The GPL is evil? Give me a break. It's one rule: if you take what I'm offering, you have to offer what you've done with it. It's the goddam golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's tit for tat. Quid pro quo. It's just saying that you have to play by the rules.
As Linus said, whoever writes the code gets to make the license. If you really want to live in a world where it's ok to take people's work without giving anything back, then fine. All people should just give to those who gave to them and the GPL would be unnecessary, just like marriage vows to lovers. Guess what, we don't live in a perfect world. So lovers take vows and coders use the GPL.
There are some human beings on this planet who happen to have ideals and actually want to live by them on occasion. If you really dislike dealing with idealists that much, commit a crime and go to prison. You'll be surrounded by plenty of perfectly practical people. If you want to live in the real world, you're going to have to follow a few rules. One of them is that you don't get to do what you want. We all require each other to be at least minimally decent human beings. RMS is trying to get people to be a little more decent than that on just one particular aspect of human life.
The only restriction that the GPL carries is that everyone has to play by the same rules. Simple. That's it. If you want to call that communistic, fine. We all have to play by the same rules that we don't get to murder someone. I guess that that's communistic too. But you know what? We all live in a community.
Oh, and about that windows nonsense and helping the common man. Giving technology to evil men isn't always in the common man's best interests. Sometimes you have forgo small things to get big ones. If you make a slave's life too comfortable he might not fight to be free. It's called the "big picture". I.e. thinking more than five minutes into the future. Nothing is guaranteed in this life, but a world dominated by one corporation is probably going to be inferior to a world where people have more control over their own lives. Microsoft must be destroyed in its current form because it poses a threat to the world. If people suffer a little bit because of that necessity, the world isn't going to fall off its axis. After all, the human race did perfectly well without computers for millenia. A few extra years without a good stable operating system for the masses isn't going to kill us now.
In conclusion, why don't you go off into seclusion and become a hermit and rant your prattle about anything where people actually give to each other being communistic to yourself. This way no one will have to perform the communistic act of listening to you instead of shooting you. Think about it for a minute? What's so evil about a license where the whole of the law is that if you take you have to give?
I think that that's a valid conclusion from that part of roblimo's post. Geek girls shouldn't go for near-soulless geek guys, either.
There may be some truth to the idea, though. What's needed in a relationship isn't for both people to love the same thing so much as to both like what the other one loves. This way you can have understanding of the other. Both loving the same thing may work out better or worse, I'm not really sure as I've never had a relationship where that happened, but I think that it's pretty obvious that you need to at least like what the other one loves.
That being the case, there are a whole lot of other personality traits on has to have in common for a relationship to work as well. Past the basics like being a decent human being, caring, thoughtful, etc., both partners need something of a similar spirit. A similar sense of humor. A similar way of looking at the world. Or maybe compatable is better than similar, though I think that in general it's only similar spirits that are compatible.
Now, personality/spirit types seem to be about randomly spread out through the human race. Some football players are caring, others aren't. Some geeks are caring, others aren't. Geekdom like the rest of professions doesn't require a full person, only a few aspects of a person, so the rest can be whatever God wanted them to be, and they'll work out as geeks (same goes for just about every profession, though different ones select on different traits). If that's true, then you'll be more likely to find a caring person in a somewhat different field, as the number of caring people in your field will be n-1 (assuming that you're a caring person and not going to date yourself).
The other problem is that for men the ratio of men:women in computers is really off balance. You'll find more geek-type girls in other "intellectual" professions (most of my girlfriends have been really into math, biology, or physics (usually with significant overlap)). That piece of advice may be more gender-specific because if you're a computer-geek guy and the number of computer geek guys is l, then the eligible population of dating partners just in computer geeks is something like l/5 (assuming that you're not homosexual). Those aren't good odds to start out with, so you've got a better chance of success by expanding your pools of possibilities. When you include anything which requires at least reasonable comfort with mathematics or logic, your odds of finding someone compatible are just a lot higher (statistically speaking, actual results may vary).
So in conclusion, it all depends (big surprise). If you're a caring partner and need a caring partner, then your odds of finding one may be better or worse if you look in the computing field, but they're almost definitely worse if you limit your search to women in the computing field as there are significantly fewer of them then men (or rather it appears to be so, however someone not announcing their geekiness and someone who isn't a geek is the same thing unless your telepathic).
But I think that a lot of this can be simplified quite a bit: 1. Make friends with everyone you like and try to be on good terms with everyone if possible. 2. If in the course of life one of your friends of target gender starts to want more from you, and at the same time you start to want more from them, and equally importantly you want to give more to each other, then great.
Well, if you're actually running your CGI scripts as root you're just asking someone to break you. By default, CGI scripts are run as the user nobody. Nobody owns no files, is part of no group, and has no login shell. In short, if they compromised a normal cgi script they shouldn't be able to do much more than fill/tmp up. That and read publically available files.
And as soon as you can break into some code running as administrator (or the OS itself, that is something like a third of the code, isn't it?), you can just install BO or something like that and get some decent remote-administratability options.
NT is no more inherently secure in a full security-breach than Linux is. In either case you're screwed if someone can compromise the superuser. And NT has plenty of services either running as administrator or in kernelspace. Can you even run a daemon-like service as a regular user under NT?
On what theory does an OS never allow anything to be done? Someone's got to be able to bring the system down so that someone can do something with the system. If that person is irresponsible, they're a problem. Handcuffing your users so that they can't do anything is not the solution.
I'm not sure what happened, and the sight doesn't seem to say, but if they were running CGI input without checking it they're: a) Dumb b) Limited to what that CGI can do.
If they configured their machine so that their CGI can do security leaks, what is the OS supposed to do, say "No, you can't do what you want. Go away and stop trying to be creative?"
As many people have pointed out, an OS is only as secure as its weakest link. The person at the keyboard is a necessary link, so if they're your weakest link, you're in trouble. The same would go if this was just a bad asp script.
You might be able to make an argument that the same sort of flexibility doesn't exist on NT and thus you can't do this sort of stuff. While that may be true, do remember that walking is generlaly safer than driving. When you can do more, you can also go wrong in more ways.
It all boils down to know what you're doing. I forget who said it, but "If you make a device idiot-proof, nature will make a better idiot."
> of course there probably is already elisp out there that does this...
Of course there is. It's called etags. You run the program like this: etags `find/source/of/project -type f | grep \.[cCh]+p*$` You unfortunately have to do this for each directory, though i suspect that you can define things out to use just one etags file. Then you just hit meta-. when the cursor is over a struct, variable, function, etc. and it brings you right to the definition, opening up all necessary files. Add in hooks to saving files in cc-mode, and you can auto-update your tags file when you save. I do this and it's so fast I don't even notice it happening (Admittedly, I'm on a 633 MHz Alpha, but even so, it is fast in and of itself). I highly recommend it. That and building with make in your xemacs window so that you can just middle click on a compile error and be brought to it, and you've got a large part of an IDE right there.
Don't get me wrong, commercial unices were no shangri la, but windows didn't really do all that much of what you're talking about.
Plenty of windows programs don't work accross windows version (though they are in the minority, granted).
As for the UI choices, you are right. There's just one and frankly it's mediocre. Why is choice such so abhorrent to corporate types? Why are you people so god damn scared of someone having their kill-window button in a different place than yours? Hint: pop up an xterm and you can do everything that you could have done before just as efficicnetly for the most part. Hell, telnet into the box, you'll never have to know what the UI on the box looks like. heaven forbid that users actually read a bit of the documentation or take a look at the tooltips.
God, so much time in an office is wasted chatting, walking to the bathroom, coffee room, etc. that the hour spent on learning the keybindings for a particular application is very minor. You people talk like you're dealing with robots, for God's sake! They'r epeople. They're inefficient by design. You're never going to get maximal productivity out of them, they won't give it.
And please don't talk about libraries. Yes, in unix you have to figure out which to use. The windows way is much worse - they decide for you then tie you to a particular version, overwriting your current verision if they possibly can.
What windows did, more than anything else, was to introduce the paradigm of the crash into computers. Sure, things were buggy before, but windows dies ona fairly regular basis, at least if you tend to install and remove programs from it (though installing is usually enough on its own). That or crash.
Windows did set back the computing industry in many ways. They substituted glitz for quality, not unpredictably, and moved the computer industry in that direction.
Oh, and do you code for win32, MFC, VB, J++, or what? Don't give me this bullshit that there's one and only one way of doing things in windows. Windows is as much of a pain in the ass as anything else (if you really use it), it just works less and is a closed box, so you can't fix it when it breaks. Frankly, it's a black mark on human history that I just wish would be erased. Profit and greed don't have to go together, merciless immoral bloodsucking doesn't have to have anything to do with profit at all. I want to be rich. Very rich. I just also want the world to be better off for me having existed, too. Microsoft seems to have completely disregarded that second one.
"For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?"
Less prfound, what does it gain a man if he gains the whole world but destroys it in the process?
Re:Variants would make nice gateway/firewall/route
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I have my suspicions about an 18MHz processor being able to handle a 100BaseT connection. It does take some CPU to do any sort of useful firewall work, unless of course you are just using that connection and utilizing only a fraction of the available bandwidth.
Does anyone know if the processor could handle a 100baseT connection?
I wouldn't worry about the anwhere-it's-not-popular crowd, they don't make up that much of any group, especially not hte linux crowd. I've been on the mailing lists of a number of open source programs, and believe me, the important people there are doing it for love, protection from boredom, personal gain, personal need (people who want tools and thus are writing them), etc. I've yet to see one group where anyone who made significant contributions was concerned with the fact that what they were doing was popular or not.
What you say about the slashdot crowd may be partially true, but remember that that portion of the crowd that you are talking about doesn't contribute much anyhow.
Those who want to be in the minority will, thankfully, always be the minority. You don't really have to worry about them.
Btw, I don't remember his last post about this, but I think that Katz is a lot closer to the mark on this one, what he said was more or less true. BWP wasn't revolutionary any more than any successful movie was revolutionary. It was largely in the right time at the right place. From what I heard it's a well told ghost story, told in an original style. The fact of the matter is that people can get used to just about anything, hence you always need new styles, or old styles which are now new again. Ii sure hope that hollywood doesn't start trying to imitate BWP. I like movies where I can make out the actors much better than ones where half the time I might as well close my eyes.:-)
"After the first day or so (once everyone started finding out about the box), the Win2K status page reported frequently receiving over 6000 frames/sec (> 7000 datagrams/sec)."
When did the box get this? It was down more than it was up as far as anyone could tell.
"while we haven't seen any such whines from the Win2K group (as if the Win2K box attackers haven't been trying the same tricks)"
No, they just blamed their downtime on the weather and power outages and the like. Can Microsoft really not afford a UPS? Besides, their complaints weren't nearly so much about their network being hurt as their net connection being flooded. Just a guess but linuxppc.org does have their bandwidth for something else than just to have it flooded. If you read the complaints, one of them was that other machines were getting obthered, true, but the biggest was that their network connection was so saturated that they couldn't do anything over it. That has nothing to do with the box involved, it has to do with the bandwidth that they can afford.
"I'm not at all convinced that the LinuxPPC box could've stood up to the attacks that the Win2K box has received."
Maybe, maybe not. They'd need a much bigger network connection to find out, which I doubt that they can afford. Either way, the linuxppc box was much smaller than the W2k box.
"I hope every name that you were prepared to call the Win2K team had they dropped out, will now be applied to the LinuxPPC team."
Since you don't seem to have read the article, I'll reiterate what it said. The contest is still going. If you can provide a workable crack into a similarly configured system, you still get the box. They just want their network connection back. As they mentioned, Microsoft can't do that, as W2K isn't purchaseable yet.
Oh, and the linuxppc people never lied about anything going on. I'm curious, while the windows2000text box was being killed by the weather and power outages, was www.microsoft.com also down? If not, why not? Couldn't they afford to put the box on a UPS?
Whiel you're correct, how many stolen bikes do you think are actually recovered every year? If someone actually managed to steal the guy's bike, what are the chances that he'd ever see it again or that the theif would ever be procecuted for it?
So gcc, the gimp, gnome, and emacs are all useless for real work? Aside from the fact that there's gnu.misc.discuss for this, what is your definition of real work?
I never meant to say that the people who pirated Lucas's work were justified. I never said it, either. I just said that noone is going to be particularly sympathetic to him because he doesn't need the money. That and do you really think that $50,000 fines plus up to five years in prison is really justified by cheating Lucas out of some portion of $8?
My point wasn't that people should pirate Lucas's work, they're not justified in doing it. Just when you compare relative evils (stealing Lucas's work (less than $8 dollar value to lucas) versus $50,000 + five years imprisonment), which do you think is worse? That's why people are against Lucas. Not because he's fighting innocent people, but that he's breaking ribs in return for insults. The retribution is many fold more than the crime.
This actually is due to the fact that if you made the punishment fit the crime, noone would care about the penalty. Still, does it make sense to make the punishmet 1000 times more significant than the crime just so that the punishment acts as a deterrent? I guess the argument is that the damage is done to the fabric of society, and that's what the punishment is about. Maybe. I don't really buy it, though. Society did just fine without copyright for too long to believe that we're that dependent on copyright now.
Besides that, there's just too much piracy going on right no for me to believe that piracy really is going to rip apart the fabric of our society.
Oh, and I saw the movie in theaters twice, and I never saw it in bootleg copy on the net. If Lucas keeps up this money-grubbing unforgiving greed that he seems to be displaying ("I wish that the toys were cheaper but it's the manufacturers who are driving the prices up, my licensing fees don't have anything to do with it... really."), I may not see his next movie on the principle of the thing. Given how much money the guy is making, it really doesn't make sense that he cares about the piracy going on. It's got to be a drop in the bucket, when you get down to it. As you pointed out - how many people actually have the systems and bandwidth to get a bootleg copy and didn't go see the movie?
You are right, Lucas is doing what he has a legal and (probably) moral right to do. However, the sucess of his product does matter.
Compare these: 1. A starving man procecutes a man who stole a loaf of bread from him (say, a full day's meal). 2. A rich man who has more bread than he can reasonably want procecutes a man who stole a load of bread from him (one that was just going to go stale and be thrown away anyhow).
Which one are people normally going to approve of? Both are acting within their legal and moral rights.
The reason that people hold his army of lawyers against him is that he has no demonstrated need for the money that he is protecting. Also, consider the wrongs being done here. On the one case, he loses some portion of $8. On the other, the bootlegger gets a $50,000 fine and years of imprisonment. He's now doing that to people when he has no demonstrated need to. Yes, he's within his rights, but come on. Doesn't he have anything better to do than get people who did him very little harm very large punishments?
That's why people hold it against him. Because he can easily afford not to go after these people and the net suffering of humanity will be less then when he goes after them.
So is he in the right, in a sense, yes. He may be completely in the right. I don't really know. His soul is his own business. But this is basically the case of the big man bullying the smaller ones. Remember something about rights - Shylock was within his rights in demanding his pound of flesh from the merchant of venice.
Actually, while I could be wrong, it's my understanding that emacs is pretty much just a lisp interpreter. It's the lisp programs that actually do everything. I think that things are a bit different in Xemacs. I'm not sure how much this is valid, but I do believe it someone, a plain xemacs binary with no elisp packages can't do all that much. But with those elisp packages, damn. I just recently discovered etags (man, meta-. binring you to a variable's declaration or a function definition really rocks). I wonder how much more there is in Xemacs.
Well, anyhow, I think that the guy that you were responding to is right, though, a good portion of xemacs isn't xemacs itself but the lisp packages. If you were to remove all of the xemacs lisp packages, I bet you that it would have a somewhat smaller memory footprint.:-)
Either way, the extremely modular design means that once the core is done, you get a stable program. I can't remember Xemacs ever crashing on me, and I use it for all of my programming. And if I was low on diskspace, I could get rid of all of the lisp packages that I don't use. That and there are very few bugs in Xemacs. Probably because it's a mature program. Funny, I remmeber someone talking about linux being based on 30-year-old technology. emacs is something like 20-30 years old, I think, maybe 10-20, and damn does it rock. I guess the Petreley was right when he said that programs shouldn't be measured by the yardstick of windows NT - normally programs do get better as they get older.
The problem with Brinn isn't that he used $10 words, everyone does that in a specialty. It's that he used archetypes. Using archetypes is nearly the surest sign that you're an ass that I can think of. Archetypes are the bad ideas generally recycled by third rate intellectuals (most of whom become english teachers or english professors) to try to come up with something to talk about. They take these archetypes, push and tug characters until they fit into them (or just proclaim that they do), then procede to talk about a story in general terms.
That is, they figure out a way to say pretty much nothing in as many words as possible with as arrogant a tone as possible, doing their best to imply that they're in the know because they can categorize everything into a bunch of made-up cubby holes.
Guess what, vader may have been more than a 1-dimension cardboard cutout. So might luke. And Han. And Chewie. And C3PO. And every damn character in the movie. Lucas could have been telling a story about people. Genuine, multifaceted people.
Did you notice that just about every one of the main characters in the SW trilogy was responsible for saving each other at least once? Did you notice that every one of the main characters was saved by someone else at some point?
The problem with Brin wasn't that he used big words. Big words are just accedents of the fact that human beings only tend to pronounce so many sounds, and to get more words than sounds we have to string the words together. Unfamiliar words are just side effects of the fact that we're not all the same person, and we don't all live the same life. Noone objects to those. What people object to are people who use big, unfamiliar words as labor-saving devices. Instead of coming up with something worth saying, they just use a special cant that's readily appliable to any situation because the can't is fairly similar to the cant of newspaper psychics - so broad that it always describes everything without exactly seeming to.
I don't think that Brin is jealous of Lucas. I just think that he's talking about him to get publicity. Talking about big issues is a way to get attention, especially if you show opinions contrary to popular belief.
I think that most people will be intereste din listening to Brin when he doesn't sound like a highschool english teacher. It takes most of us a long enough time to recover from that crap and regain the ability to appreciate good literature, we don't need another dose of mindless elitist drivel.
On the other hand, I think that Brin is right that we are all part of a community. I just think that it's strange that he thinks that star wars has anything to do with the idea that democracy is bad. After all, weren't 4-6 about the goodguy rebels defeating the badguy despots?
Please don't take this as bashing you, but do you realize how sad this sounds? What would you say if I told you that my new car works just fine if I just treat it right. Treating it right consists of: 1. Only making left turns under 9 mph 2. Never going faster than 55 mph 3. Always using extra high super octane fuel 4. Always getting manufacturer supplied hyper-expensive parts 5. Not adding things like GPS units, replacing the air conditiong system, or getting a CD player. 6. Occasionally turning my car off and starting it up again while I'm driving.
Would you say that that's the mark of a good car?
As long as you're willing to redefine normal operating conditions, anything can be stable. That's not the point. Stability isn't about adapting your computing to your computer, it's about adapting your computer to your computing.
Do you really not think that users not being able to install their own software is normal? Hell, UNIX/Linux systems are designed in such a way that users can add their own system libraries without affecting any other user or system stability (minus disk space requirements).
If you want to find linux users, go to a LUG, join development mailing lists of linux projects, join linux mailing lists. Of all the methods to form opinions on "Linux users", reading slashdot and coming up with your conclusions from there has got to be a genuinely stupid method. Why on earth would you pick the one place where people don't need so much as a valid email address to post, so the anonymity level is through the roof?
Look, I'm on a number of mailing lists and projects (generally in the periphery (sp?) for most), and the people there are virtually all intelligent, level headed people. You tend to find more people who believe in the GPL than you will in other places, but by and large you find competent people getting work done.
Go to LUGs, you'll find linux users from every walk of life. Some smart, some not so smart, some brilliant, some questionably mentally incompetent. A wide variety of people like and use Linux, and forming your opinion of them in a place nearly guaranteed to be unrepresentative is a little strange.
Oh, Linux is a better client side OS than NT as long as you have a sysadmin for it, if for no other reason than it's not the path to hellish vendor lock-in. I've seen a place which runs just about every incarnation of windows under the sun (including different service pack levels of both NT 3.51 and NT 4.0) because some particular proprietary software package will only work on that particular version, heaven knows why. And let's see you remote display on a Mac's interface. Of course, you can probably come close to duplicating a Mac's wm/interface nowadays with gnome/E, so it's not even much of a point.
Note, the interface issue is a really dumb one to bring up. I'm a power user, so I can't stand the mac interface. Some people love it. Interfaces are extremely subjective things.
Anyhow, my experience with *BSD people, aside from slashdot, has them generally being pretty decent people, and I've whitnessed great levels of cooperation for portability whenever needed. These holy wars generally only exist in isolated places. The majority of people live with each other, just like the rest of life.
I'm not surprised at the insecure people who find meaning in their lives through enemies bashing everything but their one true foo. That's always happened and always will. i'm a bit surprised at level-headed sounding people thinking that those people are at all representative.
Oh, and microsoft is a real enemy. Just like carthage to the romans, microsoft must be destroyed for the good of the computing community in general, be it mac, sun, *bsd, linux, os2, etc. Everyone else can work with each other relatively well, M$ is the only one who's trying to kill off the rest. Personally, as a linux user, I hope that both linux and the BSDs flourish. As a man who has to live in the world, I hope that microsoft dies. There are real enemies and there are fake enemies. The BSDs and Linux are anything but enemies. Microsoft and everyone else are nothing but enemies. Please keep the two straight.
As for the users, there's no real generalizing them. I've seen everyone from great programmers to great novices using Linux, just like nearly everything in life. Why overgeneralize? life's to short to be wrong.:-)
Actually, the mozilla project is not only an inherently complex project, it's a cross-api project. That's probably what really hurt it. Yes, the core rendering part is pretty complex, but the user interface part isn't. The real thing that prevented a lot of people from jumping in on mozilla was the significant level of abstraction involved.
The abiword project is similar, and I've given up on trying to work on that, as well. Whenever you try to be cross-api, you just end up inventing your own api and implementing it twice. So joining the mozilla project isn't a matter of working on a browser, it's a matter of working on a browser/operating system combo. And as soon as tracing a function becomes a matter of working through levels of abstraction, it raises the difficulty signifcantly.
That's why single-api projects do much better than cross-api projects, you don't end up building a new api at the same time. Look at the gimp and gtk.
They really both started to blossom when they were split off from each other.
The mozilla project is really a whole bunch of projects, and as such could benefit from the open source style, as I think to some degree it is doing. However, the mozilla project was attacked in the wrong manner. They didn't release working code, and only just now are starting to really get working code. You can only really bugfix and contribute small pieces to working code. Devling in and building it up to a working condition is the job of the core developers.
Anyhow, the open source development model would work and at some point will work for mozilla, it just has high entry points.
Ah, anyhow, you don't get it. Open source doesn't produce small, dinky projects or work poorly for big projects, it just needs, like any project, a decent project coordinator. Those projects which flourish are those wihch have a good project coordinator, when you get down to it. I'm not even sure that the mozilla people had a project coordinator. They seem to be getting their act at least somewhat together, though.
Probably their biggest problem, which they will always have, is that they are a seriously cross-platform project. That keeps them from actually becoming part of any community, and that's a lot of what open source is about. If every part of code has to be implementable on windows as well as on unix, that just really makes working on the project much less feasable. I don't know windows, and don't want to.
That's also hurt the abisourse people- there are features that they couldn't use because they aren't on windows. I don't want to do even as much windows programming as requires knowing what can't be done on windows. So I'm not really contributing. That's probably mozilla's biggest problem. It's too schitsophrenic (sp?) to ever be done really well, though the mozilla people do seem to be pulling it off, slowly but surely. That's the part that really surprises me.
Was w2k beta really released 1 year and 10 months ago? And they still haven't released the actual w2k? And this is a real server which gets used significantly all the time?
No, I know both C and perl and like both quite a bit. I use them for different things, but when speed isn't an issue and text processing is, I absolutely love perl.
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The GPL is evil? Give me a break. It's one rule: if you take what I'm offering, you have to offer what you've done with it. It's the goddam golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's tit for tat. Quid pro quo. It's just saying that you have to play by the rules.
As Linus said, whoever writes the code gets to make the license. If you really want to live in a world where it's ok to take people's work without giving anything back, then fine. All people should just give to those who gave to them and the GPL would be unnecessary, just like marriage vows to lovers. Guess what, we don't live in a perfect world. So lovers take vows and coders use the GPL.
There are some human beings on this planet who happen to have ideals and actually want to live by them on occasion. If you really dislike dealing with idealists that much, commit a crime and go to prison. You'll be surrounded by plenty of perfectly practical people. If you want to live in the real world, you're going to have to follow a few rules. One of them is that you don't get to do what you want. We all require each other to be at least minimally decent human beings. RMS is trying to get people to be a little more decent than that on just one particular aspect of human life.
The only restriction that the GPL carries is that everyone has to play by the same rules. Simple. That's it. If you want to call that communistic, fine. We all have to play by the same rules that we don't get to murder someone. I guess that that's communistic too. But you know what? We all live in a community.
Oh, and about that windows nonsense and helping the common man. Giving technology to evil men isn't always in the common man's best interests. Sometimes you have forgo small things to get big ones. If you make a slave's life too comfortable he might not fight to be free. It's called the "big picture". I.e. thinking more than five minutes into the future. Nothing is guaranteed in this life, but a world dominated by one corporation is probably going to be inferior to a world where people have more control over their own lives. Microsoft must be destroyed in its current form because it poses a threat to the world. If people suffer a little bit because of that necessity, the world isn't going to fall off its axis. After all, the human race did perfectly well without computers for millenia. A few extra years without a good stable operating system for the masses isn't going to kill us now.
In conclusion, why don't you go off into seclusion and become a hermit and rant your prattle about anything where people actually give to each other being communistic to yourself. This way no one will have to perform the communistic act of listening to you instead of shooting you. Think about it for a minute? What's so evil about a license where the whole of the law is that if you take you have to give?
I think that that's a valid conclusion from that part of roblimo's post. Geek girls shouldn't go for near-soulless geek guys, either.
There may be some truth to the idea, though. What's needed in a relationship isn't for both people to love the same thing so much as to both like what the other one loves. This way you can have understanding of the other. Both loving the same thing may work out better or worse, I'm not really sure as I've never had a relationship where that happened, but I think that it's pretty obvious that you need to at least like what the other one loves.
That being the case, there are a whole lot of other personality traits on has to have in common for a relationship to work as well. Past the basics like being a decent human being, caring, thoughtful, etc., both partners need something of a similar spirit. A similar sense of humor. A similar way of looking at the world. Or maybe compatable is better than similar, though I think that in general it's only similar spirits that are compatible.
Now, personality/spirit types seem to be about randomly spread out through the human race. Some football players are caring, others aren't. Some geeks are caring, others aren't. Geekdom like the rest of professions doesn't require a full person, only a few aspects of a person, so the rest can be whatever God wanted them to be, and they'll work out as geeks (same goes for just about every profession, though different ones select on different traits). If that's true, then you'll be more likely to find a caring person in a somewhat different field, as the number of caring people in your field will be n-1 (assuming that you're a caring person and not going to date yourself).
The other problem is that for men the ratio of men:women in computers is really off balance. You'll find more geek-type girls in other "intellectual" professions (most of my girlfriends have been really into math, biology, or physics (usually with significant overlap)). That piece of advice may be more gender-specific because if you're a computer-geek guy and the number of computer geek guys is l, then the eligible population of dating partners just in computer geeks is something like l/5 (assuming that you're not homosexual). Those aren't good odds to start out with, so you've got a better chance of success by expanding your pools of possibilities. When you include anything which requires at least reasonable comfort with mathematics or logic, your odds of finding someone compatible are just a lot higher (statistically speaking, actual results may vary).
So in conclusion, it all depends (big surprise). If you're a caring partner and need a caring partner, then your odds of finding one may be better or worse if you look in the computing field, but they're almost definitely worse if you limit your search to women in the computing field as there are significantly fewer of them then men (or rather it appears to be so, however someone not announcing their geekiness and someone who isn't a geek is the same thing unless your telepathic).
But I think that a lot of this can be simplified quite a bit:
1. Make friends with everyone you like and try to be on good terms with everyone if possible.
2. If in the course of life one of your friends of target gender starts to want more from you, and at the same time you start to want more from them, and equally importantly you want to give more to each other, then great.
Sounds fairly reasonable, doesn't it?
Well, if you're actually running your CGI scripts as root you're just asking someone to break you. By default, CGI scripts are run as the user nobody. Nobody owns no files, is part of no group, and has no login shell. In short, if they compromised a normal cgi script they shouldn't be able to do much more than fill /tmp up. That and read publically available files.
And as soon as you can break into some code running as administrator (or the OS itself, that is something like a third of the code, isn't it?), you can just install BO or something like that and get some decent remote-administratability options.
NT is no more inherently secure in a full security-breach than Linux is. In either case you're screwed if someone can compromise the superuser. And NT has plenty of services either running as administrator or in kernelspace. Can you even run a daemon-like service as a regular user under NT?
On what theory does an OS never allow anything to be done? Someone's got to be able to bring the system down so that someone can do something with the system. If that person is irresponsible, they're a problem. Handcuffing your users so that they can't do anything is not the solution.
I'm not sure what happened, and the sight doesn't seem to say, but if they were running CGI input without checking it they're:
a) Dumb
b) Limited to what that CGI can do.
If they configured their machine so that their CGI can do security leaks, what is the OS supposed to do, say "No, you can't do what you want. Go away and stop trying to be creative?"
As many people have pointed out, an OS is only as secure as its weakest link. The person at the keyboard is a necessary link, so if they're your weakest link, you're in trouble. The same would go if this was just a bad asp script.
You might be able to make an argument that the same sort of flexibility doesn't exist on NT and thus you can't do this sort of stuff. While that may be true, do remember that walking is generlaly safer than driving. When you can do more, you can also go wrong in more ways.
It all boils down to know what you're doing. I forget who said it, but "If you make a device idiot-proof, nature will make a better idiot."
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
saftey deserve neither liberty not saftey."
-- Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Isn't fortune wonderful?
Alphas handle files much bigger than 2 GB. As Linus is supposed to have said, if you want to do stuff like that, get a real computer to do it with.
> of course there probably is already elisp out there that does this...
/source/of/project -type f | grep \.[cCh]+p*$`
Of course there is. It's called etags. You run the program like this:
etags `find
You unfortunately have to do this for each directory, though i suspect that you can define things out to use just one etags file. Then you just hit meta-. when the cursor is over a struct, variable, function, etc. and it brings you right to the definition, opening up all necessary files. Add in hooks to saving files in cc-mode, and you can auto-update your tags file when you save. I do this and it's so fast I don't even notice it happening (Admittedly, I'm on a 633 MHz Alpha, but even so, it is fast in and of itself). I highly recommend it. That and building with make in your xemacs window so that you can just middle click on a compile error and be brought to it, and you've got a large part of an IDE right there.
Remember the Mantra: "Emacs can do everything."
Don't get me wrong, commercial unices were no shangri la, but windows didn't really do all that much of what you're talking about.
Plenty of windows programs don't work accross windows version (though they are in the minority, granted).
As for the UI choices, you are right. There's just one and frankly it's mediocre. Why is choice such so abhorrent to corporate types? Why are you people so god damn scared of someone having their kill-window button in a different place than yours? Hint: pop up an xterm and you can do everything that you could have done before just as efficicnetly for the most part. Hell, telnet into the box, you'll never have to know what the UI on the box looks like. heaven forbid that users actually read a bit of the documentation or take a look at the tooltips.
God, so much time in an office is wasted chatting, walking to the bathroom, coffee room, etc. that the hour spent on learning the keybindings for a particular application is very minor. You people talk like you're dealing with robots, for God's sake! They'r epeople. They're inefficient by design. You're never going to get maximal productivity out of them, they won't give it.
And please don't talk about libraries. Yes, in unix you have to figure out which to use. The windows way is much worse - they decide for you then tie you to a particular version, overwriting your current verision if they possibly can.
What windows did, more than anything else, was to introduce the paradigm of the crash into computers. Sure, things were buggy before, but windows dies ona fairly regular basis, at least if you tend to install and remove programs from it (though installing is usually enough on its own). That or crash.
Windows did set back the computing industry in many ways. They substituted glitz for quality, not unpredictably, and moved the computer industry in that direction.
Oh, and do you code for win32, MFC, VB, J++, or what? Don't give me this bullshit that there's one and only one way of doing things in windows. Windows is as much of a pain in the ass as anything else (if you really use it), it just works less and is a closed box, so you can't fix it when it breaks. Frankly, it's a black mark on human history that I just wish would be erased. Profit and greed don't have to go together, merciless immoral bloodsucking doesn't have to have anything to do with profit at all. I want to be rich. Very rich. I just also want the world to be better off for me having existed, too. Microsoft seems to have completely disregarded that second one.
"For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?"
Less prfound, what does it gain a man if he gains the whole world but destroys it in the process?
I have my suspicions about an 18MHz processor being able to handle a 100BaseT connection. It does take some CPU to do any sort of useful firewall work, unless of course you are just using that connection and utilizing only a fraction of the available bandwidth.
Does anyone know if the processor could handle a 100baseT connection?
I wouldn't worry about the anwhere-it's-not-popular crowd, they don't make up that much of any group, especially not hte linux crowd. I've been on the mailing lists of a number of open source programs, and believe me, the important people there are doing it for love, protection from boredom, personal gain, personal need (people who want tools and thus are writing them), etc. I've yet to see one group where anyone who made significant contributions was concerned with the fact that what they were doing was popular or not.
:-)
What you say about the slashdot crowd may be partially true, but remember that that portion of the crowd that you are talking about doesn't contribute much anyhow.
Those who want to be in the minority will, thankfully, always be the minority. You don't really have to worry about them.
Btw, I don't remember his last post about this, but I think that Katz is a lot closer to the mark on this one, what he said was more or less true. BWP wasn't revolutionary any more than any successful movie was revolutionary. It was largely in the right time at the right place. From what I heard it's a well told ghost story, told in an original style. The fact of the matter is that people can get used to just about anything, hence you always need new styles, or old styles which are now new again. Ii sure hope that hollywood doesn't start trying to imitate BWP. I like movies where I can make out the actors much better than ones where half the time I might as well close my eyes.
Isn't that what the RTF (Rich Text Format) is for? I thought that that was about the only way that Word users communicate with each other.
Have you posted these problems to linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu? Public humiliation may take the place of conscience some times. :-)
"After the first day or so (once everyone started finding out about the box), the Win2K status page reported frequently receiving over 6000 frames/sec (> 7000 datagrams/sec)."
When did the box get this? It was down more than it was up as far as anyone could tell.
"while we haven't seen any such whines from the Win2K group (as if the Win2K box attackers haven't been trying the same tricks)"
No, they just blamed their downtime on the weather and power outages and the like. Can Microsoft really not afford a UPS? Besides, their complaints weren't nearly so much about their network being hurt as their net connection being flooded. Just a guess but linuxppc.org does have their bandwidth for something else than just to have it flooded. If you read the complaints, one of them was that other machines were getting obthered, true, but the biggest was that their network connection was so saturated that they couldn't do anything over it. That has nothing to do with the box involved, it has to do with the bandwidth that they can afford.
"I'm not at all convinced that the LinuxPPC box could've stood up to the attacks that the Win2K box has received."
Maybe, maybe not. They'd need a much bigger network connection to find out, which I doubt that they can afford. Either way, the linuxppc box was much smaller than the W2k box.
"I hope every name that you were prepared to call the Win2K team had they dropped out, will now be applied to the LinuxPPC team."
Since you don't seem to have read the article, I'll reiterate what it said. The contest is still going. If you can provide a workable crack into a similarly configured system, you still get the box. They just want their network connection back. As they mentioned, Microsoft can't do that, as W2K isn't purchaseable yet.
Oh, and the linuxppc people never lied about anything going on. I'm curious, while the windows2000text box was being killed by the weather and power outages, was www.microsoft.com also down? If not, why not? Couldn't they afford to put the box on a UPS?
Whiel you're correct, how many stolen bikes do you think are actually recovered every year? If someone actually managed to steal the guy's bike, what are the chances that he'd ever see it again or that the theif would ever be procecuted for it?
So gcc, the gimp, gnome, and emacs are all useless for real work? Aside from the fact that there's gnu.misc.discuss for this, what is your definition of real work?
I never meant to say that the people who pirated Lucas's work were justified. I never said it, either. I just said that noone is going to be particularly sympathetic to him because he doesn't need the money. That and do you really think that $50,000 fines plus up to five years in prison is really justified by cheating Lucas out of some portion of $8?
My point wasn't that people should pirate Lucas's work, they're not justified in doing it. Just when you compare relative evils (stealing Lucas's work (less than $8 dollar value to lucas) versus $50,000 + five years imprisonment), which do you think is worse? That's why people are against Lucas. Not because he's fighting innocent people, but that he's breaking ribs in return for insults. The retribution is many fold more than the crime.
This actually is due to the fact that if you made the punishment fit the crime, noone would care about the penalty. Still, does it make sense to make the punishmet 1000 times more significant than the crime just so that the punishment acts as a deterrent? I guess the argument is that the damage is done to the fabric of society, and that's what the punishment is about. Maybe. I don't really buy it, though. Society did just fine without copyright for too long to believe that we're that dependent on copyright now.
Besides that, there's just too much piracy going on right no for me to believe that piracy really is going to rip apart the fabric of our society.
Oh, and I saw the movie in theaters twice, and I never saw it in bootleg copy on the net. If Lucas keeps up this money-grubbing unforgiving greed that he seems to be displaying ("I wish that the toys were cheaper but it's the manufacturers who are driving the prices up, my licensing fees don't have anything to do with it... really."), I may not see his next movie on the principle of the thing. Given how much money the guy is making, it really doesn't make sense that he cares about the piracy going on. It's got to be a drop in the bucket, when you get down to it. As you pointed out - how many people actually have the systems and bandwidth to get a bootleg copy and didn't go see the movie?
You are right, Lucas is doing what he has a legal and (probably) moral right to do. However, the sucess of his product does matter.
Compare these:
1. A starving man procecutes a man who stole a loaf of bread from him (say, a full day's meal).
2. A rich man who has more bread than he can reasonably want procecutes a man who stole a load of bread from him (one that was just going to go stale and be thrown away anyhow).
Which one are people normally going to approve of? Both are acting within their legal and moral rights.
The reason that people hold his army of lawyers against him is that he has no demonstrated need for the money that he is protecting. Also, consider the wrongs being done here. On the one case, he loses some portion of $8. On the other, the bootlegger gets a $50,000 fine and years of imprisonment. He's now doing that to people when he has no demonstrated need to. Yes, he's within his rights, but come on. Doesn't he have anything better to do than get people who did him very little harm very large punishments?
That's why people hold it against him. Because he can easily afford not to go after these people and the net suffering of humanity will be less then when he goes after them.
So is he in the right, in a sense, yes. He may be completely in the right. I don't really know. His soul is his own business. But this is basically the case of the big man bullying the smaller ones. Remember something about rights - Shylock was within his rights in demanding his pound of flesh from the merchant of venice.
Actually, while I could be wrong, it's my understanding that emacs is pretty much just a lisp interpreter. It's the lisp programs that actually do everything. I think that things are a bit different in Xemacs. I'm not sure how much this is valid, but I do believe it someone, a plain xemacs binary with no elisp packages can't do all that much. But with those elisp packages, damn. I just recently discovered etags (man, meta-. binring you to a variable's declaration or a function definition really rocks). I wonder how much more there is in Xemacs.
:-)
Well, anyhow, I think that the guy that you were responding to is right, though, a good portion of xemacs isn't xemacs itself but the lisp packages. If you were to remove all of the xemacs lisp packages, I bet you that it would have a somewhat smaller memory footprint.
Either way, the extremely modular design means that once the core is done, you get a stable program. I can't remember Xemacs ever crashing on me, and I use it for all of my programming. And if I was low on diskspace, I could get rid of all of the lisp packages that I don't use. That and there are very few bugs in Xemacs. Probably because it's a mature program. Funny, I remmeber someone talking about linux being based on 30-year-old technology. emacs is something like 20-30 years old, I think, maybe 10-20, and damn does it rock. I guess the Petreley was right when he said that programs shouldn't be measured by the yardstick of windows NT - normally programs do get better as they get older.
Wasn't it Disraeli who said that one?
The problem with Brinn isn't that he used $10 words, everyone does that in a specialty. It's that he used archetypes. Using archetypes is nearly the surest sign that you're an ass that I can think of. Archetypes are the bad ideas generally recycled by third rate intellectuals (most of whom become english teachers or english professors) to try to come up with something to talk about. They take these archetypes, push and tug characters until they fit into them (or just proclaim that they do), then procede to talk about a story in general terms.
That is, they figure out a way to say pretty much nothing in as many words as possible with as arrogant a tone as possible, doing their best to imply that they're in the know because they can categorize everything into a bunch of made-up cubby holes.
Guess what, vader may have been more than a 1-dimension cardboard cutout. So might luke. And Han. And Chewie. And C3PO. And every damn character in the movie. Lucas could have been telling a story about people. Genuine, multifaceted people.
Did you notice that just about every one of the main characters in the SW trilogy was responsible for saving each other at least once? Did you notice that every one of the main characters was saved by someone else at some point?
The problem with Brin wasn't that he used big words. Big words are just accedents of the fact that human beings only tend to pronounce so many sounds, and to get more words than sounds we have to string the words together. Unfamiliar words are just side effects of the fact that we're not all the same person, and we don't all live the same life. Noone objects to those. What people object to are people who use big, unfamiliar words as labor-saving devices. Instead of coming up with something worth saying, they just use a special cant that's readily appliable to any situation because the can't is fairly similar to the cant of newspaper psychics - so broad that it always describes everything without exactly seeming to.
I don't think that Brin is jealous of Lucas. I just think that he's talking about him to get publicity. Talking about big issues is a way to get attention, especially if you show opinions contrary to popular belief.
I think that most people will be intereste din listening to Brin when he doesn't sound like a highschool english teacher. It takes most of us a long enough time to recover from that crap and regain the ability to appreciate good literature, we don't need another dose of mindless elitist drivel.
On the other hand, I think that Brin is right that we are all part of a community. I just think that it's strange that he thinks that star wars has anything to do with the idea that democracy is bad. After all, weren't 4-6 about the goodguy rebels defeating the badguy despots?
Please don't take this as bashing you, but do you realize how sad this sounds? What would you say if I told you that my new car works just fine if I just treat it right. Treating it right consists of:
1. Only making left turns under 9 mph
2. Never going faster than 55 mph
3. Always using extra high super octane fuel
4. Always getting manufacturer supplied hyper-expensive parts
5. Not adding things like GPS units, replacing the air conditiong system, or getting a CD player.
6. Occasionally turning my car off and starting it up again while I'm driving.
Would you say that that's the mark of a good car?
As long as you're willing to redefine normal operating conditions, anything can be stable. That's not the point. Stability isn't about adapting your computing to your computer, it's about adapting your computer to your computing.
Do you really not think that users not being able to install their own software is normal? Hell, UNIX/Linux systems are designed in such a way that users can add their own system libraries without affecting any other user or system stability (minus disk space requirements).
If you want to find linux users, go to a LUG, join development mailing lists of linux projects, join linux mailing lists. Of all the methods to form opinions on "Linux users", reading slashdot and coming up with your conclusions from there has got to be a genuinely stupid method. Why on earth would you pick the one place where people don't need so much as a valid email address to post, so the anonymity level is through the roof?
:-)
Look, I'm on a number of mailing lists and projects (generally in the periphery (sp?) for most), and the people there are virtually all intelligent, level headed people. You tend to find more people who believe in the GPL than you will in other places, but by and large you find competent people getting work done.
Go to LUGs, you'll find linux users from every walk of life. Some smart, some not so smart, some brilliant, some questionably mentally incompetent. A wide variety of people like and use Linux, and forming your opinion of them in a place nearly guaranteed to be unrepresentative is a little strange.
Oh, Linux is a better client side OS than NT as long as you have a sysadmin for it, if for no other reason than it's not the path to hellish vendor lock-in. I've seen a place which runs just about every incarnation of windows under the sun (including different service pack levels of both NT 3.51 and NT 4.0) because some particular proprietary software package will only work on that particular version, heaven knows why. And let's see you remote display on a Mac's interface. Of course, you can probably come close to duplicating a Mac's wm/interface nowadays with gnome/E, so it's not even much of a point.
Note, the interface issue is a really dumb one to bring up. I'm a power user, so I can't stand the mac interface. Some people love it. Interfaces are extremely subjective things.
Anyhow, my experience with *BSD people, aside from slashdot, has them generally being pretty decent people, and I've whitnessed great levels of cooperation for portability whenever needed. These holy wars generally only exist in isolated places. The majority of people live with each other, just like the rest of life.
I'm not surprised at the insecure people who find meaning in their lives through enemies bashing everything but their one true foo. That's always happened and always will. i'm a bit surprised at level-headed sounding people thinking that those people are at all representative.
Oh, and microsoft is a real enemy. Just like carthage to the romans, microsoft must be destroyed for the good of the computing community in general, be it mac, sun, *bsd, linux, os2, etc. Everyone else can work with each other relatively well, M$ is the only one who's trying to kill off the rest. Personally, as a linux user, I hope that both linux and the BSDs flourish. As a man who has to live in the world, I hope that microsoft dies. There are real enemies and there are fake enemies. The BSDs and Linux are anything but enemies. Microsoft and everyone else are nothing but enemies. Please keep the two straight.
As for the users, there's no real generalizing them. I've seen everyone from great programmers to great novices using Linux, just like nearly everything in life. Why overgeneralize? life's to short to be wrong.
Actually, the mozilla project is not only an inherently complex project, it's a cross-api project. That's probably what really hurt it. Yes, the core rendering part is pretty complex, but the user interface part isn't. The real thing that prevented a lot of people from jumping in on mozilla was the significant level of abstraction involved.
The abiword project is similar, and I've given up on trying to work on that, as well. Whenever you try to be cross-api, you just end up inventing your own api and implementing it twice. So joining the mozilla project isn't a matter of working on a browser, it's a matter of working on a browser/operating system combo. And as soon as tracing a function becomes a matter of working through levels of abstraction, it raises the difficulty signifcantly.
That's why single-api projects do much better than cross-api projects, you don't end up building a new api at the same time. Look at the gimp and gtk.
They really both started to blossom when they were split off from each other.
The mozilla project is really a whole bunch of projects, and as such could benefit from the open source style, as I think to some degree it is doing. However, the mozilla project was attacked in the wrong manner. They didn't release working code, and only just now are starting to really get working code. You can only really bugfix and contribute small pieces to working code. Devling in and building it up to a working condition is the job of the core developers.
Anyhow, the open source development model would work and at some point will work for mozilla, it just has high entry points.
Ah, anyhow, you don't get it. Open source doesn't produce small, dinky projects or work poorly for big projects, it just needs, like any project, a decent project coordinator. Those projects which flourish are those wihch have a good project coordinator, when you get down to it. I'm not even sure that the mozilla people had a project coordinator. They seem to be getting their act at least somewhat together, though.
Probably their biggest problem, which they will always have, is that they are a seriously cross-platform project. That keeps them from actually becoming part of any community, and that's a lot of what open source is about. If every part of code has to be implementable on windows as well as on unix, that just really makes working on the project much less feasable. I don't know windows, and don't want to.
That's also hurt the abisourse people- there are features that they couldn't use because they aren't on windows. I don't want to do even as much windows programming as requires knowing what can't be done on windows. So I'm not really contributing. That's probably mozilla's biggest problem. It's too schitsophrenic (sp?) to ever be done really well, though the mozilla people do seem to be pulling it off, slowly but surely. That's the part that really surprises me.
Was w2k beta really released 1 year and 10 months ago? And they still haven't released the actual w2k? And this is a real server which gets used significantly all the time?
No, I know both C and perl and like both quite a bit. I use them for different things, but when speed isn't an issue and text processing is, I absolutely love perl.