Good point. Does Mojo Nation have a concept of topological expenditure? Does it know that retrieving blocks from a least-cost neighbor is more preferable?
Expense might be measured in terms of throughput, financial cost, social responsibility, all of the above, and so on.
Does it have any way of knowing the topology? It should at least have user-configurable specifications for what routes are least expensive. In one case, you might be on a residential cable network where everyone in town is on your same physical broadcast. In another case, your next least expensive hop might be thousands of miles away and all physically local are more expensive.
No no, I hear what you're saying but that's too far.:) I was just suggesting _some_ sort of competency, not actual enforcement of rules. I'm just talking about people like CmdrTaco having more personal responsibility. And more Slashdot infrastructure for us to help him increase his responsibility, through higher levels of moderation.
Basically if someone in their office walked up to them in reference to the multiple postings and the grossly inflammatory or wrong articles, and said "Guys! Come *ON*!!!"
So many people here are asking if they even read their own site!
The people you're talking about can get bent out of shape, that's okay.
I dig what you're saying. Here are my suggestions to Redhat and my summary of related issues. And another attempt to get any sort of moderation instead of the default "1"!;-> I'm probably too late or too redundant.
* Don't have named it 7.0. Perhaps they should have named it something like 6.9. That's probably what it really is, regardless of the marketing. It's obvious at a nontrivial user level, that the critical software included is not yet finished.
* Like other Slashdotters mentioned, label it as targeted primarily for developers like FreeBSD tends to do with x.0 releases. I think my first suggestion would have been much better, but this one's a backup for marketing's demands for it being called "7.0".
No matter what, it needs to be labeled as non-mainstream, until the real showstopper subsystems like the 2.4 kernel and GCC each have a stable release. I recommend that this one should not be used by anyone interested in playing it safe. This reminds me of Redhat 5.0! It may end up similarly, having been mainly a proof of concept that took a major usability hit in order to propel the development and acceptance of the unfinished software.
It's great that Redhat wanted to do a current release, as well as providing a forward path to the next kernel, C library, and compiler. But this method of release was not nearly the best compromise for the reputation of Redhat, the free software community, and everyone else involved.
And finally, Slashdot's article posters should be taken over someone's knee for having sensationalized the "bug" issue. See all the other fine reader postings on the debunking of common perceptions of bugs in mainstream Linux distributions.
Slashdot tangent: Don't the Slashdot maintainers have employers, or someone else responsible for what goes on with its administration? Isn't Slashdot concerned with what anyone would do to them for the constant defamation, inflammatory, and incorrect postings? Who are these guys accountable to? We need a posting moderation system, and more stories!
Tonight I went to ftp.freesoftware.com to find a couple hundred kilobytes of updates to the stable old Redhat 6.2 systems I maintain. I had to retry about 10 times because its 5000 user limit was reached. While I waited 30 seconds for a small directory listing, I was wondering how many of you are wrecking the availability of the Internet in general.
Here's some advice for the general masses, aside from the great technical commentary already shmoozing around on the topic here. Most of you don't need this software this soon. Think about how your actions affect everyone else. You don't need to download an operating system, especially to do a single installation straight off the remote host rather than mirror it locally. Ask around your neighborhood, ISP, or workplace for setting up a local mirror.
And buy the cdrom at http://cheapbytes.com because it's not expensive, it gets to you pretty quickly, and most of you just didn't need it that soon anyway. Many of you are wrecking the availability for those who do need it fast.
If you have a hard drive, just install Linux elsewhere, with a custom kernel and maybe a tiny distro like Jailbait. Then move the hard drive back to your terminal. And you might up using an NFS, DHCP/bootp/tftp, or VNC client. Maybe the SVGA or GGI VNC client. If you can hook up a floppy disk, you have an alternate remote installation method.
Kernel 2.2 is even more optimized for such low memory than 2.0 and earlier, due to modularity and other optimizations. Slackware claims to be interested in 4MB RAM installations.:)
Here is a list of applications that can open Microsoft's proprietary file formats. But first, I ask you all what good even an open standard is from a company who champions most of the world's business and personal document formats, if that company doesn't follow their own standard? We must script one copy of Office such that it acts as a cgi-bin, converting all submitted proprietary docs into an open standard.
http://www.wvWare.com/, maybe the best open source Word converter? Formerly "mswordview", it's a library and a front-end app, which is currently AbiWord's converter.
AbiSource, a company producing an open source, cross platform, comercial office suite. Their motto was "SHOW ME THE SOURCE!!!", which we had to scream at the March 1999 Linuxworld Expo in order to get their t-shirt.
VistaSource / ApplixWare -- Cross platform, partially open source, complete office suite and integrated development environment in the form of either a local app, or as a Java-based thin client plus app server architecture. Compare to StarOffice. My experience has been that you can send an un-convertable Office document to Applix's closely-monitored community support mailing list, and they will attempt to modify Applixware's import filters around it, and send you a patch. How cool is that?
S un StarOffice. Very good as well. Complete office suite. StarOffice and Applixware are capable of replacing Microsoft Office for literally most people.
Here is a list of how to buy books for tutoring you on how to use these products, including reviews and price comparisons, and free shipping from Buy.com. In order of my personal preference.
Any others? Perhaps some that are embedded in the ton of entries in Freshmeat's office index? Let's hear some authors pipe up! Slashdot's html submitter seems to be busted, so try to fix the above urls by removing their spaces!
The following is a posting I made today on the ReiserFS mailing list, in response to this Microsoft innovation. Maybe this will help some people pull information from the ashes, because there is something to be learned everywhere. I am not a platform bigot; I'm merely against Stuff That Sucks. And we have to always be on the lookout to find the diamond in the rough, even if that diamond is just a gem of an idea that you'd end up cutting yourself.
Heck, sometimes good ideas are arrived at by the process of eliminating the bad ones.
===
*beep* *beep* *beep*
That's the sound of my FUD-ometer, in light scan mode. It's not going into red alert because this Microsoft article was merely rife with unsubstantiated, abstract, sensationalistic, and wild claims, rather than actual blatantly destructive FUD. Many times when Microsoft's actions are observed by non-Microsoft-oriented individuals, the reaction is rather extreme. Microsoft as a whole basically lives in its own impenetrable, self-contained, narcissistic universe, which they believe is inherently objectively correct and good for all humankind. Sometimes that fact is not directly evident in each case, but we can STILL look at what they do and SOMEHOW contrive something pretty cool. It sounds like this technique may be working AT LEAST in their own environments, and it may be worth looking into even if JUST to provide totally abstract inspiration or motivation to create our own product. I'll just step into the Microsoft world here for a minute. I'll attempt to make sense of some info so as to use it for our advantage, not to vent sour emotions, or whatever. The truth about Microsoft is out there, and it's hideously ugly, but once you clean it up, it can be useful, as long as you then reimplement in a completely different way. :) I'm thinking that they're subversively referring to a few unwritten facts:
* that the network is often an objective bottleneck in a file service context
* aggressive data reduction techniques improve the performance of things like caches and general throughput, but we usually don't do that nearly as much as we can, such as extra conceptual layers like compression, checksumming, and hard linking
* that their software is almost totally inherently non-multiuser and grotesquely bloated, so as to likewise dramatically bloat the net effect of any technological advance
So if you had a way to reduce the damage of the fact that, as another esteemed reiserfs contributer pointed out, each small Microsoft application installation will take about 100 MB, then you'd be doing way better. -Especially- in a Microsoft-oriented system. Not good. But better than worse. Let their overall stated BENEFIT of their technological property be of little consequence to us. It's under the governance of an alien distortion field as far as we're concerned, which may or may not pan out to reality. Unless you're re-engineering one of their own products, as is the case of Samba and WINE, it's often a waste of time to try to rationalize their claims. Virtually all of their software is a monolithic monstrosity in every sense of the concept of computing. That's quite a kind way to state it once you've examined it from any one point of view, and to get any more kind would require the blurring of many ethical and technical details. So ANYthing you do to reduce that will be noticable, and people will consider anything to improve their Windows systems, even if it's architecturally questionable. I think you guys have the right direction, when you're talking about normal concepts such as copy-on-write and other stuff like that built right into reiserfs. But don't lose any sleep over deciphering their claims, their implementations, motivations, or goals, unless you're wanting to be an expert in group psychology. And maybe I just made a complete fool of myself, but all I care about here is that people on reiserfs@devlinux.com are having a tough time deciphering the value of a product and information about that product, which were engineered in an environment where time, space, and ethics may or may not apply:-}
I have suggested that MacOS X and Linux/GNOME provide the best of both worlds -- professionalism and freedom. So we should try to merge them. Well my point was not just in terms of code merging. It was more of an abstract, philosophical and psychological sense. I realize that GNOME is a 2nd generation display and MacOS X is a much more advanced 3rd generation, so it would be very different to truly merge their code. But thanks to the magic of abstraction and not ever giving up, I submit two possible technical approaches, followed by a third general philosophical approach. We still have years to go before we have the One True OS, if that's ever possible before we get to Star Trek times. Having to touch or look at a computer just to have full control over it is so 20th century!
1. MacOS X can be a superset of GNOME. In fact, it can be a superset of all of Linux. The microkernel Linux server can be made to work atop the Mach microkernel. Apple's Mach 3.0 and iokits are not slow, because they learned from all the work Apple did on MkLinux. MkLinux's partial microkernel architecture can be corrected. Then we can have bare concurrent compatibility, with optional platform tunings to each Linux-native layer such as X11. Or, if you just want GNOME and its applications, you can port GTK to MacOS X's Quartz (display PDF) layer.
2. Or, on the other hand, MacOS X's ideas can be a subset of Linux's -- a free implementation, obviously. Linux already has Objective C and GNUstep. I've read reports that for the purposes that some companies have, they use GNUStep as a complete production environment, which I'm pretty sure includes Display Postscript (a small step behind the Display PDF in MacOS X's Quartz layer). URL's are VERY welcome in helping me learn about GNUStep! MacOS X's API, environment, and interface technologies and philosophies can be mimicked on Linux/GNOME. In either case of MacOS X or Linux/GNOME, they can take each others' philosophies home. Apple can open up more standards and their implementations (ideally open source the human interface stuff), and Linux/GNOME can become genuinely, objectively, and consistantly easy to use. C'mon, GNOME can make it so that all applications use "openapple-S" to save! Fer cryin' out loud! At least MacOS X and Linux/GNOME now truly acknowledge each other at this point in the timeline of computing evolution. MacOS X has the extremely proven and advanced technological guts and simplicity of a smooth, professional, partially free unix, and Linux/GNOME has the freer controlled chaos of a great anarchistic community, with increasing production quality in mind. RFC: correct me if I'm wrong, and educate me anyhow. URL's please!
I would like to point out that journaling does not need to have a serious performance tradeoff. As I discussed with Jeremy Allison of SGI, regarding porting XFS to Linux back in the day of the Samba vs. Windows benchmarks at PC Week and VA, you can devote hardware for that. You can tell XFS to use particularly one RAID stripe just for logging. Yay!
What would you do if he donated to free software?
on
Who Bought Linux.Net?
·
· Score: 2
First of all, his name is spelled "Fred N. van Kempen". Fred is his first name, N. is his middle initial, and "van Kempen" is his last name.
It seems to be that out of all the contention over the sale of linux.com and linux.net, the most rational response has been that Fred should donate at least part of the money to free software.
Where would you suggest that he send money, and why? What would you have done with the money? Maybe it even makes material sense since he'd be taxed on it anyway.
I'll pass your comments on to him the next time I see him before he leaves the U.S. He's not feeling very well.
And finally, like a few people have mentioned, get a clue about his contributions by grepping some source code. 'rgrep -i kempen/usr/src/linux/*/etc/*'. He was a primary coder of Minix, a student of Andrew Tanenbaum. He wrote parts of its networking subsystem including the NE2000 driver which became Donald Becker's template for Linux's NE2000 driver which is the template for every Linux ethernet device driver I've ever seen, which are all sitting atop the networking subsystem that is at least squarely based on or a rewrite of Linux's NET2 (the network subsystem of around kernel 1.0 to 2.0) which he also largely pioneered from inception to production. He's contributed to many elements of unix-like systems because of being at the right place at the right time when much of unix was purely grassroots, and sticking with it even in a time and place where it was not profitable (almost literally starving student).
I've seen his name in SunOS 5.7 config files. He's got the source code of every revision of unix and most other types of OS's ever, and has just installed BSD on his "new" PDP in his office in Holland.
The point is that foolz who bust their asses to make the best software the world can handle, should be able to eventually be very comfortable. Just like when you get a degree and graduate. Fred coordinated live production testing of Linux's NET2 among European universities while he was developing it. Ever wonder how come suddenly Linux broke out of almost total obscurity around kernel 1.0.9 and 1.2.13 and hit the ground running, knocking commercial competitors down left and right? You don't come by this kind of community-oriented obsessive talent every day. If you haven't coded your own underground open-standard OS's (plural), for years without pay, on its own merit, while in production testing, and innovating on the world's collective established body of work along the way, and helping build companies to publish and reward the work of others, bite your tongue. Without these things, Linux would not exist.
And all this insane materialism in the world of free software has done to him is that now he bought his first car since forever, and one of those really expensive Mavica digital cameras! He's a true classic Dutch gentleman with impeccable manners and a tremendous sense of humor under any situation, who buys dinner for his friends at the local grill.
Yes, he went on to more commercial stuff after school (he originally had a degree in accounting), but you really should understand the economics of the land of Holland first. Although he and I might still have some discrepancies on the ethics of using Microsoft software anywhere for any reason, it's essentially roughly *similar* to what many other free software heavyweight contenders have done after their initial university-subsidized nirvana. Linus, the celebrity engineers of VA, etc, all ride atop a cloud of extreme commercialism and secrecy.
We're in a world that's still trying to figure out how to put down its bombs...material means are still developing.
That material/practical/profit part of our community, as it develops into its own industry, is a LONG TERM work in progress.
So is Fred's professional direction, so make some more specific and productive suggestions about post-sale proceeds. I think you guys will be pleasantly flabbergasted at what's already cooking inside his goofy head. (uh, that was supposed to sound like a good thing.)
Now see what you Slashdottian hotheads have done? You guys done worked me up to where I'm making runon sentences! I have a pseudo-intellectually verbose nature which suits Slashdot just fine, as long as we keep from being self-righteous and stick with the Good of the Code.
Slashdot Mirror
And on a sidenote, if Carnivore is able to access any emails, would they also be susceptible to the viruses that may be attatched to them?
Probably not, because Carnivore would probably be programmed to not execute the virus.
===
Good point. Does Mojo Nation have a concept of topological expenditure? Does it know that retrieving blocks from a least-cost neighbor is more preferable?
Expense might be measured in terms of throughput, financial cost, social responsibility, all of the above, and so on.
Does it have any way of knowing the topology? It should at least have user-configurable specifications for what routes are least expensive. In one case, you might be on a residential cable network where everyone in town is on your same physical broadcast. In another case, your next least expensive hop might be thousands of miles away and all physically local are more expensive.
===
Time to get ahold of The Bodoman.
===
"Could be useful for stuff like air traffic control. Or playing that chess game that we saw in Star Wars."
So this is a stop motion clay animation system? Finally, in realtime!?
===
No no, I hear what you're saying but that's too far. :) I was just suggesting _some_ sort of competency, not actual enforcement of rules. I'm just talking about people like CmdrTaco having more personal responsibility. And more Slashdot infrastructure for us to help him increase his responsibility, through higher levels of moderation.
Basically if someone in their office walked up to them in reference to the multiple postings and the grossly inflammatory or wrong articles, and said "Guys! Come *ON*!!!"
So many people here are asking if they even read their own site!
The people you're talking about can get bent out of shape, that's okay.
:)
===
So maybe Steve Jobs thought at some point that these should be known as "The Models Formerly Known as 'Macintosh'"?
===
I dig what you're saying. Here are my suggestions to Redhat and my summary of related issues. And another attempt to get any sort of moderation instead of the default "1"! ;-> I'm probably too late or too redundant.
* Don't have named it 7.0. Perhaps they should have named it something like 6.9. That's probably what it really is, regardless of the marketing. It's obvious at a nontrivial user level, that the critical software included is not yet finished.
* Like other Slashdotters mentioned, label it as targeted primarily for developers like FreeBSD tends to do with x.0 releases. I think my first suggestion would have been much better, but this one's a backup for marketing's demands for it being called "7.0".
No matter what, it needs to be labeled as non-mainstream, until the real showstopper subsystems like the 2.4 kernel and GCC each have a stable release. I recommend that this one should not be used by anyone interested in playing it safe. This reminds me of Redhat 5.0! It may end up similarly, having been mainly a proof of concept that took a major usability hit in order to propel the development and acceptance of the unfinished software.
It's great that Redhat wanted to do a current release, as well as providing a forward path to the next kernel, C library, and compiler. But this method of release was not nearly the best compromise for the reputation of Redhat, the free software community, and everyone else involved.
And finally, Slashdot's article posters should be taken over someone's knee for having sensationalized the "bug" issue. See all the other fine reader postings on the debunking of common perceptions of bugs in mainstream Linux distributions.
Slashdot tangent: Don't the Slashdot maintainers have employers, or someone else responsible for what goes on with its administration? Isn't Slashdot concerned with what anyone would do to them for the constant defamation, inflammatory, and incorrect postings? Who are these guys accountable to? We need a posting moderation system, and more stories!
===
Hey guys.
:)
Tonight I went to ftp.freesoftware.com to find a couple hundred kilobytes of updates to the stable old Redhat 6.2 systems I maintain. I had to retry about 10 times because its 5000 user limit was reached. While I waited 30 seconds for a small directory listing, I was wondering how many of you are wrecking the availability of the Internet in general.
Here's some advice for the general masses, aside from the great technical commentary already shmoozing around on the topic here. Most of you don't need this software this soon. Think about how your actions affect everyone else. You don't need to download an operating system, especially to do a single installation straight off the remote host rather than mirror it locally. Ask around your neighborhood, ISP, or workplace for setting up a local mirror.
And buy the cdrom at http://cheapbytes.com because it's not expensive, it gets to you pretty quickly, and most of you just didn't need it that soon anyway. Many of you are wrecking the availability for those who do need it fast.
Ask not only "Can I?" but "Should I?". Thanks.
===
If you have a hard drive, just install Linux elsewhere, with a custom kernel and maybe a tiny distro like Jailbait. Then move the hard drive back to your terminal. And you might up using an NFS, DHCP/bootp/tftp, or VNC client. Maybe the SVGA or GGI VNC client. If you can hook up a floppy disk, you have an alternate remote installation method.
:)
Kernel 2.2 is even more optimized for such low memory than 2.0 and earlier, due to modularity and other optimizations. Slackware claims to be interested in 4MB RAM installations.
===
- http://www.wvWare.com/, maybe the best open source Word converter? Formerly "mswordview", it's a library and a front-end app, which is currently AbiWord's converter.
- word2x
- AbiSource, a company producing an open source, cross platform, comercial office suite. Their motto was "SHOW ME THE SOURCE!!!", which we had to scream at the March 1999 Linuxworld Expo in order to get their t-shirt.
- Adobe FrameMaker for Linux -- Not sure if it does Office, but it's a commercial word processor!
- VistaSource / ApplixWare -- Cross platform, partially open source, complete office suite and integrated development environment in the form of either a local app, or as a Java-based thin client plus app server architecture. Compare to StarOffice. My experience has been that you can send an un-convertable Office document to Applix's closely-monitored community support mailing list, and they will attempt to modify Applixware's import filters around it, and send you a patch. How cool is that?
- S un StarOffice. Very good as well. Complete office suite. StarOffice and Applixware are capable of replacing Microsoft Office for literally most people.
- Corel Wordperfect -- See also Corel's Linux distribution.
- KDE's KOffice -- Open source office suite.
- Freshmeat.net's index of office apps
Here is a list of how to buy books for tutoring you on how to use these products, including reviews and price comparisons, and free shipping from Buy.com. In order of my personal preference.-
- Special Edition Using StarOffice, replaces htt p://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789719932/re
f =sim_books/002-2291160-6260020. -
- http://www.us.buy.com/books/pr oduct.asp?sku=30400392 $14.99 ($1 less than amazon.com) Replaces: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672314126
/ ref=sim_books/002-2291160-6260020 -
Any others? Perhaps some that are embedded in the ton of entries in Freshmeat's office index? Let's hear some authors pipe up! Slashdot's html submitter seems to be busted, so try to fix the above urls by removing their spaces!The following is a posting I made today on the ReiserFS mailing list, in response to this Microsoft innovation. Maybe this will help some people pull information from the ashes, because there is something to be learned everywhere. I am not a platform bigot; I'm merely against Stuff That Sucks. And we have to always be on the lookout to find the diamond in the rough, even if that diamond is just a gem of an idea that you'd end up cutting yourself.
:-}
Heck, sometimes good ideas are arrived at by the process of eliminating the bad ones.
===
*beep* *beep* *beep*
That's the sound of my FUD-ometer, in light scan mode. It's not going
into red alert because this Microsoft article was merely rife with
unsubstantiated, abstract, sensationalistic, and wild claims, rather
than actual blatantly destructive FUD.
Many times when Microsoft's actions are observed by
non-Microsoft-oriented individuals, the reaction is rather extreme.
Microsoft as a whole basically lives in its own impenetrable,
self-contained, narcissistic universe, which they believe is
inherently objectively correct and good for all humankind. Sometimes
that fact is not directly evident in each case, but we can STILL look
at what they do and SOMEHOW contrive something pretty cool.
It sounds like this technique may be working AT LEAST in their own
environments, and it may be worth looking into even if JUST to provide
totally abstract inspiration or motivation to create our own product.
I'll just step into the Microsoft world here for a minute. I'll
attempt to make sense of some info so as to use it for our advantage,
not to vent sour emotions, or whatever. The truth about Microsoft is
out there, and it's hideously ugly, but once you clean it up, it can be
useful, as long as you then reimplement in a completely different way.
:)
I'm thinking that they're subversively referring to a few unwritten
facts:
* that the network is often an objective bottleneck in a file service
context
* aggressive data reduction techniques improve the performance of
things like caches and general throughput, but we usually don't do that
nearly as much as we can, such as extra conceptual layers like
compression, checksumming, and hard linking
* that their software is almost totally inherently non-multiuser and
grotesquely bloated, so as to likewise dramatically bloat the net
effect of any technological advance
So if you had a way to reduce the damage of the fact that, as another
esteemed reiserfs contributer pointed out, each small Microsoft
application installation will take about 100 MB, then you'd be doing
way better. -Especially- in a Microsoft-oriented system. Not good.
But better than worse.
Let their overall stated BENEFIT of their technological property be of
little consequence to us. It's under the governance of an alien
distortion field as far as we're concerned, which may or may not pan
out to reality. Unless you're re-engineering one of their own
products, as is the case of Samba and WINE, it's often a waste of time
to try to rationalize their claims.
Virtually all of their software is a monolithic monstrosity in every
sense of the concept of computing. That's quite a kind way to state it
once you've examined it from any one point of view, and to get any more
kind would require the blurring of many ethical and technical details.
So ANYthing you do to reduce that will be noticable, and people will
consider anything to improve their Windows systems, even if it's
architecturally questionable.
I think you guys have the right direction, when you're talking about
normal concepts such as copy-on-write and other stuff like that built
right into reiserfs. But don't lose any sleep over deciphering their
claims, their implementations, motivations, or goals, unless you're
wanting to be an expert in group psychology.
And maybe I just made a complete fool of myself, but all I care about
here is that people on reiserfs@devlinux.com are having a tough time
deciphering the value of a product and information about that product,
which were engineered in an environment where time, space, and ethics
may or may not apply
I have suggested that MacOS X and Linux/GNOME provide the best of both worlds -- professionalism and freedom. So we should try to merge them.
Well my point was not just in terms of code merging. It was more of an
abstract, philosophical and psychological sense. I realize that GNOME
is a 2nd generation display and MacOS X is a much more advanced 3rd
generation, so it would be very different to truly merge their code.
But thanks to the magic of abstraction and not ever giving up, I submit
two possible technical approaches, followed by a third general
philosophical approach. We still have years to go before we have the
One True OS, if that's ever possible before we get to Star Trek times. Having to touch or look at a computer just to have full control over it is so 20th century!
1.
MacOS X can be a superset of GNOME. In fact, it can be a superset of
all of Linux. The microkernel Linux server can be made to work atop
the Mach microkernel. Apple's Mach 3.0 and iokits are not slow,
because they learned from all the work Apple did on MkLinux. MkLinux's
partial microkernel architecture can be corrected. Then we can have
bare concurrent compatibility, with optional platform tunings to each
Linux-native layer such as X11. Or, if you just want GNOME and its
applications, you can port GTK to MacOS X's Quartz (display PDF) layer.
2.
Or, on the other hand, MacOS X's ideas can be a subset of Linux's -- a free implementation, obviously.
Linux already has Objective C and GNUstep. I've read reports that for
the purposes that some companies have, they use GNUStep as a complete
production environment, which I'm pretty sure includes Display
Postscript (a small step behind the Display PDF in MacOS X's Quartz
layer). URL's are VERY welcome in helping me learn about GNUStep! MacOS X's API, environment, and interface technologies and
philosophies can be mimicked on Linux/GNOME.
In either case of MacOS X or Linux/GNOME, they can take each others'
philosophies home. Apple can open up more standards and their
implementations (ideally open source the human interface stuff), and
Linux/GNOME can become genuinely, objectively, and consistantly easy to
use. C'mon, GNOME can make it so that all applications use
"openapple-S" to save! Fer cryin' out loud!
At least MacOS X and Linux/GNOME now truly acknowledge each other at
this point in the timeline of computing evolution. MacOS X has the
extremely proven and advanced technological guts and simplicity of a smooth, professional, partially free unix, and Linux/GNOME has the freer controlled chaos of a great
anarchistic community, with increasing production quality in mind.
RFC: correct me if I'm wrong, and educate me anyhow. URL's please!
I would like to point out that journaling does not need to have a serious performance tradeoff. As I discussed with Jeremy Allison of SGI, regarding porting XFS to Linux back in the day of the Samba vs. Windows benchmarks at PC Week and VA, you can devote hardware for that. You can tell XFS to use particularly one RAID stripe just for logging.
Yay!
First of all, his name is spelled "Fred N. van Kempen". Fred is his first name, N. is his middle initial, and "van Kempen" is his last name.
/usr/src/linux/* /etc/*'. He was a primary coder of Minix, a student of Andrew Tanenbaum. He wrote parts of its networking subsystem including the NE2000 driver which became Donald Becker's template for Linux's NE2000 driver which is the template for every Linux ethernet device driver I've ever seen, which are all sitting atop the networking subsystem that is at least squarely based on or a rewrite of Linux's NET2 (the network subsystem of around kernel 1.0 to 2.0) which he also largely pioneered from inception to production. He's contributed to many elements of unix-like systems because of being at the right place at the right time when much of unix was purely grassroots, and sticking with it even in a time and place where it was not profitable (almost literally starving student).
It seems to be that out of all the contention over the sale of linux.com and linux.net, the most rational response has been that Fred should donate at least part of the money to free software.
Where would you suggest that he send money, and why? What would you have done with the money? Maybe it even makes material sense since he'd be taxed on it anyway.
I'll pass your comments on to him the next time I see him before he leaves the U.S. He's not feeling very well.
And finally, like a few people have mentioned, get a clue about his contributions by grepping some source code. 'rgrep -i kempen
I've seen his name in SunOS 5.7 config files. He's got the source code of every revision of unix and most other types of OS's ever, and has just installed BSD on his "new" PDP in his office in Holland.
The point is that foolz who bust their asses to make the best software the world can handle, should be able to eventually be very comfortable. Just like when you get a degree and graduate. Fred coordinated live production testing of Linux's NET2 among European universities while he was developing it. Ever wonder how come suddenly Linux broke out of almost total obscurity around kernel 1.0.9 and 1.2.13 and hit the ground running, knocking commercial competitors down left and right? You don't come by this kind of community-oriented obsessive talent every day. If you haven't coded your own underground open-standard OS's (plural), for years without pay, on its own merit, while in production testing, and innovating on the world's collective established body of work along the way, and helping build companies to publish and reward the work of others, bite your tongue. Without these things, Linux would not exist.
And all this insane materialism in the world of free software has done to him is that now he bought his first car since forever, and one of those really expensive Mavica digital cameras! He's a true classic Dutch gentleman with impeccable manners and a tremendous sense of humor under any situation, who buys dinner for his friends at the local grill.
Yes, he went on to more commercial stuff after school (he originally had a degree in accounting), but you really should understand the economics of the land of Holland first. Although he and I might still have some discrepancies on the ethics of using Microsoft software anywhere for any reason, it's essentially roughly *similar* to what many other free software heavyweight contenders have done after their initial university-subsidized nirvana. Linus, the celebrity engineers of VA, etc, all ride atop a cloud of extreme commercialism and secrecy.
We're in a world that's still trying to figure out how to put down its bombs...material means are still developing.
That material/practical/profit part of our community, as it develops into its own industry, is a LONG TERM work in progress.
So is Fred's professional direction, so make some more specific and productive suggestions about post-sale proceeds. I think you guys will be pleasantly flabbergasted at what's already cooking inside his goofy head. (uh, that was supposed to sound like a good thing.)
Now see what you Slashdottian hotheads have done? You guys done worked me up to where I'm making runon sentences! I have a pseudo-intellectually verbose nature which suits Slashdot just fine, as long as we keep from being self-righteous and stick with the Good of the Code.