Ok, the "great unwashed" probably won't miss ftp, telnet or ssh. But what about SMTP/POP/IMAP? What about IM? Those are "killer apps" as far as Joe Public is concerned. Block those, and people just won't bother with you. Don't block those, and many people will just use those services, and won't ever be forced to see your ads.
The point was valid even if the example (of ssh) wasn't perfect.
I think the fellow was referring to the link in his signature (a porn site), not to/. Porn is certainly the one area of the Internet that seems to be a steady, consistent, and recession-proof earner.
Would you use a free wireless access point [...] if you had to have a framed banner ad at the top of every page you visited while on the network?
Sure, as long as you don't mind that I use the access for checking my email, logging in to machines at work or home, apt-get updating my system, chatting/IM'ing with friends and colleagues, playing online games, and other activities that don't involve "visiting" any "pages". (And that's if I'm a nice guy, and don't use junkbuster or mozilla's image-blocking features.)
I'm not fully confident that stringing together Postfix, Cyrus, OpenLDAP, etc. is really going to produce a cohesive groupware server. Yes, it'll work, but it'll be difficult to install.
That would seem to be a problem for vendors, not users. If Debian can make installing the maze of dependencies that is gnucash as easy as "apt-get install gnucash", then they can probably handle some groupware suite as well.
Now, it's true that DIYers may have some extra headaches. But, quite frankly, people who say, "I want to do it the hard way, 'cause it's more fun," and then turn around and whine, "this way's too hard!" don't get much sympathy from me.
(And before you start moaning about those poor Debian/RH/Suse folks who have no choice but to wrestle with these dependencies, note that it's a Debian developer saying these things. We revel in the challenge.)
think this is a big step forward, but it can be done even better. (Full disclosure: I am a developer on the Citadel [citadel.org] project [...]
Well, good, competition is always good, even with free software. I'd like to wish both projects the best of luck, and hope that neither one falters in their goal to bring us high-quality groupware software.
Unless they agree to the terms of the GPL, the GPL doesn't apply, and they lose all the rights it grants, and this becomes a simple copyright violation case, and they're probably justified in asking you to return the software, since they didn't have the right to give it to you in the first place.
I used to think the way you do, that RobotWars was great, and Battlebots a pale imitation. Two things changed my mind.
First, discovering something of the history behind the two. Battlebots was originally called RobotWars, but a promotion company stole the name and sold it to the Brits.
Second was watching them head to head one night. The RC "bots" on the show called RobotWars are pathetic, wimpy little things compared to the monsters on Battlebots. They have prettier paintjobs and grillwork, combined with "weapons" that can barely scratch tinfoil. If "functional" and "actually able to cause real carnage", and "shredded steel plate flying through the air" are "simple", then give me simple any day.
That said, the Comedy Central coverage of the Battlebot events is pretty bad, and getting worse. I'm a huge Craig Charles fan, and would rather listen to him than anyone who has ever worked for "Comedy Central Sports". But dismissing Battlebots because the coverage is lame is like dismissing the Olympics because NBC is lame -- it's missing the point. I think that Comedy Central dropping the show may be the best thing that could happen to the show.
No, copyright law protects copyright owners. The DMCA is not, despite the name, a copyright law. It makes it illegal for a copyright holder to even CHECK if some media cartel's copy prevention scheme actually works and helps "protect" his/her copyrighted material. (Rot13 anyone?) It makes it illegal to disclose how to access PUBLIC DOMAIN material that has been encrypted by someone. It is a bad law which fails to achieve its stated goals, and which should be stuck down (in part if not in whole).
The parent post was funny, without being even slightly disrespectful to the memory of a valued member of our community. Humor at a death may bother some, but it can also be cathartic. There is absolutely no justification in modding the parent post as "troll" or "flamebait", and the people who wasted their mod points need some severe attitude readjustment. Please mod the parent back up before you mod me down as offtopic (I have karma to spare, and then some).
There's an old saying (was on a "Murphy's Laws of Computing" poster I used to have): "make it easy for programmers to write in English, and you'll find that programmers can't write in English."
Others have pointed out the all-too-common case where the code gets edited but the comments don't. This is bad, but not as bad as another common case: the programmer tries to comment the code, but his/her grasp of English isn't up to the task. This may be because English is a second language, or simply because the person specializes in computer languages, not human ones. In any case, the result is frequently misleading or incomprehensible comments that either do no good, or worse than no good. And, of course, deadline pressures never help.
I think Literate programming is a wonderful idea, but I don't think it's a practical one in many (most?) real-world environments.
The casual mention of MS's booth at LWE really pleased me. Yeah, just another company making Linux credible to the business types. No mention of any MS FUD or speculation on their possible ulterior motives. Just the bald fact: they were there, lending credibility. Somehow, I doubt that's the spin MS wanted (though I'm sure they were aware it was a possibility).
The rest of the article was pretty mundane, but no worse than I'd expect from the mainstream press (as opposed to industry press). Yeah, we've had suits at the shows for years, but the reputation of a system for "freaks and geeks" is still alive. Yeah, they got a few details wrong, but that's the press for ya. But the oh-so casual mention of MS I liked.
Yes, in many ways, MS looks more like ESR's bazaar -- "release early?", sure that's why no X.0 release from MS ever works as expected/documented. "Release often?", definitely, you have to maximize the revenue stream by getting people to pay for upgrades (which fix the bugs in those X.0 releases that shouldn't have been).
There are days when I look at the huge steaming heaps of half-working, awkward, ugly, incomprehensible software on my Linux box, compare it to the glowing promises from the developers, and wonder if ESR hasn't done more damage to the Free Source/Open Sores movement than MS ever could.
It's not irresponsible to assume that a domain name should have SOMETHING to do with the content of the site
Yes it clearly is. At least, unless you WANT to be inundated with porn!:)
just as you should expect the name of a store to have SOMETHING to do with what they sell.
Completely different case. A domain name is far more analogous to a street address.
In the old days (before the steaming pile of groat clustards we call the World Wide Web appeared), if you wanted info on Civil War battles, you'd go to sci.history.civilwar, check the FAQ, and find a referral to (say) thompson.unc.edu:/pub/civilwar. (Note that the domain name has nothing to do with the civil war.) Nowadays you go to Google and type "civil war battles". At no point in time was typing "www.civilwarbattles.com" ever a recommended search method. The fact that it may have worked for you once or twice simply shows that some SITE OWNERS misunderstood the purpose of DNS, which is what lead to your misunderstanding.
It would explain Obi Wan. We got the whole ancestral spirit thing going there.
I hate when I have to explain my jokes. Oh well, guess the knowledge of Lucas's influences isn't as widespread as I'd hoped. Yes, the fact that Star Wars is loosely based on Kurosawa's 1958 movie, Kakushi toride no san akunin, or "The Hidden Fortress", is no secret. Lucas even has an interview on the DVD version of this movie.
Once you know this, then the samurai elements begin to leap out at you: why Jedi fight with swords and wear robes, why Yoda looks like an old zen master, possibly even why Leia wears cinnamon buns on her head.:)
Of course, going from "SW is loosely based on a samurai movie" to "SW is a samurai movie" is a bit of a stretch. It's the kind of thing that could be considered funny if you're enough of a geek. Which I suppose I am -- I'm just glad that at least one moderator was geeky enough to agree.:)
A paper book can last for centuries if it's printed on acid-free paper -- but most SF and other pop/pulp literature is not, and you'll be lucky if a 50-year-old paperback is still in one piece, and doesn't fall apart when you try to turn the pages.
As for digital media, there's no reason in theory why it couldn't be built to last for centuries. In practice, of course, such things would probably be too expensive, but I fully expect to see some longer-lived digital media (at least equivalent to acid-free paper) before the century is out.
After all the trouble the mobilix folks got into from the owners of "Asterix and Obelix", I think "asterisknex.com" might be even less safe than "unix.com".
Going from "LWN is folding," to "open source is failing," is quite a stretch.
If kernel.org or even debian.org were about to fold, then you might have a point. But neither is in any danger of disappearing. LWN, while it's a wonderful site, is just a free news site. Plenty of non-linux/open-source news sites are in trouble or dead (including many that I worked with fairly recently). And so this merely goes to show that web-only news sites are probably not a reliable way to make money at this point in time. While I'm saddened to see LWN go, I still have my Debian system, and I still have my subscription to Linux Journal. I've had 'em for years, and expect to have 'em for years to come.
IBM, HP, even Sun, and thousands of smaller (and/or less computer-oriented) organizations all have a vested interest in keeping kernel.org up and running. HP and hundreds of other companies have a vested interest in keeping debian.org up. Those sites are in absolutely no danger.
Don't underestimate the power of cooperation as a competitive force.
Plus the fact that testing has a serious security problem (security updates won't show up until about two weeks after they are packaged since they have to go through unstable first).
No, the package maintainer can assign a priority to a package. Default priority uploads will move to testing after a couple of weeks in unstable, but security uploads are normally assigned the highest priority, and should appear within a day or two. Just enough time to make sure it won't actually eat your system.
The kernel developers know what a feature freeze is. There's no quotation marks around it in the referenced article. The quotation marks in the slashdot headline came from an "anonymous person" somewhere, and the slashdot "editors" decided to leave it there because they are "editors", not editors.
#include <usual lecture about reading the article before commenting.h>
What? You're surprised that Debian developers and users are geeks? What planet did you say you came from again?:)
In any case, note that the Debian developers finished in time to head off to the movies/restaurants/clubs (especially those of us on the left coast). It's the Debian users who are now faced with confronting their true geek natures.
At first, I read the headline as "A Blue-Screen Mobile MP3 Console", and the first thing that popped into my mind was: "that's what they get for using wince".:)
I'm not actually complaining about what you did, I'm registering a very mild complaint about your advice, to wit, that you failed to mention that people should check with their ISPs first.
As for easy -- I did a quick search for "NTP" on Speakeasy's support database, and got an answer. Sending a quick email to support@ISP is pretty easy too. These are the easy approaches, and I think it's a bad idea to dismiss them without even trying. Don't assume your ISP doesn't offer NTP until you've checked, because it's very easy to check. If you've checked and the answer is "no", then that's fine, go probe for servers or whatever.
But the more people that ask for time services, the more likely that ISPs will offer time services as part of the package (like Speakeasy does), and the more likely that the answers will be on the FAQ list. (The name "Frequently Asked Questions" ought to be a clue here -- it only becomes a FAQ if it's asked. Frequently.) So asking is a good thing, even if you get negative results.
Bottom line, I don't object to what you did, I simply think that your advice is skipping what should be an obvious and easy first step.
Um, what part of "you should ask" didn't you understand? Running ntptrace does not constitute asking -- in fact, I'd consider it slightly rude to do so without asking first.
"They don't advertise it" is not at all the same thing as "they don't provide it". And yes, it's certainly possible that they don't provide it, I suppose. Doesn't match my experience, but I've only had a couple of ISPs so far. However, it doesn't sound like you've ever asked.
SMTP and POP3 are things that customers demand, so of course they get advertised. Time services is something that probably only a handful of customers know about or care about, so it doesn't get advertised. But that doesn't mean it's not available if you ask!!
I've got a bunch of spare space on my/usr/local partition, and I'm running Samba, so I thought I'd install CygWin/XFree there, so my still-stuck-with-WinDOS roommates would have a way to start experimenting with X and Linux. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to install it from Linux, so I'm still stuck with VNC, which has bandwidth issues, and ease-of-launch issues. *sigh*
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, the "great unwashed" probably won't miss ftp, telnet or ssh. But what about SMTP/POP/IMAP? What about IM? Those are "killer apps" as far as Joe Public is concerned. Block those, and people just won't bother with you. Don't block those, and many people will just use those services, and won't ever be forced to see your ads.
The point was valid even if the example (of ssh) wasn't perfect.
I think the fellow was referring to the link in his signature (a porn site), not to /. Porn is certainly the one area of the Internet that seems to be a steady, consistent, and recession-proof earner.
Would you use a free wireless access point [...] if you had to have a framed banner ad at the top of every page you visited while on the network?
Sure, as long as you don't mind that I use the access for checking my email, logging in to machines at work or home, apt-get updating my system, chatting/IM'ing with friends and colleagues, playing online games, and other activities that don't involve "visiting" any "pages". (And that's if I'm a nice guy, and don't use junkbuster or mozilla's image-blocking features.)
I'm not fully confident that stringing together Postfix, Cyrus, OpenLDAP, etc. is really going to produce a cohesive groupware server. Yes, it'll work, but it'll be difficult to install.
That would seem to be a problem for vendors, not users. If Debian can make installing the maze of dependencies that is gnucash as easy as "apt-get install gnucash", then they can probably handle some groupware suite as well.
Now, it's true that DIYers may have some extra headaches. But, quite frankly, people who say, "I want to do it the hard way, 'cause it's more fun," and then turn around and whine, "this way's too hard!" don't get much sympathy from me.
(And before you start moaning about those poor Debian/RH/Suse folks who have no choice but to wrestle with these dependencies, note that it's a Debian developer saying these things. We revel in the challenge.)
think this is a big step forward, but it can be done even better. (Full disclosure: I am a developer on the Citadel [citadel.org] project [...]
Well, good, competition is always good, even with free software. I'd like to wish both projects the best of luck, and hope that neither one falters in their goal to bring us high-quality groupware software.
Unless they agree to the terms of the GPL, the GPL doesn't apply, and they lose all the rights it grants, and this becomes a simple copyright violation case, and they're probably justified in asking you to return the software, since they didn't have the right to give it to you in the first place.
I used to think the way you do, that RobotWars was great, and Battlebots a pale imitation. Two things changed my mind.
First, discovering something of the history behind the two. Battlebots was originally called RobotWars, but a promotion company stole the name and sold it to the Brits.
Second was watching them head to head one night. The RC "bots" on the show called RobotWars are pathetic, wimpy little things compared to the monsters on Battlebots. They have prettier paintjobs and grillwork, combined with "weapons" that can barely scratch tinfoil. If "functional" and "actually able to cause real carnage", and "shredded steel plate flying through the air" are "simple", then give me simple any day.
That said, the Comedy Central coverage of the Battlebot events is pretty bad, and getting worse. I'm a huge Craig Charles fan, and would rather listen to him than anyone who has ever worked for "Comedy Central Sports". But dismissing Battlebots because the coverage is lame is like dismissing the Olympics because NBC is lame -- it's missing the point. I think that Comedy Central dropping the show may be the best thing that could happen to the show.
The DMCA protects copyright owners.
No, copyright law protects copyright owners. The DMCA is not, despite the name, a copyright law. It makes it illegal for a copyright holder to even CHECK if some media cartel's copy prevention scheme actually works and helps "protect" his/her copyrighted material. (Rot13 anyone?) It makes it illegal to disclose how to access PUBLIC DOMAIN material that has been encrypted by someone. It is a bad law which fails to achieve its stated goals, and which should be stuck down (in part if not in whole).
The parent post was funny, without being even slightly disrespectful to the memory of a valued member of our community. Humor at a death may bother some, but it can also be cathartic. There is absolutely no justification in modding the parent post as "troll" or "flamebait", and the people who wasted their mod points need some severe attitude readjustment. Please mod the parent back up before you mod me down as offtopic (I have karma to spare, and then some).
There's an old saying (was on a "Murphy's Laws of Computing" poster I used to have): "make it easy for programmers to write in English, and you'll find that programmers can't write in English."
Others have pointed out the all-too-common case where the code gets edited but the comments don't. This is bad, but not as bad as another common case: the programmer tries to comment the code, but his/her grasp of English isn't up to the task. This may be because English is a second language, or simply because the person specializes in computer languages, not human ones. In any case, the result is frequently misleading or incomprehensible comments that either do no good, or worse than no good. And, of course, deadline pressures never help.
I think Literate programming is a wonderful idea, but I don't think it's a practical one in many (most?) real-world environments.
The casual mention of MS's booth at LWE really pleased me. Yeah, just another company making Linux credible to the business types. No mention of any MS FUD or speculation on their possible ulterior motives. Just the bald fact: they were there, lending credibility. Somehow, I doubt that's the spin MS wanted (though I'm sure they were aware it was a possibility).
The rest of the article was pretty mundane, but no worse than I'd expect from the mainstream press (as opposed to industry press). Yeah, we've had suits at the shows for years, but the reputation of a system for "freaks and geeks" is still alive. Yeah, they got a few details wrong, but that's the press for ya. But the oh-so casual mention of MS I liked.
But in the first instance, the government is forced to exclude people like microsoft, oracle etc
No, all of those companies are free to release their software as open source. The companies will be excluding themselves if they decide not to do so.
Yes, in many ways, MS looks more like ESR's bazaar -- "release early?", sure that's why no X.0 release from MS ever works as expected/documented. "Release often?", definitely, you have to maximize the revenue stream by getting people to pay for upgrades (which fix the bugs in those X.0 releases that shouldn't have been).
There are days when I look at the huge steaming heaps of half-working, awkward, ugly, incomprehensible software on my Linux box, compare it to the glowing promises from the developers, and wonder if ESR hasn't done more damage to the Free Source/Open Sores movement than MS ever could.
It's not irresponsible to assume that a domain name should have SOMETHING to do with the content of the site
:)
Yes it clearly is. At least, unless you WANT to be inundated with porn!
just as you should expect the name of a store to have SOMETHING to do with what they sell.
Completely different case. A domain name is far more analogous to a street address.
In the old days (before the steaming pile of groat clustards we call the World Wide Web appeared), if you wanted info on Civil War battles, you'd go to sci.history.civilwar, check the FAQ, and find a referral to (say) thompson.unc.edu:/pub/civilwar. (Note that the domain name has nothing to do with the civil war.) Nowadays you go to Google and type "civil war battles". At no point in time was typing "www.civilwarbattles.com" ever a recommended search method. The fact that it may have worked for you once or twice simply shows that some SITE OWNERS misunderstood the purpose of DNS, which is what lead to your misunderstanding.
It would explain Obi Wan. We got the whole ancestral spirit thing going there.
:)
:)
I hate when I have to explain my jokes. Oh well, guess the knowledge of Lucas's influences isn't as widespread as I'd hoped. Yes, the fact that Star Wars is loosely based on Kurosawa's 1958 movie, Kakushi toride no san akunin, or "The Hidden Fortress", is no secret. Lucas even has an interview on the DVD version of this movie.
Once you know this, then the samurai elements begin to leap out at you: why Jedi fight with swords and wear robes, why Yoda looks like an old zen master, possibly even why Leia wears cinnamon buns on her head.
Of course, going from "SW is loosely based on a samurai movie" to "SW is a samurai movie" is a bit of a stretch. It's the kind of thing that could be considered funny if you're enough of a geek. Which I suppose I am -- I'm just glad that at least one moderator was geeky enough to agree.
The collection is science fiction. Star Wars is a samurai movie, so it probably doesn't qualify. :)
A paper book can last for centuries if it's printed on acid-free paper -- but most SF and other pop/pulp literature is not, and you'll be lucky if a 50-year-old paperback is still in one piece, and doesn't fall apart when you try to turn the pages.
As for digital media, there's no reason in theory why it couldn't be built to last for centuries. In practice, of course, such things would probably be too expensive, but I fully expect to see some longer-lived digital media (at least equivalent to acid-free paper) before the century is out.
After all the trouble the mobilix folks got into from the owners of "Asterix and Obelix", I think "asterisknex.com" might be even less safe than "unix.com".
Going from "LWN is folding," to "open source is failing," is quite a stretch.
If kernel.org or even debian.org were about to fold, then you might have a point. But neither is in any danger of disappearing. LWN, while it's a wonderful site, is just a free news site. Plenty of non-linux/open-source news sites are in trouble or dead (including many that I worked with fairly recently). And so this merely goes to show that web-only news sites are probably not a reliable way to make money at this point in time. While I'm saddened to see LWN go, I still have my Debian system, and I still have my subscription to Linux Journal. I've had 'em for years, and expect to have 'em for years to come.
IBM, HP, even Sun, and thousands of smaller (and/or less computer-oriented) organizations all have a vested interest in keeping kernel.org up and running. HP and hundreds of other companies have a vested interest in keeping debian.org up. Those sites are in absolutely no danger.
Don't underestimate the power of cooperation as a competitive force.
Plus the fact that testing has a serious security problem (security updates won't show up until about two weeks after they are packaged since they have to go through unstable first).
No, the package maintainer can assign a priority to a package. Default priority uploads will move to testing after a couple of weeks in unstable, but security uploads are normally assigned the highest priority, and should appear within a day or two. Just enough time to make sure it won't actually eat your system.
The kernel developers know what a feature freeze is. There's no quotation marks around it in the referenced article. The quotation marks in the slashdot headline came from an "anonymous person" somewhere, and the slashdot "editors" decided to leave it there because they are "editors", not editors.
#include <usual lecture about reading the article before commenting.h>
What? You're surprised that Debian developers and users are geeks? What planet did you say you came from again? :)
In any case, note that the Debian developers finished in time to head off to the movies/restaurants/clubs (especially those of us on the left coast). It's the Debian users who are now faced with confronting their true geek natures.
At first, I read the headline as "A Blue-Screen Mobile MP3 Console", and the first thing that popped into my mind was: "that's what they get for using wince". :)
I'm not actually complaining about what you did, I'm registering a very mild complaint about your advice, to wit, that you failed to mention that people should check with their ISPs first.
As for easy -- I did a quick search for "NTP" on Speakeasy's support database, and got an answer. Sending a quick email to support@ISP is pretty easy too. These are the easy approaches, and I think it's a bad idea to dismiss them without even trying. Don't assume your ISP doesn't offer NTP until you've checked, because it's very easy to check. If you've checked and the answer is "no", then that's fine, go probe for servers or whatever.
But the more people that ask for time services, the more likely that ISPs will offer time services as part of the package (like Speakeasy does), and the more likely that the answers will be on the FAQ list. (The name "Frequently Asked Questions" ought to be a clue here -- it only becomes a FAQ if it's asked. Frequently.) So asking is a good thing, even if you get negative results.
Bottom line, I don't object to what you did, I simply think that your advice is skipping what should be an obvious and easy first step.
Um, what part of "you should ask" didn't you understand? Running ntptrace does not constitute asking -- in fact, I'd consider it slightly rude to do so without asking first.
"They don't advertise it" is not at all the same thing as "they don't provide it". And yes, it's certainly possible that they don't provide it, I suppose. Doesn't match my experience, but I've only had a couple of ISPs so far. However, it doesn't sound like you've ever asked.
SMTP and POP3 are things that customers demand, so of course they get advertised. Time services is something that probably only a handful of customers know about or care about, so it doesn't get advertised. But that doesn't mean it's not available if you ask!!
I've got a bunch of spare space on my /usr/local partition, and I'm running Samba, so I thought I'd install CygWin/XFree there, so my still-stuck-with-WinDOS roommates would have a way to start experimenting with X and Linux. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to install it from Linux, so I'm still stuck with VNC, which has bandwidth issues, and ease-of-launch issues. *sigh*