it strikes me as very lame that the same slashdot kids who jump on the opportunity to spread DeCSS (which, remember, is against the law) but turn around and make claims like "illegal is illegal" when it concerns an issue of real importance.
the slashdot party line may be correct in that DeCSS should not be illegal, but unfortunately slashdot "nerds" are too isolated to realize that there are far greater injustices in the world. perhaps if overprivilidged geeks had to experience any injustice worse than DVD encryption, they'd understand the need to resist.
I agree that the geforce2 performs well with xfree 4.0 but it should just be pointed out that NVidia's drivers are closed-source and still considered beta by nvidia. Some would complain that they are not open source for idealogical reasons, others for practical reasons (less bugfixes, less frequent releases, not in main xfree tree), while others will just be happy that they work relatively well.
When Slobodan Milosevic clung to power after a narrow election defeat, thousands of protesters rallied in every Yugoslav city, forcing him to give up. Wouldn't it be ironic if democracy was today stronger in Serbia than in the USA?
OJ was presumed innocent until prosecutors provided a mountain of evidence. OJ didn't have to provide a mountain of evidence that he was innocent. He just had to introduce reasonable doubt. He did. The jury
bought it. He's free.
OJ did not introduce reasonable doubt. His army of overpriced lawyers did.
Where's the problem?
The problem is that if OJ were a poor man, he'd be on death row right now. The problem is that the same laws are not applied equally to rich and poor -- the "justice" system works for the rich but against the poor.
This would be a great thing, because a majority of Windows users don't know how Windows is set up. They don't know what their hardware is, or how their email is set up, or any of that. They set it up once, or
had their kid set it up, and now they're helpless. Linux could go and find all that information. Installing Linux on top of Windows would be almost as easy and seamless as upgrading from Windows NT to
Windows 2000.
I think this idea (using windows driver and registry info for linux installs) sounds great. However, in my experience, the majority of Windows installs more than a week old are horribly broken. Drivers, software config, etc.. a "hardware manager" screen without "broken" devices is an unusual sight.
Last time I checked it wasn't Linux' goal to be bug-for-bug compatible with Windows. If someone has a broken or kludgy windows system, what good is an equally broken linux install?
Hopefully there is a middle ground -- maybe the windows info could be used as defaults or a starting point for autoprobing drivers. However I think basing an entire off of the windows registry is very dangerous.
dselect is based on apt. apt is the base of the package system. What you're thinking of is probably console-apt, known to most through apt-get, the central control binary.
No, I'm thinking of dselect.
Sorta. See, there's only one program in the whole bunch that actually knows the dpkg file format, and that's dpkg-deb. Apt is really a system for updating files. Any file. Apt can be easily adapted to any group of
files that lend themselves to being packaged. You could use apt to get the latest Slashdot stories, if you wanted. apt-get update to grab the headlines, apt-get install some_headline to install the comments... &c.
The apt system is pretty complex. It was hard for me to get my mind around. Hell, I've been using Debian for around a year now, and I just recently 'got it'. Most people never have reason to learn, so they don't.
Well, I've been using Debian for over three years, since version 1.3 (bo). Back then, there was no apt. The was dpkg, and there was dselect as a front end. The base install just threw you into dselect, and there you selected the packages and then installed by way of one of dselect's "methods". You would also use dselect if you wanted to sync up to unstable, by having dselect use "dpkg-ftp" or the like... and the first time I saw that I was damn impressed.
But dselect's interface has not changed too much since then (I don't know for sure since I avoid it if possible). The dependency handling is unpleasant, and overall it is rather cumbersome. Debian has been talking about replacing it for some time -- originally the project for the replacement of dselect was called "diety." Indeed, the apt mailing list is still deity@lists.debian.org, and this old project design shows the original intentions of the project. Apt was the result of the deity project.
Well, as it tends to happen within debian, technical items that appeal to volunteer developers come before less glamourous UI issues, so the grand GUI for deity/apt never really materialized, while the apt-get backend tool flourished. (Wichert's first answer in his slashdot interview was about this very topic.) apt-get as it is today is great for developers, sysadmins, and power users, but still doesn't provide that friendly interface that everyone says debian lacks. Since dselect has yet to be fully replaced, apt was integrated as a dselect "method", replacing dpkg-ftp, dpkg-www, etc, as the Jason Gunthorpe mail linked to above says. Debconf has been added to the mix also, handling package configuration issues.
Apt is a very well implemented piece of software. It just happened to end up filling a niche slightly different than originally intended.
console-apt, gnome-apt, etc etc, have all been attempts at a dselect-like UI for apt, but haven't been complete enough to be full replacements. Remember, "The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the
other 90% of the time." Its nice to hear that people are adopting apt-get for non-debian purposes.. go GPL. Whether it is worth it for RedHat to adopt apt-get, I don't know. Either way, debian and dpkg will live on.
Matt Toups
debian user, sysadmin, and former part-time debian-devel lurker.
I agree that apt is awesome. But dselect? dselect's lameness is the reason for apt's existence.
comparing rpm and apt is comparing apples to oranges. rpm == dpkg. apt is a frontend to dpkg.
this article is about taking the auto-retrieval features of apt (which everyone loves) and applying them to rpm -- ie, using apt as a frontend to rpm instead of dpkg. So, therefore, you could combine the (implied) superiority of the debian system's auto-retrieval with the ubiquity of redhat's rpm format. Personally I'm going to keep using apt as a frontend to dpkg, keep installing.deb packages, and not worry about it... what does worry me is the author's dismissal of.deb, suggesting that rpm may become part of LSB (something I haven't heard about) and implying that therefore.deb might as well give up.
I forget how many Megabytes the kernel was then, perhaps 30 -- now that doesn't seem like anything, but at the time it seemed like quite a bit
The current linux-2.4.0-test8.tar.gz is 22502369 bytes compressed... granted it is more than 30 megs uncompressed, but surely the kernel wasn't that big then. Perhaps he is referring to the whole mirror, not just the kernel... ?
Just out of curiosity, what kind of hardware do the root servers run? Is each root server actually a cluster or are they each just a Really Big Machine?
The answer is, the a.root server used to be a Sun Enterprise 10000, but was replaced by an IBM RS/6000 S80. Both would qualify as "Really Big Machines" in my opinion...
There are several root nameservers, in disparate locations...
>...beg in the street or work on
> something else to survive.
Some of the best musicians I know have jobs during the day.
Music is important in the lives of all people in all cultures. Creating and listening to music is something that all people do, and the way this has been corrupted by the music "industry" is sad.
The fact that people will argue for the economic "rights" of musicians today just shows how far capitalism has been ingrained into American lives.
There are things more important than money, and there are actually musicians out there that realize this.
> Its precicely this attitude that promotes "white flight" > Okay, I am white, but it really pisses me off to think that you > would assume that all the white people leaving magically creates > a BAD system.
I didn't invent the term "white flight" which is why I put it in quotes. In the rest of my post I went out of my way to portray disparity in schools as a function of both race and economics.
I don't assume that white people leaving public schools creates a bad system. I know it does. I spent 13 years in New Orleans Public Schools, which are 96% non-white. The few white people left in the system stay in a few diverse schools which have remained somewhat successful academically. The rest of the system has turned to utter garbage. A recent state of Louisiana report shows 91 out of 103 NOPS schools are below average; 50 were "academically unacceptable." This is from the state of Louisiana (as is the school mentioned in the ID story), a state with one of the lowest standards in the United States. Not to mention the low standards of the US in general.
Schools need families that are interested in and able to help improve schools. Active parents. Those happen to be the ones with enough money that they can afford to worry about their kids' school, not worrying about whether they're going to be able to feed their family that month. When they leave a school, and its only the poor kids left, or the ones that "probably deserve to be in prison" as you said in a previous post. I contend that they're the ones that need quality schools the most. But they're the ones that really get the least education. Thus, the cycle of poverty and crime continues.
You're right in that the problem isn't as simple as just "white flight", though I don't think the term "white and a few upper class black and asian flight" is going to catch on any time soon. The bottom line is, its about money, and for the most part, where I live at least, the White people are generally the ones with the money.
As I am white but without big bucks, I find that I generally side with the "black" side, at least when it comes to public education debates. But it seems that the upper middle class blacks tend to side with the whites. I think that will tell you if the issue is really racial, or economic.
> "They that can give up essential liberty > to obtain a little temporary safety > deserve niether liberty nor safety." > -Ben Franklin Funny. I attend Benjamin Franklin High School (New Orleans, LA). This is the third year that we've been compelled to wear our ID cards on our chest. The first year I was suspended for failure to wear my ID card. For that first year, resistance to the policy was common, I was just singled out as an example. But now that my class is the last to have been here before the ID policy, the spirit is dying. When that sort of environment is all that you know, you don't know any better than to accept it. This year they added plaintext and barcoded SSN's to the ID. Benjamin Franklin would be proud.
> Yes, but I would not try to win a war > using MY KID. [...] > if they run the school like a prison, > the only students left will be the ones which > probably deserve to be in prison.
Its precicely this attitude that promotes "white flight" and the requisite neglect of public school systems that follows it, leaving the socioeconomic underclasses to languish in further lack of education. I know its easy for me to say, since I don't have children, but I hope that when I do I'll be able to make the choice that is best for all students, not just my child. After all, I consider it in everyone's interest, including my child's, to live in a society with equal educational opportunities. I think I'd be doing a disservice to my child by sending him or her into a world of race and economic based privilidge that begins as soon as they begin school. Positive action needs to be taken, not more knee-jerk reactionism. Everyone says that they want better education, but no one is willing to do anything about it.
Slashdot Mirror
undergraduate tuition benefits are tax-free.
graduate tuition benefits are taxed, but the first $5,250 per calendar year are tax-free.
(see Section 127 of the Internal Revenue Code)
or worse... "justice."
it strikes me as very lame that the same slashdot kids who jump on the opportunity to spread DeCSS (which, remember, is against the law) but turn around and make claims like "illegal is illegal" when it concerns an issue of real importance.
the slashdot party line may be correct in that DeCSS should not be illegal, but unfortunately slashdot "nerds" are too isolated to realize that there are far greater injustices in the world. perhaps if overprivilidged geeks had to experience any injustice worse than DVD encryption, they'd understand the need to resist.
If you're interested in why NVidia's drivers are closed-source, I would recommend reading this brief interview of an nvidia developer.
I'll let you make up your mind on that issue.
From this site:
OJ did not introduce reasonable doubt. His army of overpriced lawyers did.
Where's the problem?
The problem is that if OJ were a poor man, he'd be on death row right now.
The problem is that the same laws are not applied equally to rich and poor -- the "justice" system works for the rich but against the poor.
I think this idea (using windows driver and registry info for linux installs) sounds great. However, in my experience, the majority of Windows installs more than a week old are horribly broken. Drivers, software config, etc.. a "hardware manager" screen without "broken" devices is an unusual sight.
Last time I checked it wasn't Linux' goal to be bug-for-bug compatible with Windows. If someone has a broken or kludgy windows system, what good is an equally broken linux install?
Hopefully there is a middle ground -- maybe the windows info could be used as defaults or a starting point for autoprobing drivers. However I think basing an entire off of the windows registry is very dangerous.
No, I'm thinking of dselect.
Sorta. See, there's only one program in the whole bunch that actually knows the dpkg file format, and that's dpkg-deb. Apt is really a system for updating files. Any file. Apt can be easily adapted to any group of files that lend themselves to being packaged. You could use apt to get the latest Slashdot stories, if you wanted. apt-get update to grab the headlines, apt-get install some_headline to install the comments... &c. The apt system is pretty complex. It was hard for me to get my mind around. Hell, I've been using Debian for around a year now, and I just recently 'got it'. Most people never have reason to learn, so they don't.
Well, I've been using Debian for over three years, since version 1.3 (bo). Back then, there was no apt. The was dpkg, and there was dselect as a front end. The base install just threw you into dselect, and there you selected the packages and then installed by way of one of dselect's "methods". You would also use dselect if you wanted to sync up to unstable, by having dselect use "dpkg-ftp" or the like ... and the first time I saw that I was damn impressed.
But dselect's interface has not changed too much since then (I don't know for sure since I avoid it if possible). The dependency handling is unpleasant, and overall it is rather cumbersome. Debian has been talking about replacing it for some time -- originally the project for the replacement of dselect was called "diety." Indeed, the apt mailing list is still deity@lists.debian.org, and this old project design shows the original intentions of the project. Apt was the result of the deity project.
Well, as it tends to happen within debian, technical items that appeal to volunteer developers come before less glamourous UI issues, so the grand GUI for deity/apt never really materialized, while the apt-get backend tool flourished. (Wichert's first answer in his slashdot interview was about this very topic.) apt-get as it is today is great for developers, sysadmins, and power users, but still doesn't provide that friendly interface that everyone says debian lacks. Since dselect has yet to be fully replaced, apt was integrated as a dselect "method", replacing dpkg-ftp, dpkg-www, etc, as the Jason Gunthorpe mail linked to above says. Debconf has been added to the mix also, handling package configuration issues.
Apt is a very well implemented piece of software. It just happened to end up filling a niche slightly different than originally intended. console-apt, gnome-apt, etc etc, have all been attempts at a dselect-like UI for apt, but haven't been complete enough to be full replacements. Remember, "The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time." Its nice to hear that people are adopting apt-get for non-debian purposes.. go GPL. Whether it is worth it for RedHat to adopt apt-get, I don't know. Either way, debian and dpkg will live on.
Matt Toups
debian user, sysadmin, and former part-time debian-devel lurker.
I agree that apt is awesome. But dselect? dselect's lameness is the reason for apt's existence.
comparing rpm and apt is comparing apples to oranges. rpm == dpkg. apt is a frontend to dpkg.
this article is about taking the auto-retrieval features of apt (which everyone loves) and applying them to rpm -- ie, using apt as a frontend to rpm instead of dpkg. So, therefore, you could combine the (implied) superiority of the debian system's auto-retrieval with the ubiquity of redhat's rpm format. Personally I'm going to keep using apt as a frontend to dpkg, keep installing .deb packages, and not worry about it... what does worry me is the author's dismissal of .deb, suggesting that rpm may become part of LSB (something I haven't heard about) and implying that therefore .deb might as well give up.
I forget how many Megabytes the kernel was then, perhaps 30 -- now that doesn't seem like anything, but at the time it seemed like quite a bit
... granted it is more than 30 megs uncompressed, but surely the kernel wasn't that big then. Perhaps he is referring to the whole mirror, not just the kernel... ?
The current linux-2.4.0-test8.tar.gz is 22502369 bytes compressed
This came up in a slashdot article some months ago called "Sun no longer the dot in
The answer is, the a.root server used to be a Sun Enterprise 10000, but was replaced by an IBM RS/6000 S80. Both would qualify as "Really Big Machines" in my opinion...
There are several root nameservers, in disparate locations...
- B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
128.9.0.107
- J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
198.41.0.10
- K.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
193.0.14.129
- L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
198.32.64.12
- M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
202.12.27.33
- I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
192.36.148.17
- E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
192.203.230.10
- D.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
128.8.10.90
- A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
198.41.0.4
- H.ROOT-SERVERS.NET
128.63.2.53
> want to try and live, and not have the masses
> dictate it for them?
If you think that being on a major record label equals self-determination for an artist, you're sadly mistaken.
I think musicians should have the same ability to decide how they live as the rest of us -- ie, not much.
Or, life sucks, and music is how we deal with it.
> ...beg in the street or work on
> something else to survive.
Some of the best musicians I know have jobs during the day.
Music is important in the lives of all people in all cultures. Creating and listening to music is something that all people do, and the way this has been corrupted by the music "industry" is sad.
The fact that people will argue for the economic "rights" of musicians today just shows how far capitalism has been ingrained into American lives.
There are things more important than money, and there are actually musicians out there that realize this.
> Um... The PIX 520 is a P2 350, the case is mostly air.
Ah, I was thinking of the PIX 515.
I think the 506 is also a p200 though.
True .. the PIX uses a 200 Mhz pentium, to be exact.
The 3600 series is a MIPS, IIRC.
I have upgraded to 2.7-beta and I'm glad to see that ethernet bridging seems to be performing better.
Don't forget StarOffice.
Click here for more details on the kernel archive mirror system.
As a side note, I still haven't heard a reasonable explanation for how and why there is a kernel mirror in Antarctica.
Note that there is also a linux port of maelstrom, its one of my favorite svgalib games. There is also a debian pacakge of it in the non-free section.
> Okay, I am white, but it really pisses me off to think that you
> would assume that all the white people leaving magically creates
> a BAD system.
I didn't invent the term "white flight" which is why I put it in quotes. In the rest of my post I went out of my way to portray disparity in schools as a function of both race and economics.
I don't assume that white people leaving public schools creates a bad system. I know it does. I spent 13 years in New Orleans Public Schools, which are 96% non-white. The few white people left in the system stay in a few diverse schools which have remained somewhat successful academically. The rest of the system has turned to utter garbage. A recent state of Louisiana report shows 91 out of 103 NOPS schools are below average; 50 were "academically unacceptable." This is from the state of Louisiana (as is the school mentioned in the ID story), a state with one of the lowest standards in the United States. Not to mention the low standards of the US in general.
Schools need families that are interested in and able to help improve schools. Active parents. Those happen to be the ones with enough money that they can afford to worry about their kids' school, not worrying about whether they're going to be able to feed their family that month. When they leave a school, and its only the poor kids left, or the ones that "probably deserve to be in prison" as you said in a previous post. I contend that they're the ones that need quality schools the most. But they're the ones that really get the least education. Thus, the cycle of poverty and crime continues.
You're right in that the problem isn't as simple as just "white flight", though I don't think the term "white and a few upper class black and asian flight" is going to catch on any time soon. The bottom line is, its about money, and for the most part, where I live at least, the White people are generally the ones with the money.
As I am white but without big bucks, I find that I generally side with the "black" side, at least when it comes to public education debates. But it seems that the upper middle class blacks tend to side with the whites. I think that will tell you if the issue is really racial, or economic.
> "They that can give up essential liberty > to obtain a little temporary safety > deserve niether liberty nor safety." > -Ben Franklin Funny. I attend Benjamin Franklin High School (New Orleans, LA). This is the third year that we've been compelled to wear our ID cards on our chest. The first year I was suspended for failure to wear my ID card. For that first year, resistance to the policy was common, I was just singled out as an example. But now that my class is the last to have been here before the ID policy, the spirit is dying. When that sort of environment is all that you know, you don't know any better than to accept it. This year they added plaintext and barcoded SSN's to the ID. Benjamin Franklin would be proud.
> Yes, but I would not try to win a war
> using MY KID.
[...]
> if they run the school like a prison,
> the only students left will be the ones which
> probably deserve to be in prison.
Its precicely this attitude that promotes "white flight" and the requisite neglect of public school systems that follows it, leaving the socioeconomic underclasses to languish in further lack of education.
I know its easy for me to say, since I don't have children, but I hope that when I do I'll be able to make the choice that is best for all students, not just my child. After all, I consider it in everyone's interest, including my child's, to live in a society with equal educational opportunities. I think I'd be doing a disservice to my child by sending him or her into a world of race and economic based privilidge that begins as soon as they begin school.
Positive action needs to be taken, not more knee-jerk reactionism. Everyone says that they want better education, but no one is willing to do anything about it.