> I don't believe in god(s), but I'm not trying to claim it's a proven fact that there are no gods.
Then you are agnostic, not an atheist.
Wordnet says that atheism is:
1. The doctrine or belief that there is no God. 2. a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.
Other dictionaries say similar things. I think it's pretty clear that I am, indeed, an atheist. Just not a doctrinaire (or dogmatic) one.
On the other hand, the definitions of "agnostic" and "agnosticism" are a little more vague. I always thought an agnostic was someone who neither believed nor disbelieved (which, obviously, lets me out). But it turns out it's not quite that simple. Under some of the looser definitions, I may well be an agnostic in addition to being an atheist. But I think maybe those looser definitions are intended to refer to non-secular uses of the word. ("Do you prefer Coke or Pepsi?" "I'm agnostic.")
Anyway, the fact that you know some dogmatic atheists does not mean that all atheists are dogmatic. In fact, I suspect that the vast majority are non-dogmatic. The non-dogmatic ones won't go around preaching atheism at you, so you probably don't notice them as much. But that doesn't mean that they (and I) aren't atheists.
The problem with atheists is that they're just as turned around as the "true believers" because they have nothing with which to disprove.
Not necessarily. I don't believe in purple unicorns. Of course, I can't prove there aren't any purple unicorns, 'cause you can't prove a negative, but I don't care - I still don't believe in 'em. The important thing is that I'm not tied to this belief. If I met a purple unicorn, I would quite happily change my belief. Hey, I'm flexible.
I have friends that believe in God (or Gods), I have friends that believe in astrology or the healing power of crystals. I don't believe in any of that crap myself, but, y'know, I think people should be allowed to believe (or not believe) whatever they want.
I'd say the agnostic is on better footing because they take the scientific approach and admit they really can't say one way or the other
It's not unscientific to chose what seems like a sensible set of beliefs based on available evidence. What is scientific is to mistake a belief for a fact, or to be unwilling to change your beliefs in the face of new evidence. I don't believe in god(s), but I'm not trying to claim that it's a proven fact that there are no gods. I just don't believe it, that's all.
As was mentioned before, unemployment only applies if you get fired, or do not leave on your own accord.
Not according to my dictionary! From wordnet:
n : the state of being unemployed or not having a job.
What you're thinking of is technically referred to as "collecting unemployment insurance" (or being "on unemployment" for short), and is not a necessary corrolary to being unemployed at all.
Then again, "picking nits" technically refers to the practice of removing louse eggs, so maybe I'll shut up now.:)
[Slack] doesn't try to keep track of dependencies - which after fighting with Redhat for awhile seems like a really good choice
Which statement only makes it obvious that you've never used Debian. As someone who went from SLS to Slackware to RH to Debian, perhaps I can explain. Dependencies are:
In Slackware: things that would allow your apps to run, if only you knew what they were.
In RedHat: things that would allow your apps to install, if only you could find them.
In Debian: things that got installed for you without any need to worry on your part.
[Slack] does [have a package management system], it was the first with it I believe
Begging the question, is what Slack offers really a package management system? (You can call cat(1) an editor, and people have used it to create files, but it doesn't meet most people's definition of a text editor.) No Slack wasn't first. SLS was first, and the Debian project was founded at almost the same time as the Slackware project, so that's nearly a tie there too. (Although Debian's first official release was later than Slack's first official release. But then vi took longer to write than cat did too.:)
it's just that it follows the slack philosophy of simple elegance
IMO (as a former Slack user), Slack goes beyond "simple elegance" into the realms of painful inadequacy, but I realize that not everyone agrees with me. Then again, there are people who routinely use cat(1) to create text files too...:)
If the Linux community wasn't going to accept code as evidence, why ask for it in the first place?
The Linux community has not seen the code! Some third party who's not familiar with the history of either Linux or Unix has seen the code, and says that indeed, there are some common fragments. Well, ok, but what the community has been asking all along is for evidence not only of commonality, but evidence that it was SCO's code in the first place! And we still don't have that last. Without that, it could easily be that the code came from Linux, and SCO stole it (and not the other way around), or it could be that the code came from BSD (in which case, both SCO and Linux have an equal right to use it).
The fact is that the development of Linux has been done in public, and it's a matter of public record when changes were made to the code base. SCO seems to be claiming that if they reveal what the offending code is, that someone will magically make it disappear from Linux, and kill their case. Well, guess what? That's just not possible! Linux is too public, and too widely mirrored and archived. The ONLY danger SCO faces if they reveal this supposedly stolen code is that they won't be able to prove it's theirs! And that's going to be an issue for them when they get to court in any case, so the whole hiding-the-code thing is just plain stupid!
I was about to release a new game: "Cop Invaders", where rows of policemen move back and forth across the screen, and you have to shoot them before they reach the bottom. It also may cause problems for another game I had in the works, "Cop Man", where you run around a maze, dodging cops, and trying to get to the energy pellets which allow you to turn around and eat the cops.
(I wonder if anyone on/. will be old enough to get the references...)
On a more serious note, this law would seem to ban Nethack. (If you successfully escape from a store in Nethack with upaid items, you get attacked by "the Keystone Cops".) Since Nethack is included with most Linux/BSD systems, this law would seem to ban the sale of Linux/BSD systems in WA state. I seriously hope that more than just the game developers come out to oppose this ridiculous law.
Debian also includes SELinux, and the "details for installing" seem to be: 'apt-get install selinux'.:)
So, that's at least two major community-oriented distros that have found SELinux worth offering on at least an optional basis; two communities of sometimes-paranoid developers that have probably at least scanned for obvious backdoors. Given that, I suspect that SELinux can probably be considered reasonably safe. (At least as safe as anything else available with your system: when was the last time you reviewed KDE or GNOME for potential backdoors?)
as long as the user can't adjust the rate of scrolling, you don't infringe.
I've got a TV made back in the seventies, and I can adjust the rate of scrolling with a little knob on the front labelled "horizontal hold".:D
That seems like a pretty limited (ang obvious) patent
If it's obvious (and I agree that it seems pretty obvious), then it shouldn't qualify for a patent. I've been yelling "go faster!" at the TV guide channel for years, and when I first saw digital cable, my very first thought was, "ooh, can I set it to scroll faster?"
I agree that slashdot has (yet again) completely misrepresented the story, and made a mountain out of a molehill, but it's still a lame patent that doesn't deserve to exist. One thing that conventional slashdot wisdom does have right is that it's too easy to get a patent on something obvious, and much too hard to get a crap patent grant overturned.
Speaking as one who has literally put thousands of hours into writing a book...
Speaking as one who has literally put thousands of hours into automobile maintenance, don't I have the right to profit from those automobiles for the rest of my life? No? Then what makes you so special?
Just because you place no value on your work...
I place a value on my work. And I get paid for it too. I just don't see any reason that my work should be a gravy-train I can ride in perpetuity. And I don't see any damn reason why yours should be either.
I've been using Exim for years, and I've never looked at any docs for it. Speaking from experience here, Exim is definitely much easier to configure and use than Qmail. This book, it seems, is just for people who want to know all the gory details.
Qmail is light-years ahead of Sendmail, but if you think it's easy to use, you obviously have never even looked at Exim or Postfix!
And I'm sure someone could write a two or three pound book about Qmail if they felt so inspired. Heck, I could probably fill a quarter-pound of paper just complaining about how stupid and annoying (and ineffective) the Qmail license is!:)
Postfix, like Qmail, was designed with security in mind from the start, and uses multiple processes to enforce privilege separation. Basically, you can think of it as Qmail done right (no stupid license, much easier configuration).
Exim, on the other hand, is a small, simple, easy-to-configure, and very flexible little MTA. It's monolithic, so it doesn't have privilege separation, but it makes it very easy to do some things that are either impossible or very difficult with other MTAs. It may not scale as well as the other three, but its combination of simplicity and flexibility can still make it an attractive choice.
I'd probably go with Postfix unless I needed the extra flexibility of Exim. On the other hand, I do (at present) need the extra flexibility of Exim, so that's what I'm currently using.:)
While the post office routinely misdelivers or loses properly addressed mail, and can take a week to get a letter from one side of town to the other, I once had the experience that a letter sent from my in-laws in Ireland to my house in California, with no city listed and the wrong zip code (two digits transposed) arrived in two days.
My theory, ever since then, has been that they like a challenge. So maybe this system will be an improvement.:)
Re:Necessary?
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Ximian's Back
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· Score: 4, Informative
What does this actually do that Gnome or KDE don't?
What do you mean? The question is a non-sequitor. The Ximian Desktop is Gnome. Ximian was founded by the leader of the Gnome project to market Gnome.
this doesn't seem to add anything...
Why should it? It's a free download. You can pay for support, and for some non-free addons (like the Exchange Connector), but basically, the Ximian Desktop is the Gnome folks' own distribution of Gnome, no more, no less.
Poster is missing the point. Fvwm is not a minimalist WM! There are several minimalist WMs out there, and many of them are fairly nice, if that's your cup of tea. I think larswm is a pretty nice one, and the grandaddy of them all is 9wm. And there are a bunch of others, including, apparently, EvilWM. But Fvwm is not a minimalist WM! It's a full-featured WM that happens to use an amazingly small amount of memory. It does this by being highly modular, so that only the features you actually use get loaded. It's also amazingly configurable, considering how little memory it uses. (Another amazingly-powerful-considering-how-little-memory-i t-uses WM is Window Maker -- I'm always amazed at how little memory this feature-filled WM uses.)
And looking at evilwm's web page, I have to say, there is no way I'd consider switching from fvwm. Their choice of hard-coded defaults do not match what I want. If someone wrote a minimalist WM that did have all the defaults set to what I want, then I might consider switching, but these guys aren't even close. (And even then, I'd have to find third-party equivalents for the fvwm modules I use, like the buttonbar.)
Silly boy, doesn't he realize that the Butlerian Jihad will wipe out all machines powerful enough to provide such a simulation, paving the way for the rise of House Corrino and later House Atriedes? Thus it's clear that we're not a simulation, since there won't be any computers to run the simulation!:)
Anyway, the flaw in his logic is that if this is a simulation, there's no reason to believe that the rules of this simulation are the same as the outside world, so we can't say how likely it is that an intelligent species would live long enough to develop computers that can provide sufficiently detailed simulations (since we don't know how the real world works), so the probability that this is a simulation is completely 100% unknowable. Which is not exactly exciting news.:)
I've yet to find someone that wouldn't trade their box for my Mac in an instant.
You must not have been looking very hard. I know plenty of people who have time or money or both invested in x86 platforms of various sorts and aren't interested in losing that investment just to get an unfamiliar new system, no matter how eye-candy-encrusted. And as for me, I'd just have to rip out the OS and install Debian, and I'd lose the ability to play my Loki/Tribsoft games, so I think I'd probably pass too.
In my opinion, an operating system is a tool for booting Emacs. If it also runs Mozilla, then it's more than enough for me.:)
Re:depends on your flavor of nostalgia
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fvwm Turns Ten
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· Score: 1
Might I suggest trying xfce
I've tried it. Brings back nightmares of CDE.:)
Anway, I'm happy with fvwm. I've already tweaked my configs to work with the latest releases. I do keep trying the various new WMs (since running Debian makes this very easy), and there are a lot out there that I'd recommend to people (including xfce), but there's just a lot of little details about fvwm that keep it my personal favorite.
Re:well, there are probably better choices now
on
fvwm Turns Ten
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps you missed the part where it said that fvwm is still being actively developed? It's getting steadily better and better, IMO. Not to say that some of those other choices aren't perfectly nice too, but fvwm is a lot nicer than it was "back then", and it's still, pound-for-pound, one of the best tradeoffs for size vs. power, IMO.
As for those others being more modular, say what? Fvwm is modular almost to the point of insanity. That's what helps keep it so lightweight. Only the modules you actually use get loaded.
Now, for configuration, I'll freely grant that you have a point. Fvwm still has some of the most baroque configuration around. It's not for the faint-of-heart. And for this reason, I rarely recommend fvwm to anyone. But I already configured it just the way I like it, and I see little or no reason to use anything else. I keep trying all those others, and they keep coming up short on my personal feature requirements list. (My second choice, if they pried fvwm out of my cold, dead hands, would be windowmaker, with blackbox a close third.)
depends on your flavor of nostalgia
on
fvwm Turns Ten
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Twm probably has some nostalgia value amongst people who rolled their own X11 back in the day, but fvwm used to be the default for most Linux systems, so it's got plenty of nostalgia value of its own. Plus, it's still going strong; twm is all-but-dead, while fvwm still has a large community of enthusiastic users and developers. Including me. I keep trying out all these newer WMs, and they always seem to be missing some essential feature that I've come to depend on over the years, and/or they're massive, bloated monstrosities that don't do noticably more than my old workhorse.
Re:Dang it, there goes my stomach lining...
on
I, Spammer
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· Score: 1
Assuming of course that both the spammer (plus spamboxen) and the company that paid for the spamming reside in the US...
The location of the box is irrelevent, and both, not either, would have to be outside the US, and/or would have to do a purely-cash business (otherwise, the Feds can trace and intercept the money transfers heading outside the US).
$ man cat |wc -l; man vi |wc -l Reformatting cat(1), please wait...
74 Reformatting vi(1), please wait...
354
I wonder which one is easier to understand, use, and just flat out makes more sense. Gee, I guess I should switch to using cat for my code from now on!
(For the clue-impaired: the BSDL and the GPL have different goals, so comparing them strictly on a line-by-line basis makes about as much sense as comparing cat and vi.)
We're way off topic here, but I've gotten into dependency hell with FreeBSD too. Especially when trying to upgrade a system that hasn't been upgraded in a while. It's rare, but it happens, and when it happens, it usually ends up so completely tangled that I give up and reinstall fresh.
(Yes, APT-GET *can* and will get hellish with you. It is better tho.)
Yup, nothing's perfect, but Debian and FreeBSD are the two systems I've used that are most often a joy to work with. I really couldn't say one is better than the other -- they're both excellent; they both have quirks and gotchas. I have a mild preference for the more SYSV-like userspace offered by Linux, because I have more experience with SYSVish userspace on commercial Unixes, but that's a minor issue.
have difficulties supporting hardware
Huh -- hardware support is where I've had the most problems with FreeBSD. I don't understand what you're saying here.
As for konstruct under BSD, you just can't beat "cd/usr/ports/x11/kde3; make install". There's just nothing like it in the Linux world.
Actually, there are things like it in the Linux world, i.e., Gentoo. And that approach has disadvantages as well as advantages, like the necessity to have compilers and development libraries installed on non-development machines, and the extra time and overhead of recompiling things all the time. But like I say, I don't think anything's perfect, and I think it's great that I can pick and choose from a variety of systems, using the one that seems appropriate in a given situation.
That's not about OSS, that's the way the industry has always gone. Developers (and software companies) have been being put out of jobs since long before OSS came into the spotlight. There used to be a competitive market in word processors for MS platforms. Now, all those companies that made those products are nothing but a dim rememberance. Remember Stacker? Remember Borland? Remember DRI?
Or, on a more personal note, I once worked for a company that made PC-based point-of-sale systems; we charged a couple of thousand dollars, but that included updates and support. We were very competitive in the market at that time. Then along came a company that sold a competitive product for a couple of hundred bucks (with no support or updates, of course), and our company took a major hit, and had to lay off most of the workforce (including me). But that's just standard free-market capitalism -- offer what appears to be a better product and/or what appears to be a better price, and steal your competitors' customers, maybe even put them out of business.
As for OSS, companies like Trolltech or Sleepycat are using it as a competitive advantage. And last I heard, competition was supposed to be good for the world economy! Of course, it can be painful for individuals who find themselves being out-competed (see last paragraph), but it's still overall a good thing.
The thing you're complaining about has nothing to do with OSS per se; OSS is simply a sign that software is moving from being an expensive specialty market with high margins to being a large commodity market with razor-thin margins. Overall, I think that's a good thing, even though there's obviously going to be a lot of disruption involved.
Finally, consider my first job as a software developer: I got a contract to write a quicksort for a new machine. Nowadays, quicksort is included in the standard C library. Let us take a moment to weep for all those poor software developers who no longer have an opportunity to make money writing quicksort. And then let us move back to the realm of sanity. I don't want to write quicksorts for the rest of my life. I'm tired of re-inventing wheels, just because the older wheels are all proprietary. If you can't find some productive arena to apply your expertise, then maybe you are in the wrong business. Software developers aren't owed a living any more than buggy-whip manufacturers are. When the market moves on, it's time to move with it.
Slashdot Mirror
> I don't believe in god(s), but I'm not trying to claim it's a proven fact that there are no gods.
Then you are agnostic, not an atheist.
Wordnet says that atheism is:
1. The doctrine or belief that there is no God.
2. a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods.
Other dictionaries say similar things. I think it's pretty clear that I am, indeed, an atheist. Just not a doctrinaire (or dogmatic) one.
On the other hand, the definitions of "agnostic" and "agnosticism" are a little more vague. I always thought an agnostic was someone who neither believed nor disbelieved (which, obviously, lets me out). But it turns out it's not quite that simple. Under some of the looser definitions, I may well be an agnostic in addition to being an atheist. But I think maybe those looser definitions are intended to refer to non-secular uses of the word. ("Do you prefer Coke or Pepsi?" "I'm agnostic.")
Anyway, the fact that you know some dogmatic atheists does not mean that all atheists are dogmatic. In fact, I suspect that the vast majority are non-dogmatic. The non-dogmatic ones won't go around preaching atheism at you, so you probably don't notice them as much. But that doesn't mean that they (and I) aren't atheists.
Argh, of course I meant: "what is UNscientific is to mistake a belief for a fact..."
The problem with atheists is that they're just as turned around as the "true believers" because they have nothing with which to disprove.
Not necessarily. I don't believe in purple unicorns. Of course, I can't prove there aren't any purple unicorns, 'cause you can't prove a negative, but I don't care - I still don't believe in 'em. The important thing is that I'm not tied to this belief. If I met a purple unicorn, I would quite happily change my belief. Hey, I'm flexible.
I have friends that believe in God (or Gods), I have friends that believe in astrology or the healing power of crystals. I don't believe in any of that crap myself, but, y'know, I think people should be allowed to believe (or not believe) whatever they want.
I'd say the agnostic is on better footing because they take the scientific approach and admit they really can't say one way or the other
It's not unscientific to chose what seems like a sensible set of beliefs based on available evidence. What is scientific is to mistake a belief for a fact, or to be unwilling to change your beliefs in the face of new evidence. I don't believe in god(s), but I'm not trying to claim that it's a proven fact that there are no gods. I just don't believe it, that's all.
As was mentioned before, unemployment only applies if you get fired, or do not leave on your own accord.
:)
Not according to my dictionary! From wordnet:
n : the state of being unemployed or not having a job.
What you're thinking of is technically referred to as "collecting unemployment insurance" (or being "on unemployment" for short), and is not a necessary corrolary to being unemployed at all.
Then again, "picking nits" technically refers to the practice of removing louse eggs, so maybe I'll shut up now.
[Slack] doesn't try to keep track of dependencies - which after fighting with Redhat for awhile seems like a really good choice
:)
Which statement only makes it obvious that you've never used Debian. As someone who went from SLS to Slackware to RH to Debian, perhaps I can explain. Dependencies are:
In Slackware: things that would allow your apps to run, if only you knew what they were.
In RedHat: things that would allow your apps to install, if only you could find them.
In Debian: things that got installed for you without any need to worry on your part.
[Slack] does [have a package management system], it was the first with it I believe
Begging the question, is what Slack offers really a package management system? (You can call cat(1) an editor, and people have used it to create files, but it doesn't meet most people's definition of a text editor.) No Slack wasn't first. SLS was first, and the Debian project was founded at almost the same time as the Slackware project, so that's nearly a tie there too. (Although Debian's first official release was later than Slack's first official release. But then vi took longer to write than cat did too.:)
it's just that it follows the slack philosophy of simple elegance
IMO (as a former Slack user), Slack goes beyond "simple elegance" into the realms of painful inadequacy, but I realize that not everyone agrees with me. Then again, there are people who routinely use cat(1) to create text files too...
If the Linux community wasn't going to accept code as evidence, why ask for it in the first place?
The Linux community has not seen the code! Some third party who's not familiar with the history of either Linux or Unix has seen the code, and says that indeed, there are some common fragments. Well, ok, but what the community has been asking all along is for evidence not only of commonality, but evidence that it was SCO's code in the first place! And we still don't have that last. Without that, it could easily be that the code came from Linux, and SCO stole it (and not the other way around), or it could be that the code came from BSD (in which case, both SCO and Linux have an equal right to use it).
The fact is that the development of Linux has been done in public, and it's a matter of public record when changes were made to the code base. SCO seems to be claiming that if they reveal what the offending code is, that someone will magically make it disappear from Linux, and kill their case. Well, guess what? That's just not possible! Linux is too public, and too widely mirrored and archived. The ONLY danger SCO faces if they reveal this supposedly stolen code is that they won't be able to prove it's theirs! And that's going to be an issue for them when they get to court in any case, so the whole hiding-the-code thing is just plain stupid!
I was about to release a new game: "Cop Invaders", where rows of policemen move back and forth across the screen, and you have to shoot them before they reach the bottom. It also may cause problems for another game I had in the works, "Cop Man", where you run around a maze, dodging cops, and trying to get to the energy pellets which allow you to turn around and eat the cops.
/. will be old enough to get the references...)
(I wonder if anyone on
On a more serious note, this law would seem to ban Nethack. (If you successfully escape from a store in Nethack with upaid items, you get attacked by "the Keystone Cops".) Since Nethack is included with most Linux/BSD systems, this law would seem to ban the sale of Linux/BSD systems in WA state. I seriously hope that more than just the game developers come out to oppose this ridiculous law.
Debian also includes SELinux, and the "details for installing" seem to be: 'apt-get install selinux'. :)
So, that's at least two major community-oriented distros that have found SELinux worth offering on at least an optional basis; two communities of sometimes-paranoid developers that have probably at least scanned for obvious backdoors. Given that, I suspect that SELinux can probably be considered reasonably safe. (At least as safe as anything else available with your system: when was the last time you reviewed KDE or GNOME for potential backdoors?)
as long as the user can't adjust the rate of scrolling, you don't infringe.
:D
I've got a TV made back in the seventies, and I can adjust the rate of scrolling with a little knob on the front labelled "horizontal hold".
That seems like a pretty limited (ang obvious) patent
If it's obvious (and I agree that it seems pretty obvious), then it shouldn't qualify for a patent. I've been yelling "go faster!" at the TV guide channel for years, and when I first saw digital cable, my very first thought was, "ooh, can I set it to scroll faster?"
I agree that slashdot has (yet again) completely misrepresented the story, and made a mountain out of a molehill, but it's still a lame patent that doesn't deserve to exist. One thing that conventional slashdot wisdom does have right is that it's too easy to get a patent on something obvious, and much too hard to get a crap patent grant overturned.
Speaking as one who has literally put thousands of hours into writing a book...
Speaking as one who has literally put thousands of hours into automobile maintenance, don't I have the right to profit from those automobiles for the rest of my life? No? Then what makes you so special?
Just because you place no value on your work...
I place a value on my work. And I get paid for it too. I just don't see any reason that my work should be a gravy-train I can ride in perpetuity. And I don't see any damn reason why yours should be either.
I've been using Exim for years, and I've never looked at any docs for it. Speaking from experience here, Exim is definitely much easier to configure and use than Qmail. This book, it seems, is just for people who want to know all the gory details.
:)
Qmail is light-years ahead of Sendmail, but if you think it's easy to use, you obviously have never even looked at Exim or Postfix!
And I'm sure someone could write a two or three pound book about Qmail if they felt so inspired. Heck, I could probably fill a quarter-pound of paper just complaining about how stupid and annoying (and ineffective) the Qmail license is!
Postfix, like Qmail, was designed with security in mind from the start, and uses multiple processes to enforce privilege separation. Basically, you can think of it as Qmail done right (no stupid license, much easier configuration).
:)
Exim, on the other hand, is a small, simple, easy-to-configure, and very flexible little MTA. It's monolithic, so it doesn't have privilege separation, but it makes it very easy to do some things that are either impossible or very difficult with other MTAs. It may not scale as well as the other three, but its combination of simplicity and flexibility can still make it an attractive choice.
I'd probably go with Postfix unless I needed the extra flexibility of Exim. On the other hand, I do (at present) need the extra flexibility of Exim, so that's what I'm currently using.
While the post office routinely misdelivers or loses properly addressed mail, and can take a week to get a letter from one side of town to the other, I once had the experience that a letter sent from my in-laws in Ireland to my house in California, with no city listed and the wrong zip code (two digits transposed) arrived in two days.
:)
My theory, ever since then, has been that they like a challenge. So maybe this system will be an improvement.
What does this actually do that Gnome or KDE don't?
...
What do you mean? The question is a non-sequitor. The Ximian Desktop is Gnome. Ximian was founded by the leader of the Gnome project to market Gnome.
this doesn't seem to add anything
Why should it? It's a free download. You can pay for support, and for some non-free addons (like the Exchange Connector), but basically, the Ximian Desktop is the Gnome folks' own distribution of Gnome, no more, no less.
This is why people hate the US Patent and Trademark Office.
Poster is missing the point. Fvwm is not a minimalist WM! There are several minimalist WMs out there, and many of them are fairly nice, if that's your cup of tea. I think larswm is a pretty nice one, and the grandaddy of them all is 9wm. And there are a bunch of others, including, apparently, EvilWM. But Fvwm is not a minimalist WM! It's a full-featured WM that happens to use an amazingly small amount of memory. It does this by being highly modular, so that only the features you actually use get loaded. It's also amazingly configurable, considering how little memory it uses. (Another amazingly-powerful-considering-how-little-memory-i t-uses WM is Window Maker -- I'm always amazed at how little memory this feature-filled WM uses.)
And looking at evilwm's web page, I have to say, there is no way I'd consider switching from fvwm. Their choice of hard-coded defaults do not match what I want. If someone wrote a minimalist WM that did have all the defaults set to what I want, then I might consider switching, but these guys aren't even close. (And even then, I'd have to find third-party equivalents for the fvwm modules I use, like the buttonbar.)
Silly boy, doesn't he realize that the Butlerian Jihad will wipe out all machines powerful enough to provide such a simulation, paving the way for the rise of House Corrino and later House Atriedes? Thus it's clear that we're not a simulation, since there won't be any computers to run the simulation! :)
:)
Anyway, the flaw in his logic is that if this is a simulation, there's no reason to believe that the rules of this simulation are the same as the outside world, so we can't say how likely it is that an intelligent species would live long enough to develop computers that can provide sufficiently detailed simulations (since we don't know how the real world works), so the probability that this is a simulation is completely 100% unknowable. Which is not exactly exciting news.
I've yet to find someone that wouldn't trade their box for my Mac in an instant.
:)
You must not have been looking very hard. I know plenty of people who have time or money or both invested in x86 platforms of various sorts and aren't interested in losing that investment just to get an unfamiliar new system, no matter how eye-candy-encrusted. And as for me, I'd just have to rip out the OS and install Debian, and I'd lose the ability to play my Loki/Tribsoft games, so I think I'd probably pass too.
In my opinion, an operating system is a tool for booting Emacs. If it also runs Mozilla, then it's more than enough for me.
Might I suggest trying xfce
:)
I've tried it. Brings back nightmares of CDE.
Anway, I'm happy with fvwm. I've already tweaked my configs to work with the latest releases. I do keep trying the various new WMs (since running Debian makes this very easy), and there are a lot out there that I'd recommend to people (including xfce), but there's just a lot of little details about fvwm that keep it my personal favorite.
Perhaps you missed the part where it said that fvwm is still being actively developed? It's getting steadily better and better, IMO. Not to say that some of those other choices aren't perfectly nice too, but fvwm is a lot nicer than it was "back then", and it's still, pound-for-pound, one of the best tradeoffs for size vs. power, IMO.
As for those others being more modular, say what? Fvwm is modular almost to the point of insanity. That's what helps keep it so lightweight. Only the modules you actually use get loaded.
Now, for configuration, I'll freely grant that you have a point. Fvwm still has some of the most baroque configuration around. It's not for the faint-of-heart. And for this reason, I rarely recommend fvwm to anyone. But I already configured it just the way I like it, and I see little or no reason to use anything else. I keep trying all those others, and they keep coming up short on my personal feature requirements list. (My second choice, if they pried fvwm out of my cold, dead hands, would be windowmaker, with blackbox a close third.)
Twm probably has some nostalgia value amongst people who rolled their own X11 back in the day, but fvwm used to be the default for most Linux systems, so it's got plenty of nostalgia value of its own. Plus, it's still going strong; twm is all-but-dead, while fvwm still has a large community of enthusiastic users and developers. Including me. I keep trying out all these newer WMs, and they always seem to be missing some essential feature that I've come to depend on over the years, and/or they're massive, bloated monstrosities that don't do noticably more than my old workhorse.
Assuming of course that both the spammer (plus spamboxen) and the company that paid for the spamming reside in the US...
The location of the box is irrelevent, and both, not either, would have to be outside the US, and/or would have to do a purely-cash business (otherwise, the Feds can trace and intercept the money transfers heading outside the US).
(For the clue-impaired: the BSDL and the GPL have different goals, so comparing them strictly on a line-by-line basis makes about as much sense as comparing cat and vi.)
We're way off topic here, but I've gotten into dependency hell with FreeBSD too. Especially when trying to upgrade a system that hasn't been upgraded in a while. It's rare, but it happens, and when it happens, it usually ends up so completely tangled that I give up and reinstall fresh.
/usr/ports/x11/kde3; make install". There's just nothing like it in the Linux world.
(Yes, APT-GET *can* and will get hellish with you. It is better tho.)
Yup, nothing's perfect, but Debian and FreeBSD are the two systems I've used that are most often a joy to work with. I really couldn't say one is better than the other -- they're both excellent; they both have quirks and gotchas. I have a mild preference for the more SYSV-like userspace offered by Linux, because I have more experience with SYSVish userspace on commercial Unixes, but that's a minor issue.
have difficulties supporting hardware
Huh -- hardware support is where I've had the most problems with FreeBSD. I don't understand what you're saying here.
As for konstruct under BSD, you just can't beat "cd
Actually, there are things like it in the Linux world, i.e., Gentoo. And that approach has disadvantages as well as advantages, like the necessity to have compilers and development libraries installed on non-development machines, and the extra time and overhead of recompiling things all the time. But like I say, I don't think anything's perfect, and I think it's great that I can pick and choose from a variety of systems, using the one that seems appropriate in a given situation.
That's not about OSS, that's the way the industry has always gone. Developers (and software companies) have been being put out of jobs since long before OSS came into the spotlight. There used to be a competitive market in word processors for MS platforms. Now, all those companies that made those products are nothing but a dim rememberance. Remember Stacker? Remember Borland? Remember DRI?
Or, on a more personal note, I once worked for a company that made PC-based point-of-sale systems; we charged a couple of thousand dollars, but that included updates and support. We were very competitive in the market at that time. Then along came a company that sold a competitive product for a couple of hundred bucks (with no support or updates, of course), and our company took a major hit, and had to lay off most of the workforce (including me). But that's just standard free-market capitalism -- offer what appears to be a better product and/or what appears to be a better price, and steal your competitors' customers, maybe even put them out of business.
As for OSS, companies like Trolltech or Sleepycat are using it as a competitive advantage. And last I heard, competition was supposed to be good for the world economy! Of course, it can be painful for individuals who find themselves being out-competed (see last paragraph), but it's still overall a good thing.
The thing you're complaining about has nothing to do with OSS per se; OSS is simply a sign that software is moving from being an expensive specialty market with high margins to being a large commodity market with razor-thin margins. Overall, I think that's a good thing, even though there's obviously going to be a lot of disruption involved.
Finally, consider my first job as a software developer: I got a contract to write a quicksort for a new machine. Nowadays, quicksort is included in the standard C library. Let us take a moment to weep for all those poor software developers who no longer have an opportunity to make money writing quicksort. And then let us move back to the realm of sanity. I don't want to write quicksorts for the rest of my life. I'm tired of re-inventing wheels, just because the older wheels are all proprietary. If you can't find some productive arena to apply your expertise, then maybe you are in the wrong business. Software developers aren't owed a living any more than buggy-whip manufacturers are. When the market moves on, it's time to move with it.