Well the majority of the comments here is containing just question marks, so I guess it doesn't do any harm if I post some myself, and even put a question before them.
Thing is, I happen to get annoyed with Web development as soon as I either want a user to input formatted text (just yer basic bold, italic, etc.) or I want to enable them to create an ordering in the list of objects they own. The latter currently involves a multiple selection box and a small-print A4 full of JavaScript garble.
So I guess anything should be O.K. when it solves the above problems. But does it? (Honestly: idunno, and I'm not sure if I want to read a W3 document right now;-)
And wasn't Sklyarov arrested when he came to the US?
Sure thing. Now the US, let there be no doubt about it, is a broad country with a million different sceneries and subcultures, but one central government. I just happen to like, maybe, 1% of U.S. culture enough that I want to visit the States some day, in one way or another.
Nevertheless, something in the back of my mind tells me the US is a "no-go" zone for me, and that I'd better get a trip to Israel/ Palestina or Irak than go visit the US. That "something" is the Skylarov case, and the fact that I am unsure whether I'll just be picked off the streets (or off the airport) as an example and (as any good example should) get my pants prosecuted off, just because I once advertized DeCSS, got music off the net, or did some other silly thing that might even be entirely legal within my own legislation area.
The U.S. is known to track visitors to the States closely enough to be able to match them for such profiles. This is (AFAIK) part of this PATRIOT act, and is supposed to stop terrorists from entering America without being noticed. What worries me is that if I am too radical at anything for U.S. taste, I'll probably already become a dot on the radar screen in America, while most other countries normally won't be able to do such a background check at all. And I don't feel like maintaining a low profile all my life just because I want to visit a fellow Western country one day.
As I already stated, I also have no more confidence in the US prosecuting foreigners for silly crimes just to set an example, than I have in other "less civilized" countries. But I do know that my "criminal activities" (= being your average techie) frustrate the US more than any other country in the world. (Now if I also were a human rights activist, things would be different.) And I don't see how getting 3 years in jail just because you can is a good prospective, just because the jail is in the Land of the Free.
Maybe I have the typical Slashdot fear for Washington that this lobbyist describes, but it puts a serious weight on my doubts on whether to ever visit (or study in) America. So if you can debunk this with good arguments, please be my guest.
The current FHS totally ignores the difference between command-line tools and GUI apps. (This is because, in its view, X11 is still seen as an add-on to UNIX.)
The distinctions that are made by the FHS, that are related to this problem, are:
3.12/opt : Add-on application software packages 4.4/usr/X11R6 : X Window System, Version 11 Release 6 (optional) 4.5/usr/bin : Most user commands
It's clear from reading the FHS that/opt is a directory for apps (be it add-on apps), and/usr/bin is officially reserved for CLI tools, interpreters, etc. Remarkably enough, while the FHS explicitly states that distro's *as well as* maintainers may fill/opt, and doesn't hint about using/usr/bin for applications at all, the latter usually contains all the app binaries, and the former doesn't. It's totally unclear whether you may use/usr/X11R6/bin for storing X11 apps, but current practices suggest that only windowmanagers and X11 tools (xclock, etc.) be stored there./usr/bin dirlistings from GUI environments make it clear that we need to separate tools and apps. An argument against using/opt to store most no-basic software used to be maintaing $PATH. By ensuring that all/opt packages are what you'd generally refer to as "applications" (= stuff that you usually don't invoke from a command line), we could use/opt for our purpose.
Users, however, have no use for the hierarchy inside/opt; they just want to click-start an application. This could be done by displaying the app dir as an application icon, like in NextStep/ OSX. (Maybe using some resource file to point at the main binary and the icon.)
You could argue against/opt being named "/opt" and not e.g. "/apps". That's fine. Yet, I think using the system proposed here would be a mighty fine backwards-compatible way to handle GUI apps better inside GNU/ Linux systems.
Being a little more clearer, but probably also trying to explain what the parent tried to explain:
Researchers (guess where) have found that smoking pot is a cure to the disease mentioned here, which is at least having a genetic cause to some people. I saw a documentary once on TV about an American doctor (I guess) whose behavior in the military has kept him from becoming blind like most of his family. That guy is now doing some research in the Netherlands on this topic. (Because his fatherland rather has him going blind than smoking pot; he's been treated really lame out there according to his story.)
I get work done just the way you describe it (even with deadlines only being able to use one hour of a fully reserved day), and don't have any problems with that;-)
Thanks. Now I can consider writing a filesystem-based backend to my PHP-based object data storage thingy.
Not to be nitpicking, but I was wondering whether the "filenameX/..owner" syntax already has been decided upon. I just happen to think it's not all that beautiful (really just a matter of taste) to have all these metadata files together with other dotfiles in every directory. Although the common solutions for HFS/ AppleTalk on UNIX systems don't really seem to suggest anything better. The OSX approach is dubious because it's actualy two approaches in one (reserving the "rsrc" filename and the "..namedsource" filename for just about the same purpose). One advantage is that at most you're faced with these two special files inside a normal directory(?), and not e.g. 20 different ones ("..user", "..group", "..access", etc.).
In an ideal world, you should be able to open a file or directory with a mode ("data", "metadata", and maybe even "directory"), and have the accompanying command line utils for this. But this of course doesn't fit in well with the current UNIX/ ANSI C approach of things. Of course, treating normal files as directories is a nice alternative, but the problem lies within the metadata for directories, which will still be visible as any other normal (hidden) file.
Hey, I realize that you have probably already given this stuff some thought, but anyway;-)
Well that's odd. I was just setting up ipchains on my Sparc-based Debian box (kernel 2.2) to finally replace my proxy setup. (Did this before, but every time I installed the steenking ipmasq package, which screwed up everything, refusing packages for the entire campus LAN and adding +/- 20 random rules to my ipchains.)
Anyway, as you said: the core userspace OS (GNU) is sometimes too loosely connected from the kernel (Linux). Hey, maybe we should promote a name change to make people more aware that the OS is a combination of the core userspace and the kernel...oh wait. Not here. Not on Slashdot;-)
Tnx. If that's the way it will be indeed, it would really rock.
some questions abou ReiserFS
on
Reiser4 Benchmarks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have some questions abou ReiserFS and was wondering whether someone out there would be able to answer them.
First off, there's this stuff with ReiserFS storing fine-grained data. Does this imply that using ReiserFS (v3 or v4) directly as a database would be efficient? I know RFS doesn't have Relational features, but these might very easily be implemented in userspace if you can store e.g.:.../customers/0001/name.../customers/0001/phone.../customers/0001/agent ->.../personnel/0021 (...etc.)
Am I losing this or getting this???
My other question was about this metadata-as-file thing. Hans can implement whatever he wants, but it just so appears that Linux behaves like Unix. I've just made a ReiserFS partition to check, and there's no way I can "touch foo; ls foo/" to see e.g. permissions etc.
Now I'm aware that this might be v4 stuff, but I wonder if anything of this is ever to be seen back in Linux userland? E.g., will it be possible for projects to use ReiserFS to change the paradigm used for metadata using a straight Linux kernel?
See, from time to time I just happen to be quite impressed with the "everything is a file" applied to metadata, and I hope we can make the shift to this future one day, and finally get rid of file extensions, MIME guesses and app association registries in Linux, and store this stuff in metadata space.
I'm not sure if this is at all what you want, but GNOME 2 on my Debian unstable (and I believe everywhere else as well) ships with a handful of High Contrast-themes, usually containing higher color contrasts (more towards black & white), including the icons, and huge fonts.
Again, I'm not sure if that's what you want. I've no sight problem that a small pair of glasses can't solve.
Might also explain why they export all the tech jobs to India nowadays.
Nevertheless, I'm a real proponent of the concept; it's the ideal combination. I'm currently very stressed and see my body go downhill fast. And although I don't like Yoga, I'm automatically looking in the direction of the Oriental sports with the "body and spirit healing" combination. Too bad many of these sports have a "fighting" reputation; it's one thing that keeps me, weakling, from just joining the club. That, and my week schedule of course.
Tai Chi is the other end of the universe, though, because then you completely miss the sparring concept, which is perfect for creating a certain healthy mental territorium for yourself, even when you always lose. (And although this may have its deep psychological reason, I'm just telling this from first-hand experience.)
I remember telling someone at my "basisschool" (= 12 jr.) that I did Judo. The very next thing, I lied on the tiles of the school playground, kept to the ground: "oh yeah? Then why can't you get out of this one?" I boredly replied that "I never said that I was any good".
I think that illustrates both why the "fight sport" attitude stinks, but the "healthy mental territory" experience is a real enrichment for anyone who is open to that.
I wouldn't (and "have been known to do so in the past";-) give a penny for X competitors that couldn't provite a migration path from X. In fact, most competitors never come past the point where impressive X compatibility/ migration paths are reached.
Berlin/ Fresco comes to mind, but looking at the newest incarnation of fresco.org seems to suggest that DirectFB works as a backend for Fresco. Well I'm totally confused now, but what it boils down to is: if you can't port the GIMP (or insert Linux GUI killer app) to it, why shoud I use it?
OK bigshot, show me how I get the GIMP, WindowMaker, etc. running on DirectFB from whatever ships with Debian -- which happens to be a libdirectfb package and X-based binary packages for the apps mentioned here.
I'd like to have this stuff installed directly from binary packages with APT. If that's impossible, source packages w/o having to reconfigure/ patch them by hand would be the only viable alternative.
If you can tell me how to do that, your reply becomes interesting and I'm very much willing to listen to you (because yes, I'm a newbie, as I have well admitted). But now I haven't learned anything more than I already knew -- and that's that you can't just turn any Debian box in a DirectFB-based machine.
What I was trying to say, was that it would (as far as I know, so educate me if you know things so well!) take a recompile of every GUI app to make a version of Debian with the DirectFB as the main GUI target. This isn't all that different from Debian distro's targetting different architectures or kernels.
Maybe it's just the nature of the post, but I looked at the DirectFB screenshots (on DirectFB.org), and I see everything from GNOME 2 to WindowMaker to the GIMP, translucency, etc., etc., while I've never heard of DirectFB before.
Great. Now let's see how I get this on my Debian... hmm... I guess it would take a whole other Debian "port".
Hey; it would be cool to combine Linux + DirectFB + GNUstep (+ "3rd party" Free SW) into a MacOSX wannabe distro. It's not a problem if that would still mean it's lacking more than half of the basic OSX functionality; it's the other, Free half that makes the thought interesting!
While on the topic of "SVG/SMIL != Flash" (or is, whatever), see also here. Though it is a book promotion website, there are lots of comprehensive examples on SVG, scripting SVG through Javascript (similar to simple Flash buttons) and combining SVG with SMIL.
That is, the W3C website says the link is also about SMIL. I'm still looking for that link.
The Adobe plugin also has some trouble scrolling. E.g. when you view an A4-sized graphic, and it doesn't fit on screen, no scrollbar appears. (This is for viewing SVG's directly; can't remember what went wrong when you saw them embedded in HTML; I just remember that this also didn't go OK, as I once tried to show a logo I had created in Sodipodi.)
Slashdot Mirror
Well the majority of the comments here is containing just question marks, so I guess it doesn't do any harm if I post some myself, and even put a question before them.
;-)
Thing is, I happen to get annoyed with Web development as soon as I either want a user to input formatted text (just yer basic bold, italic, etc.) or I want to enable them to create an ordering in the list of objects they own. The latter currently involves a multiple selection box and a small-print A4 full of JavaScript garble.
So I guess anything should be O.K. when it solves the above problems. But does it? (Honestly: idunno, and I'm not sure if I want to read a W3 document right now
And wasn't Sklyarov arrested when he came to the US?
Sure thing. Now the US, let there be no doubt about it, is a broad country with a million different sceneries and subcultures, but one central government. I just happen to like, maybe, 1% of U.S. culture enough that I want to visit the States some day, in one way or another.
Nevertheless, something in the back of my mind tells me the US is a "no-go" zone for me, and that I'd better get a trip to Israel/ Palestina or Irak than go visit the US. That "something" is the Skylarov case, and the fact that I am unsure whether I'll just be picked off the streets (or off the airport) as an example and (as any good example should) get my pants prosecuted off, just because I once advertized DeCSS, got music off the net, or did some other silly thing that might even be entirely legal within my own legislation area.
The U.S. is known to track visitors to the States closely enough to be able to match them for such profiles. This is (AFAIK) part of this PATRIOT act, and is supposed to stop terrorists from entering America without being noticed. What worries me is that if I am too radical at anything for U.S. taste, I'll probably already become a dot on the radar screen in America, while most other countries normally won't be able to do such a background check at all. And I don't feel like maintaining a low profile all my life just because I want to visit a fellow Western country one day.
As I already stated, I also have no more confidence in the US prosecuting foreigners for silly crimes just to set an example, than I have in other "less civilized" countries. But I do know that my "criminal activities" (= being your average techie) frustrate the US more than any other country in the world. (Now if I also were a human rights activist, things would be different.) And I don't see how getting 3 years in jail just because you can is a good prospective, just because the jail is in the Land of the Free.
Maybe I have the typical Slashdot fear for Washington that this lobbyist describes, but it puts a serious weight on my doubts on whether to ever visit (or study in) America. So if you can debunk this with good arguments, please be my guest.
Odd, huh? A character thingy in a CPU?
The current FHS totally ignores the difference between command-line tools and GUI apps. (This is because, in its view, X11 is still seen as an add-on to UNIX.)
/opt : Add-on application software packages /usr/X11R6 : X Window System, Version 11 Release 6 (optional) /usr/bin : Most user commands
/opt is a directory for apps (be it add-on apps), and /usr/bin is officially reserved for CLI tools, interpreters, etc. Remarkably enough, while the FHS explicitly states that distro's *as well as* maintainers may fill /opt, and doesn't hint about using /usr/bin for applications at all, the latter usually contains all the app binaries, and the former doesn't. It's totally unclear whether you may use /usr/X11R6/bin for storing X11 apps, but current practices suggest that only windowmanagers and X11 tools (xclock, etc.) be stored there. /usr/bin dirlistings from GUI environments make it clear that we need to separate tools and apps. An argument against using /opt to store most no-basic software used to be maintaing $PATH. By ensuring that all /opt packages are what you'd generally refer to as "applications" (= stuff that you usually don't invoke from a command line), we could use /opt for our purpose.
/opt; they just want to click-start an application. This could be done by displaying the app dir as an application icon, like in NextStep/ OSX. (Maybe using some resource file to point at the main binary and the icon.)
/opt being named "/opt" and not e.g. "/apps". That's fine. Yet, I think using the system proposed here would be a mighty fine backwards-compatible way to handle GUI apps better inside GNU/ Linux systems.
The distinctions that are made by the FHS, that are related to this problem, are:
3.12
4.4
4.5
It's clear from reading the FHS that
Users, however, have no use for the hierarchy inside
You could argue against
Being a little more clearer, but probably also trying to explain what the parent tried to explain:
Researchers (guess where) have found that smoking pot is a cure to the disease mentioned here, which is at least having a genetic cause to some people. I saw a documentary once on TV about an American doctor (I guess) whose behavior in the military has kept him from becoming blind like most of his family. That guy is now doing some research in the Netherlands on this topic. (Because his fatherland rather has him going blind than smoking pot; he's been treated really lame out there according to his story.)
very informative, thanks.
I get work done just the way you describe it (even with deadlines only being able to use one hour of a fully reserved day), and don't have any problems with that ;-)
Thanks. Now I can consider writing a filesystem-based backend to my PHP-based object data storage thingy.
;-)
Not to be nitpicking, but I was wondering whether the "filenameX/..owner" syntax already has been decided upon. I just happen to think it's not all that beautiful (really just a matter of taste) to have all these metadata files together with other dotfiles in every directory. Although the common solutions for HFS/ AppleTalk on UNIX systems don't really seem to suggest anything better. The OSX approach is dubious because it's actualy two approaches in one (reserving the "rsrc" filename and the "..namedsource" filename for just about the same purpose). One advantage is that at most you're faced with these two special files inside a normal directory(?), and not e.g. 20 different ones ("..user", "..group", "..access", etc.).
In an ideal world, you should be able to open a file or directory with a mode ("data", "metadata", and maybe even "directory"), and have the accompanying command line utils for this. But this of course doesn't fit in well with the current UNIX/ ANSI C approach of things. Of course, treating normal files as directories is a nice alternative, but the problem lies within the metadata for directories, which will still be visible as any other normal (hidden) file.
Hey, I realize that you have probably already given this stuff some thought, but anyway
Well that's odd. I was just setting up ipchains on my Sparc-based Debian box (kernel 2.2) to finally replace my proxy setup. (Did this before, but every time I installed the steenking ipmasq package, which screwed up everything, refusing packages for the entire campus LAN and adding +/- 20 random rules to my ipchains.)
...oh wait. Not here. Not on Slashdot ;-)
Anyway, as you said: the core userspace OS (GNU) is sometimes too loosely connected from the kernel (Linux). Hey, maybe we should promote a name change to make people more aware that the OS is a combination of the core userspace and the kernel
You're hired!
Tnx. If that's the way it will be indeed, it would really rock.
I have some questions abou ReiserFS and was wondering whether someone out there would be able to answer them.
.../customers/0001/name .../customers/0001/phone .../customers/0001/agent -> .../personnel/0021
First off, there's this stuff with ReiserFS storing fine-grained data. Does this imply that using ReiserFS (v3 or v4) directly as a database would be efficient? I know RFS doesn't have Relational features, but these might very easily be implemented in userspace if you can store e.g.:
(...etc.)
Am I losing this or getting this???
My other question was about this metadata-as-file thing. Hans can implement whatever he wants, but it just so appears that Linux behaves like Unix. I've just made a ReiserFS partition to check, and there's no way I can "touch foo; ls foo/" to see e.g. permissions etc.
Now I'm aware that this might be v4 stuff, but I wonder if anything of this is ever to be seen back in Linux userland? E.g., will it be possible for projects to use ReiserFS to change the paradigm used for metadata using a straight Linux kernel?
See, from time to time I just happen to be quite impressed with the "everything is a file" applied to metadata, and I hope we can make the shift to this future one day, and finally get rid of file extensions, MIME guesses and app association registries in Linux, and store this stuff in metadata space.
Your statement is missing arguments...
I'm not sure if this is at all what you want, but GNOME 2 on my Debian unstable (and I believe everywhere else as well) ships with a handful of High Contrast-themes, usually containing higher color contrasts (more towards black & white), including the icons, and huge fonts.
Again, I'm not sure if that's what you want. I've no sight problem that a small pair of glasses can't solve.
Might also explain why they export all the tech jobs to India nowadays.
Nevertheless, I'm a real proponent of the concept; it's the ideal combination. I'm currently very stressed and see my body go downhill fast. And although I don't like Yoga, I'm automatically looking in the direction of the Oriental sports with the "body and spirit healing" combination. Too bad many of these sports have a "fighting" reputation; it's one thing that keeps me, weakling, from just joining the club. That, and my week schedule of course.
Tai Chi is the other end of the universe, though, because then you completely miss the sparring concept, which is perfect for creating a certain healthy mental territorium for yourself, even when you always lose. (And although this may have its deep psychological reason, I'm just telling this from first-hand experience.)
I remember telling someone at my "basisschool" (= 12 jr.) that I did Judo. The very next thing, I lied on the tiles of the school playground, kept to the ground: "oh yeah? Then why can't you get out of this one?" I boredly replied that "I never said that I was any good".
I think that illustrates both why the "fight sport" attitude stinks, but the "healthy mental territory" experience is a real enrichment for anyone who is open to that.
...remember that there are some (lots of) spams out there that make money on the price-per-minute of the phone line you're trying to flood!
Reading what you wrote, I realized that this part of the deal is mainly there to say "you won't get SCO kinds of trouble with us".
Oooh, I thought this finally was a pure positive thing coming out of Redmont, but your wordings make me suspicious after all!.
That's not a wet T-shirt folks, it's TRANSPARENCY!
Goddammit, we're trying to show a FEATURE here!
I wouldn't (and "have been known to do so in the past" ;-) give a penny for X competitors that couldn't provite a migration path from X. In fact, most competitors never come past the point where impressive X compatibility/ migration paths are reached.
Berlin/ Fresco comes to mind, but looking at the newest incarnation of fresco.org seems to suggest that DirectFB works as a backend for Fresco. Well I'm totally confused now, but what it boils down to is: if you can't port the GIMP (or insert Linux GUI killer app) to it, why shoud I use it?
OK bigshot, show me how I get the GIMP, WindowMaker, etc. running on DirectFB from whatever ships with Debian -- which happens to be a libdirectfb package and X-based binary packages for the apps mentioned here.
I'd like to have this stuff installed directly from binary packages with APT. If that's impossible, source packages w/o having to reconfigure/ patch them by hand would be the only viable alternative.
If you can tell me how to do that, your reply becomes interesting and I'm very much willing to listen to you (because yes, I'm a newbie, as I have well admitted). But now I haven't learned anything more than I already knew -- and that's that you can't just turn any Debian box in a DirectFB-based machine.
What I was trying to say, was that it would (as far as I know, so educate me if you know things so well!) take a recompile of every GUI app to make a version of Debian with the DirectFB as the main GUI target. This isn't all that different from Debian distro's targetting different architectures or kernels.
But you knew that, of course.
Long as the horny teenager is a "Hot Babe", I'd have no problem with that.
Maybe it's just the nature of the post, but I looked at the DirectFB screenshots (on DirectFB.org), and I see everything from GNOME 2 to WindowMaker to the GIMP, translucency, etc., etc., while I've never heard of DirectFB before.
Great. Now let's see how I get this on my Debian... hmm... I guess it would take a whole other Debian "port".
Hey; it would be cool to combine Linux + DirectFB + GNUstep (+ "3rd party" Free SW) into a MacOSX wannabe distro. It's not a problem if that would still mean it's lacking more than half of the basic OSX functionality; it's the other, Free half that makes the thought interesting!
yeah, OK, so on my Debian box, where am I supposed to view this in?
(Apparently my Mozilla's native SVG support lacks.)
While on the topic of "SVG/SMIL != Flash" (or is, whatever), see also here. Though it is a book promotion website, there are lots of comprehensive examples on SVG, scripting SVG through Javascript (similar to simple Flash buttons) and combining SVG with SMIL.
That is, the W3C website says the link is also about SMIL. I'm still looking for that link.
The Adobe plugin also has some trouble scrolling. E.g. when you view an A4-sized graphic, and it doesn't fit on screen, no scrollbar appears. (This is for viewing SVG's directly; can't remember what went wrong when you saw them embedded in HTML; I just remember that this also didn't go OK, as I once tried to show a logo I had created in Sodipodi.)