBSD, BSDragon, SBSD, BSDPower, Calavera BSD, BSDLight, YKZBSS, TheBSD, White Cup BSD, BSDebian, RealBSD and more.
All those companies are just making distributions of a succesful OS.
And all those BSD would be really worse than all the GNU/Linux, since all GNU/Linux distributions at least use the same kernel.
So it seems socketbits.h is part of glibc2. Alejo.
Re:The problem is that it's not bloated enough!
on
All Hail Bloatware
·
· Score: 1
Dancing paperclips... Actually I do believe people demanded this. And this is one of the reason why I am afraid of the masification of GNU/Linux: Perhaps we will begin to see dancing paperclips and similar appear everywhere.
It's just like the GUI-based Caldera installator. I am not saying it is a bad thing, I suppose it is nice... I don't know. Anyway, I can't see a *real* reason why having that GUI would be better over having a menu-driven text installer. But the problem is there are persons, lots of them, who believe the GUI is a real improvement over the menu-based interface. Can I say bloat? The depressing thing is many persons actually think that having a GUI makes it easier to install the OS.
I don't have problems with user friendliness, but I just hope massification won't turn GNU/Linux into just another OS designed for idio, erm, umm, user-friendly, expert-hostile. Please, please, please, please, don't add a dancing paperclip to GNU/Linux installation process in the name of user friendliness. The dancing paperclip pretty much shows how extremely annoying `user friendliness' can be to expert users.
And no, the GPL and the fact that we can change the code won't help in this case.
Emacs is just an editor. All it does is accept input from the user. Well, that and run Lisp programs. You can create Lisp programs to do whatever you want, but there is a difference between that and having that functionality inside of Emacs (which would be bloat), as a part of Emacs. Would you say Bash or Perl are bloated? Well, look at all the things they can do, that has to be bloat! NO.
Compare Emacs with just about any other IDE. What people calls Borland C or Visual C is a compiler, an editor, a debugger, a help system and a lot of other things. Emacs, on the other hand, just `connects' programs. I tell it to recompile (by pressing F9 according to my configuration) and it executes make -k. Make, on its turn, executes (according to my Makefile's) some Perl scripts, shell scripts and GCC. Emacs just parses their output. Then I do M-X gdb and Emacs acts as a front end to GDB. So I can debug my code and edit it within the same program, but using different programs. Emacs just talks with GDB, that's all it does, act as an awesome interface between me and the programs. But never does it attempt to compile or to debug my executables. When I tell it to check my spelling, all it does is fork and talk with ispell... and I could go on and on.
Anyway Emacs is just a front end to other programs. And it has a Lisp interpreter so I can tell it exactly what to do. This is kinda like saying that the GNU readline library is bloatware, since it attempts to provide a user interface to every command-line program. It is exactly the opposite: don't code the way to read info at a prompt, use another program (a library) to do it. And that just rocks, I really wish every command-line program I have used GNU readline, instead of providing their own (stupid) prompts.
Okay, on one hand, this is good for the Joe users coming from Windows. I suppose.
But people should keep in mind GUIs are just an alternative to CLI. I would rather be given a shell with the standard programs (ls, pwd, mount, fdisk...) to install GNU/Linux than any GUI. I can't think of any real reasons why this GUI would make the installation process any easier than a menu-driven, text-based interface, such as Debian's. I'm afraid of world domination. Many developers seem willing to give up the best things of GNU/Linux just so it can be used by Joes. More efforts spent helping Joe-Computer-Illiterate use GNU/Linux are less efforts spent making GNU/Linux better for the experts. There's nothing wrong with being user friendly, but I'm afraid it may turn GNU/Linux a little expert hostile... There's nothing wrong with this GUI, but GNU/Linux companies are beginning to worry about the kind of persons who think having the GUI is an improvement over a text-based menu-drive interface... Who cares about such computer illiterate persons? Screw world domination!
I'm afraid of massification. Perhaps we will see every distribution turn to a stable, bugless MacOS/Windows... There's no essay as good as Neal Stephenson's to explain the difference between GNU/Linux and the other two.
Oh, and by the way, that's not a modern GUI, it looks exactly like Windows. Alejo.
The real advantage of running X for me is that I can have many consoles opened (each inside its own xterm window), see more information at the same time (continually see the load, number of smtp connections, last mails I have received and the like) and see images. But I would rather be in plain text than trapped inside X with whatever Window Manager but without an xterm.
Stallman's EMACS was brilliant in the 1970s, but today we demand more, specifically Microsoft Word, which can't be written over a weekend, no matter how much Coke you drink.
Oh, yeah! I'm gonna drop Emacs and code in Word!! On a second thought, there is WP, StarOffice, ABI and many other Word-like programs for Linux already, I'm now gonna code in WP.
Emacs is NOT a word processor.
And Linux is 30-year-old technology.
Yeah, right. And PCs are 50 years old, since they are still built based on the Von Neumann's work. Okay, there are some trivial things such as pipelines and the like, but everything is still the same, right? Like Linux!
I found that article more destructive and insulting like anything. "Richard Stallman's Marx rants", "Disagreeing even on how to pronounce Linux" and his implication that open source software can't create "modern software".
The company will not divulge all of the specifications of the hardware, except to confirm that the iToaster runs on an Intel Pentium class processor, and includes a 2.1GB hard drive.
Do you get tired of writing all those extra.0's, or are you afraid you might get out of disk space?
A programming language (these days) has to be designed to ease the work of the programmer. Having to type all those '.0' can be a real pain. I suppose it is just a thing of getting used to it. So I suppose both of you are right and we could bitch about C too for many things if we weren't so used to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, please, showing that you know what DoS stands for proves you're inteligent, uh? Get a life, at least his posts was way funnier than yours.
Alejo.
Andrés Pastrana you suck, your whole administration sucks, and your momma sucks also.
Alejo.
Since Slashdot contains lots of dynamic contents (or rather, since it nothing but dynamic content), the Perl scripts print the appropiate HTTP headers (Pragma, No-Cache and related) to instruct what receives the pages (browsers, proxies and tunnels) not to cache them. That means that whenever you abandon the page (follow a link) the browser will discard it, so when you hit back, you will have to reload it.
I am developing an engine to create dynamic content and it does just the same thing: ask whatever receives the pages not to cache them.
It can be a pain to press the back button, but, on the other hand, you could always `open link in new window' whenever you plan to continue seeing a given page (that is, unless you are using Lynx which ignores all those headers anyway (at least until version 2.8.1rel.2)). Just in case you don't know, you can open links in new window just by clicking them with the middle button in Unix Netscape.
Alejo.
Alejo.
100% agreed.
Way to go, FSF! Thanks for all you've done!
Alejo.
What are those opinions you talk about?
Alejo.
Why should I spend my time helping to improve prpietary software that I have to pay for and I can't share with my friends nor even modify it?
If they want us to help them make their software suck less, they should give it to us. Helping them improve their software is just working for them, getting nothing in exchange.
I would rather spend my time fixing software that, in a practical sense belongs to me; software I can really use.
Expecting me to pay for their crappy software is silly. Expecting me to help them improve it is extremely ridicolous.
Alejo.
I consider MS software crappy at best. And I also refuse to help them improve it, as you point out. But I consider my attitude far from being hypocrite. Does Microsoft expects me to help them improve their propietary software, that I have to pay for and can't modify nor share with my friends?
Why should I help them improve their propietary software? I would do it would they release it under the GPL or a similar license.
Expecting me to pay for their crappy software is ridicolous. Expecting me to help improve their propietary software is far more ridicolous.
Alejo.
Umm. I understand they do use Solaris on their SMTP servers. I did a nslookup for their MXs and then tried to use Queso and telnet to different ports but couldn't find a way to prove that has Solaris.
Alejo.
Well, pipelines are what allows processors to execute multiple instructions at the same time. The idea is that you can be executing say 5 different instructions at the same time. It takes you 5 clock cycles to execute a given instruction, but since you are executing 5 at the same time, it works as if you were able to execute one machine instruction in each cycle. Most modern processors have multiple pipelines, meaning they can be executing around 10 different instructions at the same time. Each instruction is broken into different stages and each of your pipelines goes executing the stages one after the other (stages are like: load instruction, decode instruction, load registers/memory, do math, store registers/memory).
Alejo.
Why not?
What's parallel processing? What are pipelines?
Alejo.
Why is Amazon going to suck just by selling something more than books? What's wrong with they selling toys and other stuff?
Why does Jon Katz tell me where to buy? What makes him believe I care about his opinion on Amazon?
Katz speaks as if he was the biggest leader after Jesus. It's even worse than ESR.
Alejo.
I bet you that 99% of them, if not more, use either libc5 or glibc, and they all use the same kernel. It means I can use anything standard (fork, sockets, pthreads on glibc-based, flock, fcntl...) on any of them and my programs will compile out of the tar on any of them. I doubt, for example, that the Apache guys had any difficulty getting Apache to work on GNU/Linux because of so-called 'fragmentation'.
This whole fragmentation deal is to me just FUD against GNU/Linux from both the WinNT and the BSD people.
And, in the latter case, I find it ironic since I believe that would BSD be as succesful as GNU/Linux is, we would have 50 BSD distributions. At least all GNU/Linux distributions share the kernel and the C library.
Alejo.
Yes, it means BSDs are far less succesful. Would they be as succesful as GNU/Linux, you know there would be around 50 different BSDs.
And that is measuring success in number of users.
Alejo.
NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi, FreeBSD... That's four. And each with a different kernel.
You know, Linux is just succesful and you are just jealous. Would FreeBSD be as succesful as Linux, you know there would be MyBSD, YourBSD, PepeBSD, JohnBSD, UltraBSD, BSDragon, SBSD, BSDPower, Calavera BSD, BSDLight, YKZBSS, TheBSD, White Cup BSD, BSDebian, RealBSD and more.
All those companies are just making distributions of a succesful OS.
And all those BSD would be really worse than all the GNU/Linux, since all GNU/Linux distributions at least use the same kernel.
Alejo.
I am using Debian and /mnt is a really old Slackware with glibc installed:
c /socketbits.hs ysv/linux/socketbits.ht s.h
% locate socketbits.h
/mnt/usr/glibc-2.0.6/sysdeps/generi
/mnt/usr/glibc-2.0.6/sysdeps/unix/
/mnt/usr/include/socketbi
/usr/include/socketbits.h
So it seems socketbits.h is part of glibc2.
Alejo.
Dancing paperclips... Actually I do believe people demanded this. And this is one of the reason why I am afraid of the masification of GNU/Linux: Perhaps we will begin to see dancing paperclips and similar appear everywhere.
It's just like the GUI-based Caldera installator. I am not saying it is a bad thing, I suppose it is nice... I don't know. Anyway, I can't see a *real* reason why having that GUI would be better over having a menu-driven text installer. But the problem is there are persons, lots of them, who believe the GUI is a real improvement over the menu-based interface. Can I say bloat? The depressing thing is many persons actually think that having a GUI makes it easier to install the OS.
I don't have problems with user friendliness, but I just hope massification won't turn GNU/Linux into just another OS designed for idio, erm, umm, user-friendly, expert-hostile. Please, please, please, please, don't add a dancing paperclip to GNU/Linux installation process in the name of user friendliness. The dancing paperclip pretty much shows how extremely annoying `user friendliness' can be to expert users.
And no, the GPL and the fact that we can change the code won't help in this case.
Alejo.
I thought Emacs was exactly the opposite.
Emacs is just an editor. All it does is accept input from the user. Well, that and run Lisp programs. You can create Lisp programs to do whatever you want, but there is a difference between that and having that functionality inside of Emacs (which would be bloat), as a part of Emacs. Would you say Bash or Perl are bloated? Well, look at all the things they can do, that has to be bloat! NO.
Compare Emacs with just about any other IDE. What people calls Borland C or Visual C is a compiler, an editor, a debugger, a help system and a lot of other things. Emacs, on the other hand, just `connects' programs. I tell it to recompile (by pressing F9 according to my configuration) and it executes make -k. Make, on its turn, executes (according to my Makefile's) some Perl scripts, shell scripts and GCC. Emacs just parses their output. Then I do M-X gdb and Emacs acts as a front end to GDB. So I can debug my code and edit it within the same program, but using different programs. Emacs just talks with GDB, that's all it does, act as an awesome interface between me and the programs. But never does it attempt to compile or to debug my executables. When I tell it to check my spelling, all it does is fork and talk with ispell... and I could go on and on.
Anyway Emacs is just a front end to other programs. And it has a Lisp interpreter so I can tell it exactly what to do. This is kinda like saying that the GNU readline library is bloatware, since it attempts to provide a user interface to every command-line program. It is exactly the opposite: don't code the way to read info at a prompt, use another program (a library) to do it. And that just rocks, I really wish every command-line program I have used GNU readline, instead of providing their own (stupid) prompts.
Alejo.
Okay, on one hand, this is good for the Joe users coming from Windows. I suppose.
But people should keep in mind GUIs are just an alternative to CLI. I would rather be given a shell with the standard programs (ls, pwd, mount, fdisk...) to install GNU/Linux than any GUI.
I can't think of any real reasons why this GUI would make the installation process any easier than a menu-driven, text-based interface, such as Debian's.
I'm afraid of world domination. Many developers seem willing to give up the best things of GNU/Linux just so it can be used by Joes. More efforts spent helping Joe-Computer-Illiterate use GNU/Linux are less efforts spent making GNU/Linux better for the experts. There's nothing wrong with being user friendly, but I'm afraid it may turn GNU/Linux a little expert hostile... There's nothing wrong with this GUI, but GNU/Linux companies are beginning to worry about the kind of persons who think having the GUI is an improvement over a text-based menu-drive interface... Who cares about such computer illiterate persons? Screw world domination!
I'm afraid of massification. Perhaps we will see every distribution turn to a stable, bugless MacOS/Windows... There's no essay as good as Neal Stephenson's to explain the difference between GNU/Linux and the other two.
Oh, and by the way, that's not a modern GUI, it looks exactly like Windows.
Alejo.
I just wanted to say I agree wholeheartedly.
The real advantage of running X for me is that I can have many consoles opened (each inside its own xterm window), see more information at the same time (continually see the load, number of smtp connections, last mails I have received and the like) and see images. But I would rather be in plain text than trapped inside X with whatever Window Manager but without an xterm.
Alejo.
Oh, yeah! I'm gonna drop Emacs and code in Word!! On a second thought, there is WP, StarOffice, ABI and many other Word-like programs for Linux already, I'm now gonna code in WP.
Emacs is NOT a word processor.
Yeah, right. And PCs are 50 years old, since they are still built based on the Von Neumann's work. Okay, there are some trivial things such as pipelines and the like, but everything is still the same, right? Like Linux!
I found that article more destructive and insulting like anything. "Richard Stallman's Marx rants", "Disagreeing even on how to pronounce Linux" and his implication that open source software can't create "modern software".
Alejo.
Well, you can still charge for free software. I know, not "per seat", but the fact that they are charging $249 does not mean it is not free software.
Go to http://www.redhat.com/ and see how expensive it is. And it is still free software.
Alejo.
On http://www.news.com/ News/Item/0,4,38074,00.html?st.ne.fd.gif.j. It says:
Alejo.
But they couldn't create a propietary OS if it's Linux based, right? GPL?
Alejo.
This is completely false.
Emacs does nothing but execute Lisp programs. It is those Lisp programs which do every single thing.
Alejo.
A programming language (these days) has to be designed to ease the work of the programmer. Having to type all those '.0' can be a real pain. I suppose it is just a thing of getting used to it. So I suppose both of you are right and we could bitch about C too for many things if we weren't so used to them.
Alejo.