So there's my linux wishlist, I guess. I don't need a gui - I was a DOS boy for a long time. I need to know what I have on my system, where it is, how to change it. And there just doesn't seem to be a resource for me to learn that...It's perhaps a flaw in the decentralized nature of linux development.
What Linux Distribution are you using?
I think that Debian has answers to most of your concerns. I am sure most the other distributions work similarly - Debian is just what I know.
The default install is not all that bloated, depending on which options you choose. And the much maligned dselect will let you see exactly what you have installed. Dselect's interface may take a little getting used to, but its a really powerful tool for figuring out what you have installed, and trimming bloat on systems that are short of disk space.
As for finding out where the package has stuff installed: dpkg -L package_name will tell you exactly what files are installed by with a given package. You can usually configure the package by fooling around with the files under/etc. Just look at the man pages and the documentation under/usr/share/doc to figure what to do.
Many people (myself included) feel that copying DVDs for personal use falls under fair use, and so should be legal. To do this with DVDs, one needs to break the encryption.
This is incorrect. You do not need to decrypt the disk to copy it. You can do direct copying without decrypting.
This is a very important point. The encryption only prevents playback on systems that don't have MPAA sanctioned players. See this letter on the topic.
Don't let the MPAA incorrectly define what the issue is in this case.
Well, I agree with you, plain text should be allowed.
But there should be a way for you to generate pdf. Are you using a *nix OS? Then use enscript to generate postscript, and ps2pdf to generate pdf. (There probably are many other ways to do this, but I thought off this way first).
There are probably ways to do it on most other OSs, but I also know a more general solution. Use this service from Adobe - it let's you translate a limited number (10 ?) of files from many formats into pdfs.
I use it as a handy little Microsoft Word translator. Of course, I'm still stuck with pdfs. But at least I can read those easily.
But I use vim everyday, and I would hate to have to use something else. I am addicted to syntax highlighting, keyboard driven commands, and regex driven search and replace.
So call me old fashioned if you want, but I'm nominating vim.
Well, maybe its Unix vs. Windows thing then because I get '?'s when using Netscape 4.07 on Solaris. Lynx 2.8.1 on Solaris just ignores all of the apostrophes (which seems like better behavior than Netscape) giving :
DAMM! whats wrong? stupid netscape
And I see the same kind of problems on Netscape 4.7 on my Linux box at home.
Another example: FreeBSD has a larger installed base than Solaris, and yet there are more native ports to Solaris than to FreeBSD.
Does FreeBSD really have more users than Solaris? Or does it just have more users than Solaris/x86? I don't have any data either way, but I'd be surprised if there aren't more Sparc boxes out there than FreeBSD boxes.
As for having more native ports, it doesn't surprise me at all that Solaris has the lead. It is probably a relatively easy port from Sparc Solaris to x86 Solaris, so in many cases it might be a no brainer to do the port if there is any customer demand. And considering there are probably very big differences between the Solaris and FreeBSD markets, and the fact that a strong company like Sun is behind Solaris, it doesn't surprise that more companies are natively supporting Solaris.
Potato has 1.78 GB of binary-i386.debs , debs are compressed with bzip2.
Uhm, no. I think all debs are compressed gzip and I know that all of them that I've ever looked at are.
Or more accurately, they are 'ar' archives of a few packaging files, with the actual binaries from the package in a gzipped tar file.
For example, take a look at the latest grep deb, grep_2.3-7_i386.deb:
# ar -x grep_2.3-7_i386.deb # ls -l -rw-r--r-- 1 root root       977 Nov 3 08:54 control.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 122245 Nov 3 08:54 data.tar.gz -rw-r--r-- 1 root root           4 Nov 3 08:54 debian-binary -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 123416 Oct 5 13:59 grep_2.3-7_i386.deb
The file data.tar.gz contains the actual package binaries, man pages, etc., while the control.tar.gz file contains the installation and removal scripts
This article did not impress me. While there is little that I would classify as FUD, there are also few details in what Linux's problems are. There are a lot of quotes in the article, but most them are by people with obvious biases.
You've got a Microsoft guy saying Linux hasn't hurt NT sales. An HP guy says Linux isn't ready for high-end servers. And a Linux consultant saying that Linux is cutting into SCO sales. Wow, these statements are shocking! Next thing you know a politician will say kids shouldn't use drugs.
This article isn't damaging, because there is nothing new in it.
Anyway, the problem with paper is that ever time something changes, you have to print a whole new book. This could become a little time consuming and resourse (monetary) intensive.
Well, you could alway use paper copies of diffs. Still annoying, but it would work.
First, off I really enjoyed this article and I think that he makes some really good points about problems in Free/Open Source Software. In particular, I think that he has some good points about the problems projects have as they grow. I have seen a lot of symptoms he mentions in the growing pains that Debian has been going through.
I think, though, that he has picked the wrong target for this article. He makes a lot of good points, but I don't really think that he is refuting ESR in most of them.
I think that his "Catherdral and Bazaar Postulates" are exaggerated. I did not get the impression that ESR believes in these postulates, either from CATB or his later writings. There are probably some people who would agree with these postulates, but I get the impression that ESR is more pragmatic.
He says:
All open source projects are the same and employ the so-called "bazaar model". This model is inherently good compared to methods developed by commercial software developers. All alternative models (considered to be one and called the "Cathedral model") are infidel and doomed. Nothing can compete in quality with open source.
I don't think that ESR thinks the Bazaar is for everything and every project, and I don't think that it is implied in CATB. There are plenty of Free Software projects that are closer to the Cathedral than the Bazaar, and there is nothing wrong with that. Each project should use whatever form works for its participants and best meets the goals of the project. The point of CATB is that you should examine your development model and see if opening it up might help the project.
Microsoft need to be destroyed.
More like software needs to not suck. We need more competition in software so that the software gets better, and Open Source Software is one way to help get it. Microsoft isn't going to disappear, but maybe they'll be forced to make more reliable products.
The open source movement consist of ideal cooperative people. Conflicts are few and can be resolved within a community.
I don't think ESR is that idealistic, or that Open source Software depends on that kind of idealism. Flame wars happen. Big deal. Sometimes they may distract people from getting real work done, but often the real flamers are just wannabes, so their lost time does not really slow progress. Conflicts are fine, and the right kind of conflicts help make the software better.
Anyway, it was a good article, but I don't think that it was really refuting CATB.
I think some of you are taking this a little bit too seriously. The place where he mentions Slashdot and Jane's is just one little paragraph in a bigger article.
I understand if you don't like Cringely's writing style, but I don't think that this article was that bad. I disagree with Cringely about what Jane's and Slashdot did being censorship, but the reaction around here seems a little out of line. So his views a news coverage are a little conservative. Deal with it.
We should learn to take criticism (and even ignorance) a little more calmly. I mean, I can't imagine what the reaction have been if Cringely had said something like, "I don't really see the point of Beowulfs." Or even, "I think Gnome is worse than KDE."
You joke but this is already being done. One of my games is distributed on CD-ROM containing allmost 700MB. It is impossible to copy (with my consumer CD-RW at least)
Are you sure you don't just need longer CD-R media. 80 minute (~703 MB) CD-R media exist, though according to the CD-R FAQ, they're more expensive.
And longer CDs (if not CD-ROM) have been around a while. I have quite a few CDs that are over 74 minutes.
In smaller towns and in the boonies, cable isn't even talked about in the five year plans.
Well, yes and no. My parents live a outside a small town (less than 10 k people) in Wisconsin, and the the cable company there is rolling out service in a couple of months.
So I think that the most you can say is that it varies quite a bit.
Its doesn't seem to be currently in print, but I would recommend trying to find a used copy of _Maps in a Mirror_. I think it has pretty much all of OSC's short fiction up to 1990. Its really a must for a Card fan.
Or even better, find the novella (or novellette ?) "Ender's Game" which Card expanded into the novel. Its a tighter story, and provides its payoff more effectively. Its still probably my favorite OSC work, with the possible exception of _Speaker for the Dead_.
Not that I have anything against _Ender's Game_, the novel, but I would suggest reading the shorter version first.
I'm no fundamentalist, not by a long stretch of the imagination. I do, however, think that the jury's still out on evolution (not that I believe what's taught in Genesis, either). If evolution is the way things happened, then when it is proven, I will accept it with open arms. It seems a plausible theory to me. Creationism seems a bit far-fetched, but hey... who's to say there isn't a God that created everything? You can't prove his non-existence, and the most ardent and well-studied fundie can't prove his existence. That's why there's a thing called "faith".
`
Evolution's not proven in about the same sense that Newton's Theory of Gravitation was not proven 100 years ago. Its fits the data pretty damn well. Better theories might come along and extend it (like Einstein's General Theory of Relativity did for gravity), but its basically scientific fact.
Sure my analogy may be a little bit over-extended, but its Biology for Crissakes. Evolution is rock solid, and I think that anyone who says otherwise is really kidding themselves.
Maybe we could stick with capital K for base-10, and lowercase k for base-2 (or reverse, I don't remember the "official" case for base-10 units). Kind of like how 'b' means bits or bytes, depending. Let's just make it clear, eh?
Uhm, this wouldn't work very well. The SI prefixes are as follows: (pardon the formatting)
prefix ____ abbreviation kilo ______ k mega _____ M giga ______ G
Since kilo is abbreviated 'k', you'd have to either break the SI standard, or make 'K', 'm', and 'g' be in one system, while 'k', 'M', and 'G' are in another system. What a pain.
Besides, personally, I would always parse 'mB' as 'millibytes'.
1. Monopolies must own a huge majority of the markets they control in order to truly be monopolies. As far as the Internet goes, I doubt very much that this is the case: while AOL may be one of the largest online services around, the sheer number of people on the internet, whether through large ISP's like GTE or BellSouth, or through local ISP's, keeps AOL from the Lion's share of marketshare. Also, since ISP's don't need to own most of the market to stay in business, I see little danger (at this point) of ISP's going belly up en masse and leaving us with only AOL and a few others.
I am not an MBA, but I know that there are two types of monopolies - vertical and horizontal.
Horizontal monopolies own all of one market (pre-breakup AT&T is a good example). Vertical monopolies own shares in many related markets, allowing them to be one stop shopping locations (IBM has at times been an example).
Each type type of monopoly has it own perils. AOL seems to be moving towards being a vertical monopoly, and that is something to worry about. Vertical monopolies can do nasty things to markets.
For instance, if two people are standing on misc. objects in space and are getting further away from each other, without a way to measure red/blue shift from surrounding stars, how would you know which is moving?
Your problem is the way your thinking about the question. Relativity tells us that there is no way to tell which one is moving, because there is nothing special about moving at a constant speed. . In one frame of reference you may be moving at a constant speed, while in your own frame yourat rest. There is nothing special about either frame - physics works the same in either frame.
If someone managed to stand at the center of the universe and observe everything, would any galaxies which had quietly accelerated faster than they should be able to unobserved suddenly slow down?
There is no center of the universe and there is no preferred frame of reference.
Slashdot Mirror
What Linux Distribution are you using?
I think that Debian has answers to most of your concerns. I am sure most the other distributions work similarly - Debian is just what I know.
The default install is not all that bloated, depending on which options you choose. And the much maligned dselect will let you see exactly what you have installed. Dselect's interface may take a little getting used to, but its a really powerful tool for figuring out what you have installed, and trimming bloat on systems that are short of disk space.
As for finding out where the package has stuff installed: dpkg -L package_name will tell you exactly what files are installed by with a given package. You can usually configure the package by fooling around with the files under /etc. Just look at the man pages and the documentation under /usr/share/doc to figure what to do.
When is the ABC interview going to be on? Is it going to be on the nightly news, or on 20/20 or Nightline or something?
We heard ABC was coming to see Johansen last Thursday, but I didn't see anything about it on the nightly news.
Now the Linuxworld article made it sound like ABC was coming yesterday (Monday). So what's the deal? When can we expect to see this on TV?
This is incorrect. You do not need to decrypt the disk to copy it. You can do direct copying without decrypting.
This is a very important point. The encryption only prevents playback on systems that don't have MPAA sanctioned players. See this letter on the topic.
Don't let the MPAA incorrectly define what the issue is in this case.
Well, I agree with you, plain text should be allowed.
But there should be a way for you to generate pdf. Are you using a *nix OS? Then use enscript to generate postscript, and ps2pdf to generate pdf. (There probably are many other ways to do this, but I thought off this way first).
There are probably ways to do it on most other OSs, but I also know a more general solution. Use this service from Adobe - it let's you translate a limited number (10 ?) of files from many formats into pdfs.
I use it as a handy little Microsoft Word translator. Of course, I'm still stuck with pdfs. But at least I can read those easily.
Since nobody has mentioned it yet, I am nominating The LaTeX Companion.
Its a really nice read about my favorite document preparation system.
Yes, I am risking a vi/emacs flamewar.
And, yes vi has been around forever.
And, yes there are a bunch of other vi clones.
But I use vim everyday, and I would hate to have to use something else. I am addicted to syntax highlighting, keyboard driven commands, and regex driven search and replace.
So call me old fashioned if you want, but I'm nominating vim.
And I see the same kind of problems on Netscape 4.7 on my Linux box at home.
Does FreeBSD really have more users than Solaris? Or does it just have more users than Solaris/x86? I don't have any data either way, but I'd be surprised if there aren't more Sparc boxes out there than FreeBSD boxes.
As for having more native ports, it doesn't surprise me at all that Solaris has the lead. It is probably a relatively easy port from Sparc Solaris to x86 Solaris, so in many cases it might be a no brainer to do the port if there is any customer demand. And considering there are probably very big differences between the Solaris and FreeBSD markets, and the fact that a strong company like Sun is behind Solaris, it doesn't surprise that more companies are natively supporting Solaris.
Uhm, I already did check sgi.com.
The SGI lines and the Cray lines are still prettyy separate.
O2K is a very SGI line. It runs IRIX and is MIPS and is related to SGI workstations.
T3E is a very Cray line. It runs UNICOS/mk and it is built from alpha processors.
I know less about the SV and T90 lines, but they are also very Cray. They're vector machines and they run UNICOS.
Anyway, the Cray derived lines were more important to this story, since if you look there are a lot of T3E's in the top 500.
The Origins are nice machines, but they don't have the super high performance. They seem to give pretty good bang for the buck, though.
I have heard that the T3E, might be the last of its line, but who knows how that fits in with plans to spin Cray back off of SGI.
Yeah, Cray still uses alphas in their T3Ds and T3Es.
The T90s and SV1s use Cray's special vector processors.
I believe they are working on making apt smart enough to download smaller chunks and install those chunks.
I don't remember the details, but I'm sure you can find them in the Debian mailing list archives somewhere.
Uhm, no. I think all debs are compressed gzip and I know that all of them that I've ever looked at are.
Or more accurately, they are 'ar' archives of a few packaging files, with the actual binaries from the package in a gzipped tar file.
For example, take a look at the latest grep deb, grep_2.3-7_i386.deb:
The file data.tar.gz contains the actual package binaries, man pages, etc., while the control.tar.gz file contains the installation and removal scripts
This article did not impress me. While there is little that I would classify as FUD, there are also few details in what Linux's problems are. There are a lot of quotes in the article, but most them are by people with obvious biases.
You've got a Microsoft guy saying Linux hasn't hurt NT sales. An HP guy says Linux isn't ready for high-end servers. And a Linux consultant saying that Linux is cutting into SCO sales. Wow, these statements are shocking! Next thing you know a politician will say kids shouldn't use drugs.
This article isn't damaging, because there is nothing new in it.
Well, you could alway use paper copies of diffs. Still annoying, but it would work.
It was supposed to be a reference to ESR's quote that he wants to "live in a world where software doesn't suck."
Sorry if the reference was too oblique.
First, off I really enjoyed this article and I think that he makes some really good points about problems in Free/Open Source Software. In particular, I think that he has some good points about the problems projects have as they grow. I have seen a lot of symptoms he mentions in the growing pains that Debian has been going through.
I think, though, that he has picked the wrong target for this article. He makes a lot of good points, but I don't really think that he is refuting ESR in most of them.
I think that his "Catherdral and Bazaar Postulates" are exaggerated. I did not get the impression that ESR believes in these postulates, either from CATB or his later writings. There are probably some people who would agree with these postulates, but I get the impression that ESR is more pragmatic.
He says:
I don't think that ESR thinks the Bazaar is for everything and every project, and I don't think that it is implied in CATB. There are plenty of Free Software projects that are closer to the Cathedral than the Bazaar, and there is nothing wrong with that. Each project should use whatever form works for its participants and best meets the goals of the project. The point of CATB is that you should examine your development model and see if opening it up might help the project.
More like software needs to not suck. We need more competition in software so that the software gets better, and Open Source Software is one way to help get it. Microsoft isn't going to disappear, but maybe they'll be forced to make more reliable products.
I don't think ESR is that idealistic, or that Open source Software depends on that kind of idealism. Flame wars happen. Big deal. Sometimes they may distract people from getting real work done, but often the real flamers are just wannabes, so their lost time does not really slow progress. Conflicts are fine, and the right kind of conflicts help make the software better.
Anyway, it was a good article, but I don't think that it was really refuting CATB.
I think some of you are taking this a little bit too seriously. The place where he mentions Slashdot and Jane's is just one little paragraph in a bigger article.
I understand if you don't like Cringely's writing style, but I don't think that this article was that bad. I disagree with Cringely about what Jane's and Slashdot did being censorship, but the reaction around here seems a little out of line. So his views a news coverage are a little conservative. Deal with it.
We should learn to take criticism (and even ignorance) a little more calmly. I mean, I can't imagine what the reaction have been if Cringely had said something like, "I don't really see the point of Beowulfs." Or even, "I think Gnome is worse than KDE."
Are you sure you don't just need longer CD-R media. 80 minute (~703 MB) CD-R media exist, though according to the CD-R FAQ, they're more expensive.
And longer CDs (if not CD-ROM) have been around a while. I have quite a few CDs that are over 74 minutes.
Well, yes and no. My parents live a outside a small town (less than 10 k people) in Wisconsin, and the the cable company there is rolling out service in a couple of months.
So I think that the most you can say is that it varies quite a bit.
Its doesn't seem to be currently in print, but I would recommend trying to find a used copy of _Maps in a Mirror_. I think it has pretty much all of OSC's short fiction up to 1990. Its really a must for a Card fan.
Or even better, find the novella (or novellette ?) "Ender's Game" which Card expanded into the novel. Its a tighter story, and provides its payoff more effectively. Its still probably my favorite OSC work, with the possible exception of _Speaker for the Dead_.
Not that I have anything against _Ender's Game_, the novel, but I would suggest reading the shorter version first.
Evolution's not proven in about the same sense that Newton's Theory of Gravitation was not proven 100 years ago. Its fits the data pretty damn well. Better theories might come along and extend it (like Einstein's General Theory of Relativity did for gravity), but its basically scientific fact.
Sure my analogy may be a little bit over-extended, but its Biology for Crissakes. Evolution is rock solid, and I think that anyone who says otherwise is really kidding themselves.
Uhm, this wouldn't work very well. The SI prefixes are as follows: (pardon the formatting)
prefix ____ abbreviation
kilo ______ k
mega _____ M
giga ______ G
Since kilo is abbreviated 'k', you'd have to either break the SI standard, or make 'K', 'm', and 'g' be in one system, while 'k', 'M', and 'G' are in another system. What a pain.
Besides, personally, I would always parse 'mB' as 'millibytes'.
I am not an MBA, but I know that there are two types of monopolies - vertical and horizontal.
Horizontal monopolies own all of one market (pre-breakup AT&T is a good example). Vertical monopolies own shares in many related markets, allowing them to be one stop shopping locations (IBM has at times been an example).
Each type type of monopoly has it own perils. AOL seems to be moving towards being a vertical monopoly, and that is something to worry about. Vertical monopolies can do nasty things to markets.
Your problem is the way your thinking about the question. Relativity tells us that there is no way to tell which one is moving, because there is nothing special about moving at a constant speed. . In one frame of reference you may be moving at a constant speed, while in your own frame yourat rest. There is nothing special about either frame - physics works the same in either frame.
There is no center of the universe and there is no preferred frame of reference.