The unfortunate thing about Britain is the general apathy which we have. There are very few people who are willing to do something about issues (whatever they may be), and people don't care about things which don't directly affect them. This is probably the worst thing we have as a nation, and the reason why things like this occur.
It's very much like this in the U.S. as well. Very hard to get anyone to care about anything that doesn't directly affect them. And if they do care, they aren't likely to do anything useful about it, like demonstrate, or tell their friends, or boycott, or put pressure on their Congress-thing, or even VOTE.
Now, imagine a program where you can design your own tomahawk missile - you can change the materials, colors, type of paint, or overhaul the entire design. Then, you click a button, and watch its trajectory be plotted for you with a hundred billion different launch parameters changed in just the slightest way (degree of inclination, speed, etc). Sound stupid? Well, now put that program on every store shelf in the world, along with the system to run it. It's not that hard for some weird militant group to get their hands on it, is it? Sure, there was computing power to do it before - but in a Cray, which cost tens of thousands of dollars. This thing costs $200 - chump change.
Doesn't sound too difficult. The right people could probably get the basics of this coded up in a couple weeks at most. Anybody interested? After all, if we don't do it, the missiles will have to run Windows CE, and the first time it crashes, an errant missile could wind up crashing right into your house... ---
How about binding a red, green, and blue light together, making each of them individually controllable, and then putting, say, 786,432 of these into a 1024x768 matrix? It could be the world's largest monitor.
Most importantly, what more directly political stuff has Stephenson written?
You should check out Interface, which he wrote under the pen name Stephen Bury. As a very politically oriented book, it seems to describe Stephenson (or at least what he's thinking) well.
(I'm not posting the plot because it's been a while since I read it...I should again.) ---
The entire concept of property exists because "Stuff" is finite and any resource that exists in "meatspace" is thus, on some level, scarece. With the exception of Air, noone claims to own air.
No one's claimed to own air yet? Okay, I own it now! There's only a finite amount! Everyone must now pay me $0.04 for every hour of air they breathe. (What a bargain! You've probably got more than that under your couch right now.) That's just $0.96 per day.
Air: The thing you need most. Just 4 cents an hour! Sign up today! ---
I think MS should go the way of IBM. IBM has to publish specs for whatever they do, if people could make their own platforms & file formats TRULY compatible with the Microsoft ones, the world would be a much better place.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating: the best way to punish Microsoft is to force them to completely open their APIs and file formats for EVERYTHING, and levy stiff contempt of court fines if the APIs and file formats don't match the actual application or OS, if they failed to document an API, or documented a nonexistent API.
And by stiff i mean in the tens of millions for each occurrence. Maybe more.
Take a clue from the cellular phone industry. The loss-leader hardware with service contract doesn't make you much money unless you actually manage to keep your customers around for a long time, and you can actually WAIT for that money to come in.
Get real.
First, only requiring three months of service is asking for trouble. After paying the $65 for three months of service, whether I use it or not, I can take the hardware and run. Netpliance gets $165, I own the hardware free and clear. Now some people have estimated the cost of this box at around $300. I'm not very good at math, but I think that means Netpliance loses $135.
Second, ISP service costs money, even at wholesale. If you get it for $5, and resell it at $22, that's $17 revenue. To make up the $201 difference between $99 loss-leader price and $300 cost, your customer has to stick around at least 12 months. That's right, a whole year. (I had to get out the calculator for that.) The service contract only requires three months.
So what should Netpliance do?
Netpliance should figure out a reasonable markup to the actual manufacturing cost of the i-opener and then sell it at that price in a completely hackable version. Maybe even include one of those laptop IDE cables and a hard drive mount inside the case, so it's all ready to go.
Netpliance should then sell the same i-opener for $99, with a service contract that requires at least as much service as will generate the required amount of revenue to bring in a similar amount of money. Maybe a little more, since it's spread out over time. A 12-18 month contract seems appropriate.
Netpliance should then sit back, relax and let us hackers get to what we do best: hacking. Watch the ideas we come up with and our prototypes and maybe even buy some of the ideas, or even hire some of the hackers, for future products. ---
And since I actually bothered to read the original posting, and some comments, I know that freenet is going to have a "voting" system very similar to slashdot moderation. You view some information, and if it's garbage, you vote it down. Sound familiar?
Of course, "/hot_grits/pouring_down_pants/howto" probably won't get too many requests in the first place. ---
Aside from default settings and kernel behaviour, there's becoming less of a difference between OpenBSD and FreeBSD (and in fact NetBSD as well) and I expect that trend to continue as time goes on. Everyone agrees that the often-cited "goals" of the three projects are all worthy things to pursue, the difference has just been in which order to pursue them, and so as time goes by the projects are expanding in the directions of the others.
Does this mean the code for each *BSD will eventually merge? It's always bothered me that 4.4BSD-Lite forked in the first place. ---
I suck, not only replying to my own post but posting in the first place with incomplete information as well. If you're lucky to get through to http://free.be.com/ it redirects you to http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/ which is the same damn FAQ page we've been reading for weeks now, and links back to, guess where, http://free.be.com/ for actually downloading.
I got through to ftp.be.com but it hasn't been posted there as of eight seconds ago. ---
I get it. Just because you don't want to see an open source enterprise level RDBMS, nobody else does, either.
This must be a troll...
I can easily see a lot of hackers who would like to work on such a project as either designing one from scratch, or building the functionality into an existing system (I'd personally love to see PostgresSQL have this.)
And if anyone's REALLY interested in getting down and coding, let me know and I'll put up a mailing list...wait, SourceForge will do it too, I'm sure. ---
Let me get this straight. So you're saying that anything that requires an "enormous amount of time and effort" and is "quite a challenge" can't be done by traditional open-source methods?
I've known for some time, and I suspect most people reading this have as well, that Linux won't gain major acceptance in the home until there are some games for it.
So news like this is always welcome.
However, Linux as a gaming platform is only one piece of the pie. We also need to work on usability for new users. The GNOME and KDE projects are a very good start for this.
After many years of working with "clueless newbies," it's become my opinion that most of them are willing to learn only what they need to know to get done whatever it is they want to do. Sometimes even less.
What needs to happen is this: New users should be able to learn what they need to know as they go. For instance, you have to update a whole bunch of things to get Quake III Arena installed. It's my opinion that all these drivers should have been included on the CD and the installation process included them, and these presented in a manner that users would learn what a shared library is, what X is, what X toolkits are, what the kernel is, what kernel modules are, how all this ties together, and why they are all important, in a quick, easy to follow format.
If the collective knowledge of all of us UNIX people can be placed in the hands of newbies at just the point where they're most receptive to it (e.g. the installation process of a game they really want to play) then I believe the number of "clueless" newbies will drop.
Anybody who wants to work on systems to make this sort of thing possible, or knows of any in progress, can feel free to contact me. ---
I, for one, think both stories were useful. After all, the "about to be released" story let me know that it was hitting mirror sites as we speak. As a consequence, I was able to get my copy before (almost) anyone else, and it's already burned to a CD-R here. Today, I'm getting 10-15KBytes/sec trying to download the SRPMS ISO from download.sourceforge.net, the same site I used yesterday to get the i386 ISO. It's been pretty well slashdotted, hitting its 1000 user anonymous limit and exhausting its available bandwidth.
From this story I got to find out just what to expect from 6.2 and there are a lot of cool new features (see above). ---
You didn't say much about what you DID want in a cell phone, but from your posting it sounds like you don't want too many features, just a basic phone.
Go get yourself a Motorola whatever, from whatever service providers. Unlike the Nokia phones, these things really are indestructible. To prove the point, I threw mine out my car window while cruising around town. Unfortunately, my timing was off, and it almost went down a sewer drain. I saw the drain and I was really worried it would fall in! But I wasn't worried at all about whether the phone would work. I went back to get it, and of course it still worked perfectly.
I contrast this to the typical Nokia phone. Sometimes I go out on Friday nights and get into cell-phone-smashing contests with drunk people. I throw my Motorola down on the sidewalk, and I challenge them to do the same with their whatever they have. One guy's Nokia phone didn't survive the encounter. He said it's the fourth time he had to replace it. I've caused quite a few drunks to break their cell phones this way... and the Motorola is still going, even after hitting the pavement dozens of times. ---
You wouldn't believe how many stolen laptops get sold as-is to unsuspecting computer shops.
One of my former roommates bought such a laptop, only to find out later it was stolen from the CEO of a certain major corporation. He found out after looking at the hard drive, which not only had Windows 95 installed on it, but lots of files relating to executive business of said corporation.
The bizarre part is apparently no one at the computer store ever looked at what, besides Windows 95 itself, was actually installed on the thing, nor did anybody try to format the disk.
I don't think they ever caught the thief.....so some details have been obscured. ---
Re:But is it because Linux is superior?
on
Linux Appliances
·
· Score: 1
Or merely cheap? If the latter, why not use Free/Net/OpenBSD?
Because Linux is divided into a kernel and discrete components, such as the C library, bash, command line utilities, etc., which can be easily separated and replaced with something else.
With *BSD, the OS distribution gives strong incentive to use what is provided in/usr/src and/usr/ports, to the exclusion of software not provided. Further, it's more difficult to do a binary-only installation. You're always going to have source code for something hanging around, and probably not something you intended to keep, and certainly not tarred and gzipped!
To build an embedded Linux operating system, all you need to do is build a Linux kernel, build a libc (e.g. glibc2 or newlib, and build whatever other tools you need, then combine them into a nice binary distribution. Even without a package mangler.
I can't even begin to conceive of how one would build such a thing with *BSD without seriously disturbing the OS installation hosting the build process. I'm sure it could be done, but if it were that easy, someone would have done it by now.
Further, Linux is open source and open development. Anybody can participate. BSD is far less open source, and far less open development. Ever tried to submit a patch to a *BSD kernel? Ha, good luck. There should be no question as to why the BSD kernel keeps forking.
As for Linux vs. BSD, BSD advocates will say that it is technically superior in many areas, and be correct. However, Linux is far superior in at least one aspect: the manner in which it is developed. I expect BSD to be left in the dust in all technical areas that matter within a very short time, unless they can get their act together.
I spoke with Circuit City myself, since I placed one on backorder last Tuesday (and paid full price for it then!). They told me that they are filling the backorders in the order they received them.
When I went in last Tuesday, there were only two other people who had them on order. They got two of them in yesterday, and filled those orders. I'm next. And I'm very glad I got there when I did, since there are now nine backorders behind me. And this is in Peoria, Illinois! ---
I always wonder if software companies try something like this, where of course, it would be much easier to accomplish. And if so, do they tell their employees, in order to dissuade them, or keep it secret, and then descend on them. Anyone got any stories of this kind of thing?
Doesn't happen at Microsoft. Not when there's a snapshot build every day that gets burned to CD-R and redistributed to quite a few people inside the company. Every day. (Depending on what you're working on that is, some projects don't do this.) The point is that MS really doesn't have any obvious way of "fingerprinting" anybody's particular distribution, since the daily build is also downloadable from an internal Web site (again, depending on project).
In other words, yeah, M$ technically could do it, but it would so completely screw up their existing development processes that I doubt it will ever happen. ---
Here's an example spec file for ncftp. It unpacks the source, applies a patch, configures, makes, and cleans up after itself. Run with rpm -ba ncftp.spec and you've got yourself a source and binary RPM for ncftp. Maybe I've been looking at these things too long, but the spec file seems pretty obvious to me.
For more info on writing RPM spec files, see the RPM HOWTO.
%description Ncftp is an improved FTP client. Ncftp's improvements include support for command line editing, command histories, recursive gets, automatic anonymous logins and more.
Install ncftp if you use FTP to transfer files and you'd like to try some of ncftp's additional features.
Slashdot Mirror
It's very much like this in the U.S. as well. Very hard to get anyone to care about anything that doesn't directly affect them. And if they do care, they aren't likely to do anything useful about it, like demonstrate, or tell their friends, or boycott, or put pressure on their Congress-thing, or even VOTE.
This is why WE have things like the DMCA...
---
Doesn't sound too difficult. The right people could probably get the basics of this coded up in a couple weeks at most. Anybody interested? After all, if we don't do it, the missiles will have to run Windows CE, and the first time it crashes, an errant missile could wind up crashing right into your house...
---
You could read slashdot from a mile away...
---
You should check out Interface, which he wrote under the pen name Stephen Bury. As a very politically oriented book, it seems to describe Stephenson (or at least what he's thinking) well.
(I'm not posting the plot because it's been a while since I read it...I should again.)
---
No one's claimed to own air yet? Okay, I own it now! There's only a finite amount! Everyone must now pay me $0.04 for every hour of air they breathe. (What a bargain! You've probably got more than that under your couch right now.) That's just $0.96 per day.
Air: The thing you need most. Just 4 cents an hour! Sign up today!
---
I've said this before, but it bears repeating: the best way to punish Microsoft is to force them to completely open their APIs and file formats for EVERYTHING, and levy stiff contempt of court fines if the APIs and file formats don't match the actual application or OS, if they failed to document an API, or documented a nonexistent API.
And by stiff i mean in the tens of millions for each occurrence. Maybe more.
---
Get real.
First, only requiring three months of service is asking for trouble. After paying the $65 for three months of service, whether I use it or not, I can take the hardware and run. Netpliance gets $165, I own the hardware free and clear. Now some people have estimated the cost of this box at around $300. I'm not very good at math, but I think that means Netpliance loses $135.
Second, ISP service costs money, even at wholesale. If you get it for $5, and resell it at $22, that's $17 revenue. To make up the $201 difference between $99 loss-leader price and $300 cost, your customer has to stick around at least 12 months. That's right, a whole year. (I had to get out the calculator for that.) The service contract only requires three months.
So what should Netpliance do?
Netpliance should figure out a reasonable markup to the actual manufacturing cost of the i-opener and then sell it at that price in a completely hackable version. Maybe even include one of those laptop IDE cables and a hard drive mount inside the case, so it's all ready to go.
Netpliance should then sell the same i-opener for $99, with a service contract that requires at least as much service as will generate the required amount of revenue to bring in a similar amount of money. Maybe a little more, since it's spread out over time. A 12-18 month contract seems appropriate.
Netpliance should then sit back, relax and let us hackers get to what we do best: hacking. Watch the ideas we come up with and our prototypes and maybe even buy some of the ideas, or even hire some of the hackers, for future products.
---
And since I actually bothered to read the original posting, and some comments, I know that freenet is going to have a "voting" system very similar to slashdot moderation. You view some information, and if it's garbage, you vote it down. Sound familiar?
Of course, "/hot_grits/pouring_down_pants/howto" probably won't get too many requests in the first place.
---
Who cares about Pepsi. It needs to work with Jolt!
---
Does this mean the code for each *BSD will eventually merge? It's always bothered me that 4.4BSD-Lite forked in the first place.
---
And note well that Netscape still caches JavaScript source files (.js) and CSS source files (.css), at least the Windows version does. Oops!
---
I suck, not only replying to my own post but posting in the first place with incomplete information as well. If you're lucky to get through to http://free.be.com/ it redirects you to http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/ which is the same damn FAQ page we've been reading for weeks now, and links back to, guess where, http://free.be.com/ for actually downloading.
I got through to ftp.be.com but it hasn't been posted there as of eight seconds ago.
---
http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/
---
This must be a troll...
I can easily see a lot of hackers who would like to work on such a project as either designing one from scratch, or building the functionality into an existing system (I'd personally love to see PostgresSQL have this.)
And if anyone's REALLY interested in getting down and coding, let me know and I'll put up a mailing list...wait, SourceForge will do it too, I'm sure.
---
You mean, for instance, an operating system?
Or maybe a graphical desktop environment or two?
How terribly shortsighted. I'm sure there are many people out there who are up to the challenge.
Besides, what you're basically saying is that open source projects don't scale very well, and all of the above examples disprove that.
---
So news like this is always welcome.
However, Linux as a gaming platform is only one piece of the pie. We also need to work on usability for new users. The GNOME and KDE projects are a very good start for this.
After many years of working with "clueless newbies," it's become my opinion that most of them are willing to learn only what they need to know to get done whatever it is they want to do. Sometimes even less.
What needs to happen is this: New users should be able to learn what they need to know as they go. For instance, you have to update a whole bunch of things to get Quake III Arena installed. It's my opinion that all these drivers should have been included on the CD and the installation process included them, and these presented in a manner that users would learn what a shared library is, what X is, what X toolkits are, what the kernel is, what kernel modules are, how all this ties together, and why they are all important, in a quick, easy to follow format.
If the collective knowledge of all of us UNIX people can be placed in the hands of newbies at just the point where they're most receptive to it (e.g. the installation process of a game they really want to play) then I believe the number of "clueless" newbies will drop.
Anybody who wants to work on systems to make this sort of thing possible, or knows of any in progress, can feel free to contact me.
---
Is the movie industry calling sequels "versions" now?
---
From this story I got to find out just what to expect from 6.2 and there are a lot of cool new features (see above).
---
That's some pretty expensive wallpaper.
---
Go get yourself a Motorola whatever, from whatever service providers. Unlike the Nokia phones, these things really are indestructible. To prove the point, I threw mine out my car window while cruising around town. Unfortunately, my timing was off, and it almost went down a sewer drain. I saw the drain and I was really worried it would fall in! But I wasn't worried at all about whether the phone would work. I went back to get it, and of course it still worked perfectly.
I contrast this to the typical Nokia phone. Sometimes I go out on Friday nights and get into cell-phone-smashing contests with drunk people. I throw my Motorola down on the sidewalk, and I challenge them to do the same with their whatever they have. One guy's Nokia phone didn't survive the encounter. He said it's the fourth time he had to replace it. I've caused quite a few drunks to break their cell phones this way... and the Motorola is still going, even after hitting the pavement dozens of times.
---
One of my former roommates bought such a laptop, only to find out later it was stolen from the CEO of a certain major corporation. He found out after looking at the hard drive, which not only had Windows 95 installed on it, but lots of files relating to executive business of said corporation.
The bizarre part is apparently no one at the computer store ever looked at what, besides Windows 95 itself, was actually installed on the thing, nor did anybody try to format the disk.
I don't think they ever caught the thief.....so some details have been obscured.
---
Because Linux is divided into a kernel and discrete components, such as the C library, bash, command line utilities, etc., which can be easily separated and replaced with something else.
With *BSD, the OS distribution gives strong incentive to use what is provided in /usr/src and /usr/ports, to the exclusion of software not provided. Further, it's more difficult to do a binary-only installation. You're always going to have source code for something hanging around, and probably not something you intended to keep, and certainly not tarred and gzipped!
To build an embedded Linux operating system, all you need to do is build a Linux kernel, build a libc (e.g. glibc2 or newlib, and build whatever other tools you need, then combine them into a nice binary distribution. Even without a package mangler.
I can't even begin to conceive of how one would build such a thing with *BSD without seriously disturbing the OS installation hosting the build process. I'm sure it could be done, but if it were that easy, someone would have done it by now.
Further, Linux is open source and open development. Anybody can participate. BSD is far less open source, and far less open development. Ever tried to submit a patch to a *BSD kernel? Ha, good luck. There should be no question as to why the BSD kernel keeps forking.
As for Linux vs. BSD, BSD advocates will say that it is technically superior in many areas, and be correct. However, Linux is far superior in at least one aspect: the manner in which it is developed. I expect BSD to be left in the dust in all technical areas that matter within a very short time, unless they can get their act together.
Foo. There went all my karma.
---
When I went in last Tuesday, there were only two other people who had them on order. They got two of them in yesterday, and filled those orders. I'm next. And I'm very glad I got there when I did, since there are now nine backorders behind me. And this is in Peoria, Illinois!
---
Doesn't happen at Microsoft. Not when there's a snapshot build every day that gets burned to CD-R and redistributed to quite a few people inside the company. Every day. (Depending on what you're working on that is, some projects don't do this.) The point is that MS really doesn't have any obvious way of "fingerprinting" anybody's particular distribution, since the daily build is also downloadable from an internal Web site (again, depending on project).
In other words, yeah, M$ technically could do it, but it would so completely screw up their existing development processes that I doubt it will ever happen.
---
For more info on writing RPM spec files, see the RPM HOWTO.
Summary: An improved FTP client.} -src.tar.gz /var/tmp/%{name}-root
Name: ncftp
Version: 3.0beta21
Release: 3
Prefix: %{_prefix}
Copyright: Distributable
Group: Applications/Internet
Source0: ftp://ftp.ncftp.com/ncftp/3.0BETA/ncftp-%{version
Patch0: ncftp-3.0beta21-y2k.patch
BuildRoot:
%description
Ncftp is an improved FTP client. Ncftp's improvements include support for command line editing, command histories, recursive gets, automatic anonymous logins and more.
Install ncftp if you use FTP to transfer files and you'd like to try some of ncftp's additional features.
%prep .y2k
%setup -q
%patch0 -p1 -b
%build
%configure --enable-signals
make
%install
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/{bin,man/man1}
make prefix=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr install
mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/X11/applnk/Internetk top [Desktop Entry]
cat > $RPM_BUILD_ROOT/etc/X11/applnk/Internet/ncftp.des
Name=NcFTP
Comment=NcFTP - a text mode FTP client
Icon=ftp.xpm
Exec=ncftp
Type=Application
Terminal=1
EOF
%clean
rm -rf $RPM_BUILD_ROOT
%files /etc/X11/applnk/Internet/ncftp.desktop
/usr/bin/ncftp
/usr/bin/ncftpget
/usr/bin/ncftpput
/usr/bin/ncftpbatch
/usr/bin/ncftpls
/usr/bin/ncftpbookmarks
/usr/man/man1/ncftp.1*
/usr/man/man1/ncftpget.1*
/usr/man/man1/ncftpput.1*
/usr/man/man1/ncftpbatch.1*
/usr/man/man1/ncftpls.1*
%defattr(-,root,root)
%doc *README WHATSNEW-3.0 LICENSE.txt doc
%config(missingok)
---
Microsoft spel chekar vor sail, worgs grate !!