...anymore than cp and tar are 'package management tools'.
whether anyone 'likes it' or not, the foremost package manager out there is debian's 'apt' and deb packaging system. it just plain works, keeping track of interdependencies and not leaving your system in a corrupt, useless state.
next in line is rpm, but as everyone knows, redhat has done a horrific job managing the s/w (rpm versions of package and rpm itself) that has really degraded the quality of the system. even worse, the 'rpm drift' between mandrake and redhat at rpmfind.net has made looking for anything but official packages useless. of course, deb doesn't really have alternate distros, so i assume it would have a similar drift problem were it in the same circumstance.
people need update capability that don't kill their machine. your 'package management system' does not meet that criteria, so I can only conclude that slack is a 3rd tier distro, unless you simply hold it stable between releases.
i've seen apt and rpm blow up and leave a system unable to launch X. nothing is perfect. but this is due to a fault of the pacakges or the code, not the user (unless they are 'forcing' installs).
with the setup or installpkg, the error domain goes right back out to root space. you better know what you are doing, and with thousands of packages available, it is unthinkable and ridiculous to expect an admin to know all the interdependencies of the libs/scripts/bins.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
1) continuous recording for later analysis if a crime is reported in the area (perhas a court order will be needed to scan the tape);
2) automated recognition (via computer) of a crime... gunshot, running people vectoring in odd directions, etc. notifies police.
i'd be against general scanning of the population, totally against it. especially police scanning via joystick...the personal prejudices would be completely out of control.
i doubt i'd ever sign off on facial recognition. the police would start using it for warrants, tickets, deadbeat dads, etc. it would get crazy.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
following someone around and staring at them will get you a harrassment charge and a restraining order.
drug test programs are pseudo random -- it comes up in court all the time. just how random will this be? a bunch of people of one race folling people of another race with the joystick? or economic class?
the presumption of innocence? you seem most willing to just blow that whole concept away.
at what point does it become abuse? suppose a parent is accused of child abuse (a common tactic by a disgruntled spouse) and it's false. suddenly state resources are being used in a divorce case as these cameras start scanning for this person.
1-adam-12, 1-adam-12, there's a group of teenagers drinking beer under the 12th st. bridge! one has bong and a bag of chronic! BRING OUT THE DOGS!
the truth is ugly -- this is probably unconstitutional. in general, the government is legally obligated to remove itself from your life to the greatest extent possible unless a complaint is lodged. gov is not supposed to be 'scanning' for crime. obviously, capital crimes are an exception.
remember, this probably has more to do with someone trying to sell something to the police depts. than trying to make society safer.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
I worked in an NT shop for a couple years, and they had a great training strategy. You wrote up a topic, got approval, took two weeks off regular tasking to do it, then did a presentation. You got an extra $500 for the demo.
The Unix shop I work in now is far more conservative. You have to get approval to travel to a course or seminar, which is usually kind of weak, it costs many thousands of dollars, and you have to pay the company back (pro-rated) if you leave within a year.
As much as I like Linux and Unix, the NT shop had a better way of doing things, IMHO.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
My take is that all three branches of the gov't are now proven corrupt.
1) Executive. Bush and Cheney's best pals made upwards of, and in some cases exceeded, $100M in personal cash since B&C have taken office -- through the manipulation of California's electrical grid.
At no point has the president, now or in the recent past, railed against M$. Contrast this with the presidents of the 40's and 50's, who often made scathing comments about corporate greed and behavior, and backed them up by funding the competitors.
When was the the last time you heard a president refer to america as the 'home of the free and the brave'?
2) The Legislative. No senator has banned M$ software in their state offices. Only 18 states have the guts to fight the menace.
3) The judicial. Penfield has decades of antitrust experience, yet he suddenly sabotages the trial with secret meetings and scathing comments about the convicted defendant. Oh, I guess he didn't realize his ruling would get thrown out if he did that.
A quick search on google will tell you that the original FBI investigators of the OK bombing were fired. Why? because they were explosives experts and knew 5000 lbs. of Amonium Nitrate could not devastate the Murrah building so completely. They concluded someone on the inside plated additional explosives...and were fired. The next team concluded only McVeigh was involved.
Some say an FBI or CIA agent was aware of McVeigh's plan, and covertly planted additional explosives in the Murrah pillors to exacerbate the attack, thus increasing national sentiment for a decrease in personal freedom and an increase in domestic 'spook' spending.
Hate to say it, but the US government is probably more corrupt today than in the 1920's. McVeigh should have parked that ryder truck at 1 Microsoft Way and done the world a real favor.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
I'd suggest doing a nfs mount of your apps so they can run on the PC...on a intranet, it should be pretty cool.
This offloads processing power to the node -- a very, very good thing.
Another alternative would be java apps through a browser w/ the plugin.
This would give you a taste of the "Java Platform" -- central app servers and nodes that process applications downloaded/maintained on demand to network PCs -- something that Sun envisioned some 8 years ago and Microsoft is currently implementing with.NET, C# and whatever the X-box ends up morphing into.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
the problem with coding to the MS platform for 'money today' is that... once MS has destroyed the alternatives, they will absolutely start going after the VAR/ISV money.
Any VAR/ISV that codes for income today on MS is taking big chances on their financial future.
Linux/GPL might have a certain amount of headaches to deal with, but Netscape and Oracle both had closed source code at one point and were able to deal with GPL issues.
Linux may not seem like a big money maker today, but I believe it will be an incredible tool for VAR/ISVs down the road... without the monopolistic threats of MS.
The customer can install the base system on as many machines as desired without threatening letters from the MS licensing department -- making things so much easier for the VAR/ISV.
No more upgrade hassles! It's free.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
It's so funny to read all the posts comparing Sun and Oracle's Net PCs to "time shared computers of the past" and "glorified x-terminals".
Just how many of those dumb PC magazines do you people get at work?
Nick may be a little off here and there ("benificient dictator" as opposed to "benevolent...") but that's no biggie.
I don't know or care about MS products and services.I've seen them fuck too many good people, whether employee or owner, government and private, for me to ever care what Microsoft thinks/does/shits.
But I can say that I've worked on a distributed system for a few years, and there is such a thing as a NC...not PCs, not timeshared, not NFS, not X-terminals, and probably what MS would like to see the Xbox evolve into.
Good God, I wish some of the Microsoft sheep that hang out around here would stop reading their "PC Wanker" magazines and start thinking once in awhile.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
> i for one believe that people should work and
> co-operate together for the advancement of
> computing not hide there favorite new advances
> from other brilliant minds like one would hide
> their new cheese burger recipe.
that's it, i demand 'fatburger' release their cheeseburger recipe under the GPL.
if they refuse, why, i'll just order one 'to go' and reverse engineer that sucker and post it all over the web.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
...AOL Time Warner has announced an alliance with Red Hat Linux to bundle the Real Audio streaming content software on a bootable CD to its 16 million customers...
(and then I woke up)
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
> What mindless, pathetic drivel. This is a new low,
> even for Jon Katz.
Like beeds like, I guess.
> Microsoft are guilty of several dubious business
> practices (the OEM lockin for instance) but
> their core business has succeeded by a shrewd
> knowledge of what their customers want, a
> cunning marketing campaign and quality products.
> Yes, that's right, quality products.
But of what quality? Try pulling a floppy out of the drive while WinDOS 98 is writing it. Now do it on Linux. Now that's quality.
OEM lock ins are not all there is to the story. They cheated IBM, Stac, Borland Novell...seriously. To the point where they had to settle out of court to prevent a conviction. Try settling out of court, if you ever get arrested. Must be nice to have all that cash...the fruits of crime...at their disposal.
Very few of their decisions are based on what their customer's want, rather they are based on increasing market share.
> Quite simply, we live in a capitalist system and
> corporations making money is good for everyone
> at the end of the day, as it benefits us in
> services from tax revenues and general growth of
> the economy. Without companies like Microsoft,
> AOL, Time-Warner and Cisco, do you really think
> we would be able to maintain the world
> dominating position we are presently in?
Actually, we live in a regulated capitalist system, meaning that a corporation (in theory) can't do "anything they want" for profit.
At the end of the day, people sometimes die due to corporate irresponsibility...placing shareholder profit ahead of the customer.
The truth is, without Microsoft (and the others you mentioned) I think their would be far more software and tech companies...in the US and elsewhere. That would be good for just about everyone, and would far closer match a free marketplace, than what we have now. This is actually, as far as models go, much closer to the former USSR.
> And if Microsoft come to dominate a set of new
> markets (a hell of a lot less likely than it
> made out here), then it'll be because they've
> again produced what the customer wants.
I think Bill Gate's position on wants vs. needs goes something like "Make them need you". When you need a bit of technology, and there is only one choice, it's really easy to say "Well, Microsoft did a great job of providing what the customer wants". Circular logic at best, since without a free market of competitors, it is impossible to ever know what would best serve the customer.
> Microsoft is not "above the law". How foolish.
> They're nothing more than one of our great
> success stories, a hugely visible embodiment of
> the American Dream.
If the American Dream is federal criminals paying off both sides of a two-party system, if it's false "Astroturf" campaigns designed to lie to politicians, if you smile when state laws are broken to ruin a competitor, if your "Dream" of America is the choice "one size fits all" made famous by the Soviet Union, then yes, Don, your dream for America is coming true, courtesy of Microsoft.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Slashdot Mirror
...anymore than cp and tar are 'package management tools'.
whether anyone 'likes it' or not, the foremost package manager out there is debian's 'apt' and deb packaging system. it just plain works, keeping track of interdependencies and not leaving your system in a corrupt, useless state.
next in line is rpm, but as everyone knows, redhat has done a horrific job managing the s/w (rpm versions of package and rpm itself) that has really degraded the quality of the system. even worse, the 'rpm drift' between mandrake and redhat at rpmfind.net has made looking for anything but official packages useless. of course, deb doesn't really have alternate distros, so i assume it would have a similar drift problem were it in the same circumstance.
people need update capability that don't kill their machine. your 'package management system' does not meet that criteria, so I can only conclude that slack is a 3rd tier distro, unless you simply hold it stable between releases.
i've seen apt and rpm blow up and leave a system unable to launch X. nothing is perfect. but this is due to a fault of the pacakges or the code, not the user (unless they are 'forcing' installs).
with the setup or installpkg, the error domain goes right back out to root space. you better know what you are doing, and with thousands of packages available, it is unthinkable and ridiculous to expect an admin to know all the interdependencies of the libs/scripts/bins.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
i can't advocate monitoring of the populace.
... gunshot, running people vectoring in odd directions, etc. notifies police.
but, i think two things are accetable:
1) continuous recording for later analysis if a crime is reported in the area (perhas a court order will be needed to scan the tape);
2) automated recognition (via computer) of a crime
i'd be against general scanning of the population, totally against it. especially police scanning via joystick...the personal prejudices would be completely out of control.
i doubt i'd ever sign off on facial recognition. the police would start using it for warrants, tickets, deadbeat dads, etc. it would get crazy.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
following someone around and staring at them will get you a harrassment charge and a restraining order.
drug test programs are pseudo random -- it comes up in court all the time. just how random will this be? a bunch of people of one race folling people of another race with the joystick? or economic class?
the presumption of innocence? you seem most willing to just blow that whole concept away.
at what point does it become abuse? suppose a parent is accused of child abuse (a common tactic by a disgruntled spouse) and it's false. suddenly state resources are being used in a divorce case as these cameras start scanning for this person.
1-adam-12, 1-adam-12, there's a group of teenagers drinking beer under the 12th st. bridge! one has bong and a bag of chronic! BRING OUT THE DOGS!
the truth is ugly -- this is probably unconstitutional. in general, the government is legally obligated to remove itself from your life to the greatest extent possible unless a complaint is lodged. gov is not supposed to be 'scanning' for crime. obviously, capital crimes are an exception.
remember, this probably has more to do with someone trying to sell something to the police depts. than trying to make society safer.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
if it's called 'final fantasy', why are there so many versions?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
why not put an a/d and d/a on the mobo, with a better speaker, and use anti-noise to quiet the internal case noise down?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
I worked in an NT shop for a couple years, and they had a great training strategy. You wrote up a topic, got approval, took two weeks off regular tasking to do it, then did a presentation. You got an extra $500 for the demo.
The Unix shop I work in now is far more conservative. You have to get approval to travel to a course or seminar, which is usually kind of weak, it costs many thousands of dollars, and you have to pay the company back (pro-rated) if you leave within a year.
As much as I like Linux and Unix, the NT shop had a better way of doing things, IMHO.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
My take is that all three branches of the gov't are now proven corrupt.
1) Executive. Bush and Cheney's best pals made upwards of, and in some cases exceeded, $100M in personal cash since B&C have taken office -- through the manipulation of California's electrical grid.
At no point has the president, now or in the recent past, railed against M$. Contrast this with the presidents of the 40's and 50's, who often made scathing comments about corporate greed and behavior, and backed them up by funding the competitors.
When was the the last time you heard a president refer to america as the 'home of the free and the brave'?
2) The Legislative. No senator has banned M$ software in their state offices. Only 18 states have the guts to fight the menace.
3) The judicial. Penfield has decades of antitrust experience, yet he suddenly sabotages the trial with secret meetings and scathing comments about the convicted defendant. Oh, I guess he didn't realize his ruling would get thrown out if he did that.
A quick search on google will tell you that the original FBI investigators of the OK bombing were fired. Why? because they were explosives experts and knew 5000 lbs. of Amonium Nitrate could not devastate the Murrah building so completely. They concluded someone on the inside plated additional explosives...and were fired. The next team concluded only McVeigh was involved.
Some say an FBI or CIA agent was aware of McVeigh's plan, and covertly planted additional explosives in the Murrah pillors to exacerbate the attack, thus increasing national sentiment for a decrease in personal freedom and an increase in domestic 'spook' spending.
Hate to say it, but the US government is probably more corrupt today than in the 1920's. McVeigh should have parked that ryder truck at 1 Microsoft Way and done the world a real favor.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
I'd suggest doing a nfs mount of your apps so they can run on the PC...on a intranet, it should be pretty cool.
.NET, C# and whatever the X-box ends up morphing into.
This offloads processing power to the node -- a very, very good thing.
Another alternative would be java apps through a browser w/ the plugin.
This would give you a taste of the "Java Platform" -- central app servers and nodes that process applications downloaded/maintained on demand to network PCs -- something that Sun envisioned some 8 years ago and Microsoft is currently implementing with
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
the problem with coding to the MS platform for 'money today' is that ... once MS has destroyed the alternatives, they will absolutely start going after the VAR/ISV money.
... without the monopolistic threats of MS.
Any VAR/ISV that codes for income today on MS is taking big chances on their financial future.
Linux/GPL might have a certain amount of headaches to deal with, but Netscape and Oracle both had closed source code at one point and were able to deal with GPL issues.
Linux may not seem like a big money maker today, but I believe it will be an incredible tool for VAR/ISVs down the road
The customer can install the base system on as many machines as desired without threatening letters from the MS licensing department -- making things so much easier for the VAR/ISV.
No more upgrade hassles! It's free.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Before starting, stain your printing paper liberally with urine tracks.
Next, I'd suggest adding a cross, some blood and maybe dab a bit of faeces or vomit here and there.
Before 'mounting' your 'art', get liquored up and roll around in it on your bed as you have unprotected sex with your animal(s) of choice.
Now, that will get you rave reviews and you'll be the toast of the New York, LA and San Francisco galleries!
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
this is great news for bsd.
SGI had some news the other day about their new itanimum box breaking some records, too -- with Linux, no less.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Whats all this environment/extinction/science stuff?
No movies to review?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
It's so funny to read all the posts comparing Sun and Oracle's Net PCs to "time shared computers of the past" and "glorified x-terminals".
Just how many of those dumb PC magazines do you people get at work?
Nick may be a little off here and there ("benificient dictator" as opposed to "benevolent...") but that's no biggie.
I don't know or care about MS products and services.I've seen them fuck too many good people, whether employee or owner, government and private, for me to ever care what Microsoft thinks/does/shits.
But I can say that I've worked on a distributed system for a few years, and there is such a thing as a NC...not PCs, not timeshared, not NFS, not X-terminals, and probably what MS would like to see the Xbox evolve into.
Good God, I wish some of the Microsoft sheep that hang out around here would stop reading their "PC Wanker" magazines and start thinking once in awhile.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
this is really good news.
... the 'dot crash' has certainly taken its toll.
... 2.4 kernel, xfree 4.0, etc.
i only wish so many programmers weren't losing their jobs right now
redhat 7.1 is the best release i've seen
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
err...that was a joke, son. i believe as you do, i promise :-)
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
> i for one believe that people should work and
> co-operate together for the advancement of
> computing not hide there favorite new advances
> from other brilliant minds like one would hide
> their new cheese burger recipe.
that's it, i demand 'fatburger' release their cheeseburger recipe under the GPL.
if they refuse, why, i'll just order one 'to go' and reverse engineer that sucker and post it all over the web.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
...AOL Time Warner has announced an alliance with Red Hat Linux to bundle the Real Audio streaming content software on a bootable CD to its 16 million customers...
(and then I woke up)
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
i don't see anyone else butting in on your articles.
why not just let the man have his say, just like you had your say?
that's the single most childish thing i've ever seen taco do.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
in war, improvements are often made to weapons, on the fly, to increase their lethality.
ditto for armour and maneuverability.
who is to say that the hackers aren't doing the "right thing"? they are using their skills to win a battle...sounds human enough to me.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
imode here
It looks kinda geegawish to me. but then, i still use vi in xterms, so go figure.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
You can download Forte from java.sun.com, after registering. The "community edition" is free.
I've been running it on Debian potato, and it is far better than any java I've used to date.
Two gui's later, several hours of use, not a single crash.
The performance, as always, is the tough pill to swallow. But the component design and robustness are great for learners.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Proving once again that a single man, with guts, can make a huge impact on the earth.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Not Found /cplant/doc/man/yod.html was not found on this server.
The requested URL
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
> What mindless, pathetic drivel. This is a new low,
> even for Jon Katz.
Like beeds like, I guess.
> Microsoft are guilty of several dubious business
> practices (the OEM lockin for instance) but
> their core business has succeeded by a shrewd
> knowledge of what their customers want, a
> cunning marketing campaign and quality products.
> Yes, that's right, quality products.
But of what quality? Try pulling a floppy out of the drive while WinDOS 98 is writing it. Now do it on Linux. Now that's quality.
OEM lock ins are not all there is to the story. They cheated IBM, Stac, Borland Novell...seriously. To the point where they had to settle out of court to prevent a conviction. Try settling out of court, if you ever get arrested. Must be nice to have all that cash...the fruits of crime...at their disposal.
Very few of their decisions are based on what their customer's want, rather they are based on increasing market share.
> Quite simply, we live in a capitalist system and
> corporations making money is good for everyone
> at the end of the day, as it benefits us in
> services from tax revenues and general growth of
> the economy. Without companies like Microsoft,
> AOL, Time-Warner and Cisco, do you really think
> we would be able to maintain the world
> dominating position we are presently in?
Actually, we live in a regulated capitalist system, meaning that a corporation (in theory) can't do "anything they want" for profit.
At the end of the day, people sometimes die due to corporate irresponsibility...placing shareholder profit ahead of the customer.
The truth is, without Microsoft (and the others you mentioned) I think their would be far more software and tech companies...in the US and elsewhere. That would be good for just about everyone, and would far closer match a free marketplace, than what we have now. This is actually, as far as models go, much closer to the former USSR.
> And if Microsoft come to dominate a set of new
> markets (a hell of a lot less likely than it
> made out here), then it'll be because they've
> again produced what the customer wants.
I think Bill Gate's position on wants vs. needs goes something like "Make them need you". When you need a bit of technology, and there is only one choice, it's really easy to say "Well, Microsoft did a great job of providing what the customer wants". Circular logic at best, since without a free market of competitors, it is impossible to ever know what would best serve the customer.
> Microsoft is not "above the law". How foolish.
> They're nothing more than one of our great
> success stories, a hugely visible embodiment of
> the American Dream.
If the American Dream is federal criminals paying off both sides of a two-party system, if it's false "Astroturf" campaigns designed to lie to politicians, if you smile when state laws are broken to ruin a competitor, if your "Dream" of America is the choice "one size fits all" made famous by the Soviet Union, then yes, Don, your dream for America is coming true, courtesy of Microsoft.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Geezus, Timothy, I think Taco may be paying you too much.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.