I think it would have been a Good Thing had the Slackware developer decided to adopt the BSD Ports system to pull in additional software.
Ports involves a fairly light layering of ordinary Unix tools to pull down "pristine sources" and manage the dependancies.
The Slackware "install it all by hand" dictum is fine if you've got one or two boxes; making it work for a set of systems being used for different purposes has got to be difficult to make scale.
Einstein said that things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. It seems to me that Slackware tries to head to that "simpler" point, which certainly suffices for a firewall box that shouldn't be running anything more than a bare minimum of services, but which oversimplifies for more complex systems...
A number of projects have since tried to build environments with tightly-integrated Lisps; none have been much more than curiosities.
The other major linkage is that the bulk of the members of the Unix Haters "cabal" were folks that hated Unix not simply in abstract, but rather in comparison to Lisp environments like Symbolics/Genera.
I'm not sure how this all would connect to the "Anti-Lisp" notions of the Anonymous Coward. Just as the Unix Haters Handbook presents very little about what they would propose as a preferable alternative to Unix, the AC doesn't present any information as to what he would prefer to Lisp.
The lack of high fees means that they won't have wheelbarrow-loads of money kicking around to spend on upgrading the network, but there are a bunch of contrary "forces:"
They aren't in debt to their eyeballs from paying for the existing network.
Since the "Internet Bubble" has burst, nobody's going to be expecting to get hefty "easement fees" ( e.g. - the fees paid to those that are hosting antennae)
The cost of hardware has a tendancy to go down, and the "old guard" were the ones that paid the "early adoption" premiums.
In other words, hardware to do further expansion should be cheaper than it was for Ricochet.
Furthermore, cheaper pricing can allow much more extensive adoption.
The value to it is not in providing internet access to those that want DSL/cable "modems," but rather for those that are doing "mobile" work where Internet access would be valuable.
These folks will probably still be a bit skeptical, as the previous business failed, but on the other hand have the two merits that at least the technology has been shown to be viable, and the business seems credible enough that something did emerge from the ashes.
Hate it, or despise it, the only way Linux would be likely to do anything "desktopy" is if the One True Version of Microsoft Office can be run on it.
100% bug-for-bug compatible, so that bad fonts and bad tables look bad in the right way in bloated emailed documents
100% vulnerable to all of the viruses that target Microsoft Office
100% vulnerable to the problem that "Office 2003" may be unable to read documents from "Office 97"
All of the above is 100% necessary in order to ensure 100% compatibility with the little applications that companies have constructed to allow you to download a document from the Intranet, and then have it walk you through filling it out and then mailing itself to (HR|Building Security|...).
Unfortunately, the enormous problems with this are inherently connected to the necessities. They're not merely married; they're joined at the hip like "Siamese twins." Further aspects of that as metaphor work:
The joys and sorrows are inseparable without destroying them;
It all comes as a result of a massively severe "birth defect."
I'd prefer not to see such a birth defect conceived in the first place, but if it happens, that demonstrates one company's wilful choices.
If they play in a sandbox filled with PCBs with toys made from plutonium, you can hardly expect the results to be joy and happiness...
You validly point to the location of the problem, if not necessarily the putative cause of the problem.
Yes, indeed, if they've spent $280M of borrowed money, and have nothing to show for it, that's a problem.
Zilog has a history of trying some ambitious things: some may remember the Z-8000, and even the Z80000, which attempted architectures of rather higher-bittedness. None "succeeded."
If their latest attempt at "huge growth" failed, that would nicely explain there being a big debt hanging around as a millstone to sink the stable bits of the business.
Having sources available means that somebody who's interested and capable that is independent of the vendor can do something about improving things.
Certainly, it's good for the thing to "work right in the first place;" that goes without saying. (Well, what with Microsoft's "beta-testing" of insecure software, that doesn't go without saying...)
If sources are available, and it's easy enough for some folks to demonstrate improvements, this can feed back to "sheeple consumers" in as simple a way as SHAME. If significant improvements can be demonstrated by outsiders, that can SHAME the vendor into providing the improvements to their customers. It's not guaranteed; life doesn't quite work that way.
I find it remarkable that anyone would want to link to the front page of KPMG , given an opportunity not to.:-)
The site renders extremely badly on Galeon... (And it's about as bad with Netscape 4.7 and Konqueror, albeit in different ways...)
Maybe they want nobody to link to it so that nobody knows that it's there?
Doing whatever you like is fine, if you like risks
on
The LDP and Debian
·
· Score: 2
GIF generating code is pretty dangerous, since the nice folks at Unisys have a PATENT on the algorithm, and have been doing some pursuing of people for licence fees.
I'd say that omitting GIF code from GIMP is a rather important thing if you're not interested in having Unisys' lawyers call you to ask you to fill a briefcase with money for them.
If Debian redistributes stuff that they haven't got permission to redistribute, then that is a big deal.
The situation with the LDP seems rather silly; if people sent documents to the LDP, it seems rather nonsensical that those documents could possibly not be redistributable. Nonetheless, if there's a legitimate concern, then it is entirely appropriate for the documents to be "downgraded in apparent status."
This is not a disaster; if a whack of docs fall out of Debian for a while, this is not likely to lead to goats falling from the sky and other such silliness.
The shrill reaction of "Oh, we'll have to get a bunch of documents rewritten by tomorrow!" is certainly silly...
If you fire a high-powered laser into somebody's eyes, it will do an eminently good job of blinding them.
That is going to be more expensive to the enemy that has to retrieve and treat the people than killing people outright.
(Reminiscent of another thread; in Children of Dune, much of the story revolves around who is the "prophet" that had his eyes burned out by what they called a "stone-burner," and whether or not this man was Paul Muad'dib Atreides...)
It sounds as thought licensing constraints legitimately mandated that you guys move to NetBSD.
I don't see a big problem with that, nay, I'd think it a good thing for there to be some diversity of licenses, OSes, and approaches.
Supposing there turned out to be some horrible situation where NetBSD turned out to have killer bugs for particular purposes, it's a good thing to have some alternatives. Or vice-versa, and the potential causes can remain "n'importe quoi."
I don't see any reason why it is forcibly necessary for Linux to be "dominating" the area, either. I would think dominance would lead to all sorts of Bad Results as it denied the availability of choice.
And as for licensing, if you're going to use Linux, that certainly has some implications on being mandated to release source code. If you reject that mandate (and there's some "ethic" behind it; the authors are unlikely to let go of this), then Linux obviously isn't going to be the right choice. Which makes it fortunate that the market wasn't dominated by Linux, as if it were, you wouldn't have had other choices like NetBSD.
We have come to understand with great vigor this fall that when large aircraft come down unexpectedly, this leads to very bad things.
The same is not true for smaller craft.
If a 747 "prangs" on landing, there are likely to be people injured or killed. On the other hand, smaller aircraft take hard landings rather a lot better.
Taking it to a more significant extreme, I used to fly radio controlled planes. The five pound 5 foot wingspan planes could take a pretty hard landing without damage. Move to an 8 footer weighing 15 pounds, and the plane is much more fragile.
Taking it in the other direction, it's probably impossible to kill an ant by dropping it from high altitude; there's not enough density for the terminal velocity to be too terribly high, and there's not enough mass for there to be much of an impact.
A "flying robot" is liable to be a bit bigger than an ant, but it's certainly down there in the "small scale" category. If it's made of tough materials, it should be quite resilient.
If they do anything right about it, it would involve them presenting The Weirdling Way, which would be rather a lot more like some martial art than anything else.
The "deus ex machina" of the Duniverse was spice, with some dosing of mental sciences like the Mentats and such.
The thing that struck me as being the real plague of the "Plague of the Dune" spinoffs was that they were so hot on throwing in bits of, well, late 20th century technology.
The Butlerian Jihad was all about utterly rejecting the use of computers and artificial forms of intelligence. That is not the sort of environment in which it makes sense for people to get excited about the Galaxy Wide Web:-).
Frankly, one of the neat things about Dune was the notion of the people systematically rejecting things like computers. You have to think a little bit to come up with the sorts of alternative sorts of technologies that come out of people refusing to think down those paths...
If the folks working on this include those that worked on the previous miniseries, this would be not horrible news.
The previous miniseries suffered from the problem that they kept forgetting that Dune was a desert; hopefully enough fans can remind them of that fact that it might not be such a problem this time.
And hopefully the miniseries will be better than the "Dune: House X" series (for the assortment of values of X).
Did you ever consider the option of grabbing the source code to Roaring Penguin PPPoE, sticking it on your system somewhere, maybe in /usr/src , and then running:
# make install
I spent 1/2 an hour fiddling with the Debian pppoe package, and concluded it was a much better idea to punt over to David Skoll's original version.
I did a make install , answered the questions, and my firewall has been up 64 days since the last time I moved the machine, and it works like a charm.
Considering the entire distribution as worm-fodder just because one package hasn't turned out well is about as logical as deciding Windows is wonderful because the BSOD is a particularly nice shade of blue.
If you're running a personal server, it's not vitally important, but if the mail server is processing thousands of messages a day, it can be significant.
I personally like Postfix because:
It's pretty easy to configure.
If your needs are simple, and you need only set up a DMsomehost.to.forward.to entry for Sendmail, Sendmail's easy to configure, but things instantly get a whole lot hairier.
And I've never had good success with EXIM, and every time I've configured qmail it has been a hassle.
Like qmail, it supports Maildir, which is presently handy since mail is, at the moment, being delivered to an NFS-mounted directory. Sendmail wouldn't be happy, but Postfix is.
Postfix should be more resistant to hackers than Sendmail or Exim.
It seems dangerous to compare Postfix to qmail; spectacular flame wars have broken out between the respective authors...
Yes, it has been so since 1992, when
Edwin Hoogerbeets explained this to the world.
(Note that there were not one, but two Edwin Hoogerbeets; one that went to University of Waterloo, and, for a while, worked at Microsoft, and another, quite distinct, with a somewhat ZZ-Top-like beard, that got pictured in a Microsoft advertisement back in the late '80s.)
If you're paying for the high end "gold level" support, if there is a severe problem, Oracle will "put a guy on a plane" to head over and help deal with the recovery.
That's the extreme case; in rather less extreme cases, a benefit of Paying The Bucks for Oracle is that you can do online backups while the system is running, and have the expectation that any DBA that is worth his (or her) salt can bring it back up if there is a problem.
Those are the critical things that cause managers to be willing to pay the Big Bucks for licenses.
The fact that there's a sizable community of DBAs from which to hire is a nice bonus; the process feeds on itself in that it is profitable for everyone (well, almost everyone...) to get involved in certification activities. That means that there's a half-reasonable lowest common denominator set of skills out there.
Another "merit" is that there is a whole pile of third party software out there, whether in tools to help you manage databases, tools to help you build DB schemas, applications running atop Oracle ( e.g. SAP R/3 ), and such, again, with financial benefits to many of those involved. It is SAP's interests to promote Oracle sales, and vice-versa... (Albeit that being an example of a situation where there are some conflicts of interest!)
Once you have truly grokked what is going on, it takes a whole lot more than "a little imagination" to try to imagine the perceptions of the computer illiterate.
I can't pretend to understand the perceptions of those that can't read, in general; likewise, I know at least enough to know that I don't know what the "illiterate first time user" sees.
If you seriously want a system to be usable by "total morons," then you've got to periodically pull some "total morons" in to see how they react to it. And as systems evolve, you need new "total morons." (Of course, if you call them such, or even consider them such, that is a Bad Thing. They are providing a useful service and need to be thought of with suitable respect.)
The thing I always wonder about these LCD screens is whether they last fairly well. I've had phosphor-based monitors last as long as ten years; if LCDs last a whole lot less, that's decidedly not a good thing.
I'd be reluctant to spend $600 on a lower end one to find it fuzzing out after two years. This would make them rather more like "renting" than like "buying"...:-(
I have to give the caveat that the Linux install on my laptop, salesman, was based on an install of Corel Linux (plus great big gobs of Debian Unstable) until I repartitioned it yesterday for a fresh install of Debian.
Yes, Corel Linux was pretty bad. They tried building a slick install, and did not do too badly from that perspective. But it was inadequate for more "sophisticated" use, and there just isn't yet a big market for "nonsophisticated" Linux users.
They were selling it as product when they were effectively still beta-testing it.
It's fair to say that they needed something to sell; what they probably should have done was to make sure it included software that would lead to "callbacks."
As it stood, it was pretty easy to install, but the process of adding packages to make it really usable for anything leads to the users becoming knowledgeable enough not to need the crutch of "simple installation." (Add to which that about the only faintly daunting install still around is that of Debian. With many distribution makers working on "easy installs," it's hardly unique to Corel...)
Corel probably should have included .debs for WordPerfect 8, with prominent splash screens promising the improved features of newer versions.
They probably should have included some slick little "applets" samples based on Paradox 9, with prominent advertising of the merits of deploying that.
They should have included some samples of Windows software "WINE-ized" to allow them to run natively on Linux.
This wouldn't require going after anything spectacularly prominent; I'm sure that throwing a few thousand dollars at some Windows shareware authors could get a few interesting applications ported.
Those would represent "strides" towards demonstrating that it might be worth spending more money on their software.
There's not the money in simply "making it easier," especially when other makers of distributions are trying to do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Ports involves a fairly light layering of ordinary Unix tools to pull down "pristine sources" and manage the dependancies.
The Slackware "install it all by hand" dictum is fine if you've got one or two boxes; making it work for a set of systems being used for different purposes has got to be difficult to make scale.
Einstein said that things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. It seems to me that Slackware tries to head to that "simpler" point, which certainly suffices for a firewall box that shouldn't be running anything more than a bare minimum of services, but which oversimplifies for more complex systems...
Symbolics is actually extremely relevant as one of the organizations indirectly responsible for the creation of the Free Software Foundation; Richard Stallman points to Symbolics hiring away nearly all of the hackers from the AI lab , this being one of the events that led to RMS' later actions.
A number of projects have since tried to build environments with tightly-integrated Lisps; none have been much more than curiosities.
The other major linkage is that the bulk of the members of the Unix Haters "cabal" were folks that hated Unix not simply in abstract, but rather in comparison to Lisp environments like Symbolics/Genera.
I'm not sure how this all would connect to the "Anti-Lisp" notions of the Anonymous Coward. Just as the Unix Haters Handbook presents very little about what they would propose as a preferable alternative to Unix, the AC doesn't present any information as to what he would prefer to Lisp.
In other words, hardware to do further expansion should be cheaper than it was for Ricochet.
These folks will probably still be a bit skeptical, as the previous business failed, but on the other hand have the two merits that at least the technology has been shown to be viable, and the business seems credible enough that something did emerge from the ashes.
Unfortunately, the enormous problems with this are inherently connected to the necessities. They're not merely married; they're joined at the hip like "Siamese twins." Further aspects of that as metaphor work:
If they play in a sandbox filled with PCBs with toys made from plutonium, you can hardly expect the results to be joy and happiness...
Yes, indeed, if they've spent $280M of borrowed money, and have nothing to show for it, that's a problem.
Zilog has a history of trying some ambitious things: some may remember the Z-8000, and even the Z80000, which attempted architectures of rather higher-bittedness. None "succeeded."
If their latest attempt at "huge growth" failed, that would nicely explain there being a big debt hanging around as a millstone to sink the stable bits of the business.
Certainly, it's good for the thing to "work right in the first place;" that goes without saying. (Well, what with Microsoft's "beta-testing" of insecure software, that doesn't go without saying...)
If sources are available, and it's easy enough for some folks to demonstrate improvements, this can feed back to "sheeple consumers" in as simple a way as SHAME. If significant improvements can be demonstrated by outsiders, that can SHAME the vendor into providing the improvements to their customers. It's not guaranteed; life doesn't quite work that way.
The site renders extremely badly on Galeon... (And it's about as bad with Netscape 4.7 and Konqueror, albeit in different ways...)
Maybe they want nobody to link to it so that nobody knows that it's there?
I'd say that omitting GIF code from GIMP is a rather important thing if you're not interested in having Unisys' lawyers call you to ask you to fill a briefcase with money for them.
If Debian redistributes stuff that they haven't got permission to redistribute, then that is a big deal.
The situation with the LDP seems rather silly; if people sent documents to the LDP, it seems rather nonsensical that those documents could possibly not be redistributable. Nonetheless, if there's a legitimate concern, then it is entirely appropriate for the documents to be "downgraded in apparent status."
This is not a disaster; if a whack of docs fall out of Debian for a while, this is not likely to lead to goats falling from the sky and other such silliness.
The shrill reaction of "Oh, we'll have to get a bunch of documents rewritten by tomorrow!" is certainly silly...
That is going to be more expensive to the enemy that has to retrieve and treat the people than killing people outright.
(Reminiscent of another thread; in Children of Dune, much of the story revolves around who is the "prophet" that had his eyes burned out by what they called a "stone-burner," and whether or not this man was Paul Muad'dib Atreides...)
I don't see a big problem with that, nay, I'd think it a good thing for there to be some diversity of licenses, OSes, and approaches.
Supposing there turned out to be some horrible situation where NetBSD turned out to have killer bugs for particular purposes, it's a good thing to have some alternatives. Or vice-versa, and the potential causes can remain "n'importe quoi."
I don't see any reason why it is forcibly necessary for Linux to be "dominating" the area, either. I would think dominance would lead to all sorts of Bad Results as it denied the availability of choice.
And as for licensing, if you're going to use Linux, that certainly has some implications on being mandated to release source code. If you reject that mandate (and there's some "ethic" behind it; the authors are unlikely to let go of this), then Linux obviously isn't going to be the right choice. Which makes it fortunate that the market wasn't dominated by Linux, as if it were, you wouldn't have had other choices like NetBSD.
The same is not true for smaller craft.
If a 747 "prangs" on landing, there are likely to be people injured or killed. On the other hand, smaller aircraft take hard landings rather a lot better.
Taking it to a more significant extreme, I used to fly radio controlled planes. The five pound 5 foot wingspan planes could take a pretty hard landing without damage. Move to an 8 footer weighing 15 pounds, and the plane is much more fragile.
Taking it in the other direction, it's probably impossible to kill an ant by dropping it from high altitude; there's not enough density for the terminal velocity to be too terribly high, and there's not enough mass for there to be much of an impact.
A "flying robot" is liable to be a bit bigger than an ant, but it's certainly down there in the "small scale" category. If it's made of tough materials, it should be quite resilient.
Why, when the storytelling faults are innumerable, do we want Star Wars II moreso than we'd want ParkWars? They'll probably have a more credible story :-).
They may have been very weak on getting the story right, but the appearances of the characters still strike me as quite wonderful.
The "deus ex machina" of the Duniverse was spice, with some dosing of mental sciences like the Mentats and such.
The thing that struck me as being the real plague of the "Plague of the Dune" spinoffs was that they were so hot on throwing in bits of, well, late 20th century technology.
The Butlerian Jihad was all about utterly rejecting the use of computers and artificial forms of intelligence. That is not the sort of environment in which it makes sense for people to get excited about the Galaxy Wide Web :-).
Frankly, one of the neat things about Dune was the notion of the people systematically rejecting things like computers. You have to think a little bit to come up with the sorts of alternative sorts of technologies that come out of people refusing to think down those paths...
The previous miniseries suffered from the problem that they kept forgetting that Dune was a desert; hopefully enough fans can remind them of that fact that it might not be such a problem this time.
And hopefully the miniseries will be better than the "Dune: House X" series (for the assortment of values of X).
That way the sets of "library stuff" already existant could be used, and they're not left re-implementing everything from the compiler on down...
And there are so many tremendously evil ways of taking this... This has got to be a wonderful contest...
# make install
I spent 1/2 an hour fiddling with the Debian pppoe package, and concluded it was a much better idea to punt over to David Skoll's original version.
I did a make install , answered the questions, and my firewall has been up 64 days since the last time I moved the machine, and it works like a charm.
Considering the entire distribution as worm-fodder just because one package hasn't turned out well is about as logical as deciding Windows is wonderful because the BSOD is a particularly nice shade of blue.
Code is findable at namespaces-S2.gz ; it looks like there are a number of newer versions, as we get gradually closer to 2.5.x properly forking off...
I personally like Postfix because:
If your needs are simple, and you need only set up a DMsomehost.to.forward.to entry for Sendmail, Sendmail's easy to configure, but things instantly get a whole lot hairier.
And I've never had good success with EXIM, and every time I've configured qmail it has been a hassle.
It seems dangerous to compare Postfix to qmail; spectacular flame wars have broken out between the respective authors...
(Note that there were not one, but two Edwin Hoogerbeets; one that went to University of Waterloo, and, for a while, worked at Microsoft, and another, quite distinct, with a somewhat ZZ-Top-like beard, that got pictured in a Microsoft advertisement back in the late '80s.)
That's the extreme case; in rather less extreme cases, a benefit of Paying The Bucks for Oracle is that you can do online backups while the system is running, and have the expectation that any DBA that is worth his (or her) salt can bring it back up if there is a problem.
Those are the critical things that cause managers to be willing to pay the Big Bucks for licenses.
The fact that there's a sizable community of DBAs from which to hire is a nice bonus; the process feeds on itself in that it is profitable for everyone (well, almost everyone...) to get involved in certification activities. That means that there's a half-reasonable lowest common denominator set of skills out there.
Another "merit" is that there is a whole pile of third party software out there, whether in tools to help you manage databases, tools to help you build DB schemas, applications running atop Oracle ( e.g. SAP R/3 ), and such, again, with financial benefits to many of those involved. It is SAP's interests to promote Oracle sales, and vice-versa... (Albeit that being an example of a situation where there are some conflicts of interest!)
I can't pretend to understand the perceptions of those that can't read, in general; likewise, I know at least enough to know that I don't know what the "illiterate first time user" sees.
If you seriously want a system to be usable by "total morons," then you've got to periodically pull some "total morons" in to see how they react to it. And as systems evolve, you need new "total morons." (Of course, if you call them such, or even consider them such, that is a Bad Thing. They are providing a useful service and need to be thought of with suitable respect.)
I'd be reluctant to spend $600 on a lower end one to find it fuzzing out after two years. This would make them rather more like "renting" than like "buying"... :-(
Yes, Corel Linux was pretty bad. They tried building a slick install, and did not do too badly from that perspective. But it was inadequate for more "sophisticated" use, and there just isn't yet a big market for "nonsophisticated" Linux users.
They were selling it as product when they were effectively still beta-testing it.
It's fair to say that they needed something to sell; what they probably should have done was to make sure it included software that would lead to "callbacks."
As it stood, it was pretty easy to install, but the process of adding packages to make it really usable for anything leads to the users becoming knowledgeable enough not to need the crutch of "simple installation." (Add to which that about the only faintly daunting install still around is that of Debian. With many distribution makers working on "easy installs," it's hardly unique to Corel...)
This wouldn't require going after anything spectacularly prominent; I'm sure that throwing a few thousand dollars at some Windows shareware authors could get a few interesting applications ported.
Those would represent "strides" towards demonstrating that it might be worth spending more money on their software.
There's not the money in simply "making it easier," especially when other makers of distributions are trying to do the same.