I have never used any IM client, but I see them used around me. Ouch! Do we really need *another* source of *interruptions* in our lives/work? Do we really need more concentration busters, and more ways of passing the buck? I'm a regular presence on IRC, and at least there you can #join and, above all #leave and have some peace of mind. Screw all IM.
Evidently, you are personally responsible for whatever your computer does, if you have not taken reasonable precautions to protect it from intruders and malware, that is not a valid defense.
Therefore you cannot afford to be running any OS with a dubious security record.
Consider your future as laughing-stock at your next employer. The shame in working for SCO is fast approaching that of working for Microsoft.
Consider that you will need a job after SCO Enrons (hey, any noun can be verbed), and that I, for one, would be suspicious about taking you on, if I knew you had stayed throughout this outrage.
So for your own good, WALK OUT NOW and make it a public walk-out! Do it while your options are still worth money, at least. Hurry!
Although I never actually *measured* anything, I have been moving all my boxen (except for one Duron on which I have found it quite impossible to compile Gentoo) to Gentoo 1.4rc4. I was actually in the process of building my own compile-in-place GNU/Linux called "Q-Gnu/Linux" when I discovered Gentoo did it all, and did it better. I was all RedHat before that (going so far as to wear a red fedora on parties - I have two of those). I find Gentoo as opposed to RedHat quite impressive, at least. My professional workhorse (on which I'm currently typing) is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300:
model name : Celeron (Coppermine) stepping : 3 cpu MHz : 597.077 cache size : 128 KB
..with 384MB RAM.. and was becoming annoyingly slow in things requiring major GUI complexity, like OpenOffice, and at compiling many Java classes.
Compiling Gentoo on there allowed the machine a third chance at life, the second one being when I got it (already old then) and installed RedHat on it, over that would-be-OS it came with. It just feels that much faster again. I am no longer annoyed by it at all. It took more than 4 days to compile all I wanted from the Gentoo 1.4rc4, but it was *well* worth it.
I moved my personal little server, an Athlon Thunderbird, with the same impression. Currently running
emerge system
on my brand new Athlon XP 2600, expecting much from it.
Bottom line: Nothing but Kudos for Gentoo, wondering what went wrong during the tests described, or whether somehow the subjective speedups I have experienced are just auto-suggestion. I think not. I have been staring at CRT's since 1980, thats 23 years folks! And I tell ya compiling stuff yourself is worth it. So if you have time on your side, go for LFS, which I did, and slowly ground into Q-GNU/Linux. If you have some time, but not *that* much time, go for Gentoo, if you have no time, you poor shmuck, either get a life, or install SuSe:-), and pretend..:-):-)..
First of all, what do you mean "my logic"? I'm making a little fun of a habit some nations have at getting scared for their own languages. This doesn't imply anything but the fact that I find "Adele" and "Courriel" funny. But then I think "quatre-vingt" (four-twenty) to express the number 80, and "soixante-quinze" (sixty-fifteen) to express the number 75 are just hilarious. I make it a point to use them as often as possible whenever I'm in France.
But to get back on-topic, if, as you suggest, I would be pleading for a single world-language, which I'm not, but arguendo, let's assume I am for a minute:
Mandarin Chinese would not be a logical choice at all, because it is of a language family so intertwined in a culture that it becomes necessary to seriously study that culture before being able to make much sense of the language. Now this is true for most languages, because the metaphors are culture-sensitive. But in many languages, you can carefully avoid metaphors, and still be able to carry on a reasonable conversation.
To put it boldly: Mandarin, Japanese,.. are simply too complex to be used as a common language. Imagine the resources it would take to teach these. Better to choose some more primitive language, with a simple alfabetical written version.
And then, frankly (hence the name), I find the low learning curve for basic English very appealing.....if I would be on favour of a common world language..
Apparently, there is a scientifically sound way of doing e-voting, although it would require someone much better versed in math than I, to confirm this. I once heard Vince Rijmen (of AES "Rijndael" fame) describe ways to ensure some essential, and apparently contradictory, guarantees in e-voting (it was in an EU country, so pls forgive the EU-centricity - I have a history, you insensitive clod..:-) ):
Authentication: Assuring that one votes oneself, that one's vote is not falsified, and that one has voted, at all. (some EU countries have mandatory voting)
Anonimity: Assuring that it is impossible for a third party to determine who I've voted for.
Correctability: assuring that I can modify my vote for a certain period after it has been cast (because there is no oversight in voting at home, I could have been coerced to vote a certain way, e.g. by someone coming into my home and holding a gun against my head, and should be able to correct this).
Vince described how he and his fellows at Cryptomathic found ways to project some basic mathematical techniques onto PKI, to ensure all of the above, and therefore allow for mathematically provable e-voting. Essentially making the voting process much more certain and transparant than was ever possible using conventional techniques.
I was solemnly impressed. It sounded too good to be true. I sincerely hope some of you mathematically unchallenged/.ers will draw Vince into an online discussion about this, so we can all find out whether he really has this magical solution, or he was just advertising his new company. Make it an "Ask/.", for example.
Lucky Belgians. M$ seem to be hell-bent on bribing their way into the UK Government's infrastructure.
Five years hence, watch me try to use my ID card to see an emergency doctor, only to be told that the system has been hacked through a security hole that M$ couldn't be bothered to patch, and I will need to come back tomorrow.
Sure, in terms of external security it's a relief to hear it's Sun, not MS getting the contract. But in terms of internal security, if basic PKI standards are not respected, it doesn't matter which of both evils was chosen.
Although I congratulate the Chinese on this excellent decision, I cannot help but feel the dangers involved: If such world powers move to Unix, *and* also save themselves from crippling DRM technologies being cooked up here in the west, by the west's CPU manufacturers, they will end up with an easy technical hegemony. They will have fast, secure, free systems while the west wallows in the proto-fascist and muddy results of "war against {Piracy, Drugs, Terrorism, Anything-not-Christian,...}". Imagine the incredulence of a chinese teenager 10 years from now when (s)he hears that our CPU's refuse to run any software not mandated by the state, and that posessing CPU's not so protected will get one executed without a trial. Imagine that, when that same teenager can run and toy with Linux from a young age, and be creative and innovative with it. Ring! Ring! A Bell should be ringing in our heads now! Or does it "toll" for us, instead?
They'd better watch out for Belgians with Pies. No seriously, I think the most powerful statement we can make is to completely ignore the M$ booth. Have the curious journalists make snapshots of the empty M$ booth. The M$ era is over, and it's about time we showed the world... Which we will not do by making a big deal out of this.. It is *irrelevant*. Please act accordingly.
try Calendra.
I've been to their 1-day tech course in Paris, France, and I must say I'm very impressed. Never been much of a believer in RAD tools, a hardline coder.. But this one shakes my beliefs bigtime.
If Linux Kernel development were ever to become sensitive to market pressure, it would quickly degrade into the quality we've come to expect from many other OS's. It just takes time to do these things right. We've already seen the first signs of yielding to market pressure, when other Kernel hackers threatened to release their own 2.4 kernels end of 2000, because they (he) felt Linus was dragging his feet. This is not a good sign and it's important for everyone to catch on to this situation now that's it's not yet too late.
Reminds me of what I heard when Red Hat went public. "The greatest danger to Linux is not M$, it's Red Hat". Not meant personally, against Bob & Co, but against the pressures of the commercial world that were being introduced into the Linux community. Pressures we'd never had to contend with. And once you're talking billions of dollars, you're basically playing on Bill's (and George's) turf. You're in a different world, with a different culture, in fact, as anyone that has read The Cathedral And The Bazaar must realise. It's possible that things will go smoothly though. An equilibrium is most certainly possible Take a hint from what Sun has been doing with Solaris kernels. Even though they are clearly a commercial organisation, they have *never* let market pressure threaten software quality at kernel level. I'm figuring Linus sees this and will be as strong.
Consider yourselves lucky these Belgian dudes didn't use one of their alternate names. Koeieuier is pronounced approximatively "Coup-Ya-Ey-Yer" (say that 0xA times fast.).
Wow! You look at Office 2001 for the Mac, but remember that's their 4th go at it. It was a well-known fact amongst Mac techies that people who complained about their Macs being "very slow", "very unstable" either:
- Had old hardware and/or
- Had loads of crappy system extensions or
- were running MS Office, exclusively.
In doing major software installs, nearly all the problems you got had something to do with M$ software. Sometimes in the weirdest possible ways.
I often wondered whether Office for Mac was just a clever ploy to hinder the acceptance of MacOS.
I have a Mac here (next to Solaris and Linux Box),
and I won't allow any M$ software near it. Still.
Don't believe them! Ever!
We don't need them, after all.
Even though I have my reservations regarding the press (I have been misrepresented and ridiculed in a Belgian IT mag, presumably because I had made some unpleasant statements about what I think is their prime sponsor, Microsoft), it is good to see some decent reporters are still out there. The press must be able to function and present all sides of the facts, without fear of repression. The little freedom of press we have remaining (see the dictatorsship of the large press agencies) must be fiercely protected, in the hope that one day the courageous individuals that keep it up will make honest journalism it the rule, rather than the exception, once again. As far as I'm concerned, the protection of sources should be a fundamental right.
Censorship is unacceptable, even for such nauseating and indeed insulting items as these Nazi gadgets. It is far more "fascist" to support such censorship demands than to allow a bunch of immature frustrated lowlifes to sell and buy their swastika trinkets. Tanj! They'll be turned into martyrs, next. If the French are so worried about being reminded of WWII, why don't they send their secret service after some Nazi-trinket-production plants? They could sent them after Greenpeace, couldn't they! They sunk a Greenpeace ship, killed one of her crew in the process. Why the double standards here?
As usual, there is a middle ground, a place where GUI-decadents and CLI-saurians meet. Many, many people run (many) shell "terminal" windows at once. There is a place and time and application for both worlds. Just like the best music (IMHO) is made from combining the electronic and the acoustic, the best working environment for me has the best of both GUI and CLI. So let's cut out the old X/Y warz (Gods, I'm so tired of those) and do some *on*-topic things.
From what I can see so far the WAVE program will not go away. Hence, it's probably time to start a counter-offensive. Some variations on existing Copyleft gear denouncing WAVE for what it is, maybe a new design or two, may be a start. Give it a name, a URL, announce it here. Some synomyms for "Breakwave", (you know, the Pier, the thing that keeps waves out of a harbor) please.
Don't be so sure. A student over here in Belgium was convicted for linking to sites containing mp3 music "warez". It's referred to as the IFPI-Skynet case. It's a scandal, it's ridiculous, it's proto-fascism But it happened..
Don't be so sure. A student over here in Belgium was convicted for linking to sites containing mp3 music "warez". It's referred to as the IFPI-Skynet case. It's a scandal, it's ridiculous, it's proto-fascism But it happened.. I have nothing but contempt for these new lawmakers. Please everyone, do all the mirroring and linking you can.
Slashdot Mirror
I have never used any IM client, but I see them used around me. Ouch! Do we really need *another* source of *interruptions* in our lives/work? Do we really need more concentration busters, and more ways of passing the buck? I'm a regular presence on IRC, and at least there you can #join and, above all #leave and have some peace of mind. Screw all IM.
Evidently, you are personally responsible for whatever your computer does, if you have not taken reasonable precautions to protect it from intruders and malware, that is not a valid defense.
Therefore you cannot afford to be running any OS with a dubious security record.
Dear fellow geek,
Consider your future as laughing-stock at your next employer. The shame in working for SCO is fast approaching that of working for Microsoft.
Consider that you will need a job after SCO Enrons (hey, any noun can be verbed), and that I, for one, would be suspicious about taking you on, if I knew you had stayed throughout this outrage.
So for your own good, WALK OUT NOW and make it a public walk-out! Do it while your options are still worth money, at least. Hurry!
WKR,
A concerned fellow geek.
Although I never actually *measured* anything, I have been moving all my boxen (except for one Duron on which I have found it quite impossible to compile Gentoo) to Gentoo 1.4rc4. I was actually in the process of building my own compile-in-place GNU/Linux called "Q-Gnu/Linux" when I discovered Gentoo did it all, and did it better. I was all RedHat before that (going so far as to wear a red fedora on parties - I have two of those). I find Gentoo as opposed to RedHat quite impressive, at least. My professional workhorse (on which I'm currently typing) is a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300:
..with 384MB RAM.. and was becoming annoyingly slow in things requiring major GUI complexity, like OpenOffice, and at compiling many Java classes.
:-), and pretend.. :-) :-)..
model name : Celeron (Coppermine)
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 597.077
cache size : 128 KB
Compiling Gentoo on there allowed the machine a third chance at life, the second one being when I got it (already old then) and installed RedHat on it, over that would-be-OS it came with. It just feels that much faster again. I am no longer annoyed by it at all. It took more than 4 days to compile all I wanted from the Gentoo 1.4rc4, but it was *well* worth it.
I moved my personal little server, an Athlon Thunderbird, with the same impression. Currently running
emerge system
on my brand new Athlon XP 2600, expecting much from it.
Bottom line: Nothing but Kudos for Gentoo, wondering what went wrong during the tests described, or whether somehow the subjective speedups I have experienced are just auto-suggestion. I think not. I have been staring at CRT's since 1980, thats 23 years folks! And I tell ya compiling stuff yourself is worth it. So if you have time on your side, go for LFS, which I did, and slowly ground into Q-GNU/Linux. If you have some time, but not *that* much time, go for Gentoo, if you have no time, you poor shmuck, either get a life, or install SuSe
First of all, what do you mean "my logic"? I'm making a little fun of a habit some nations have at getting scared for their own languages.
.. are simply too complex to be used as a common language. Imagine the resources it would take to teach these. Better to choose some more primitive language, with a simple alfabetical written version.
...if I would be on favour of a common world language..
This doesn't imply anything but the fact that I find "Adele" and "Courriel" funny. But then I think "quatre-vingt" (four-twenty) to express the number 80, and "soixante-quinze" (sixty-fifteen) to express the number 75 are just hilarious. I make it a point to use them as often as possible whenever I'm in France.
But to get back on-topic, if, as you suggest, I would be pleading for a single world-language, which I'm not, but arguendo, let's assume I am for a minute:
Mandarin Chinese would not be a logical choice at all, because it is of a language family so intertwined in a culture that it becomes necessary to seriously study that culture before being able to make much sense of the language. Now this is true for most languages, because the metaphors are culture-sensitive. But in many languages, you can carefully avoid metaphors, and still be able to carry on a reasonable conversation.
To put it boldly: Mandarin, Japanese,
And then, frankly (hence the name), I find the low learning curve for basic English very appealing..
Years ago, they suggested to ban the term "e-mail address" (adresse email), and to use "ADELE" instead (Adresse Electronique).
Pierre, c'est quoi ton adele?
Apparently, there is a scientifically sound way of doing e-voting, although it would require someone much better versed in math than I, to confirm this. I once heard Vince Rijmen (of AES "Rijndael" fame) describe ways to ensure some essential, and apparently contradictory, guarantees in e-voting (it was in an EU country, so pls forgive the EU-centricity - I have a history, you insensitive clod.. :-) ):
/.ers will draw Vince into an online discussion about this, so we can all find out whether he really has this magical solution, or he was just advertising his new company. Make it an "Ask /.", for example.
Authentication: Assuring that one votes oneself, that one's vote is not falsified, and that one has voted, at all. (some EU countries have mandatory voting)
Anonimity: Assuring that it is impossible for a third party to determine who I've voted for.
Correctability: assuring that I can modify my vote for a certain period after it has been cast (because there is no oversight in voting at home, I could have been coerced to vote a certain way, e.g. by someone coming into my home and holding a gun against my head, and should be able to correct this).
Vince described how he and his fellows at Cryptomathic found ways to project some basic mathematical techniques onto PKI, to ensure all of the above, and therefore allow for mathematically provable e-voting. Essentially making the voting process much more certain and transparant than was ever possible using conventional techniques.
I was solemnly impressed. It sounded too good to be true. I sincerely hope some of you mathematically unchallenged
Lucky Belgians. M$ seem to be hell-bent on bribing their way into the UK Government's infrastructure. Five years hence, watch me try to use my ID card to see an emergency doctor, only to be told that the system has been hacked through a security hole that M$ couldn't be bothered to patch, and I will need to come back tomorrow.
Sure, in terms of external security it's a relief to hear it's Sun, not MS getting the contract. But in terms of internal security, if basic PKI standards are not respected, it doesn't matter which of both evils was chosen.
Although I congratulate the Chinese on this excellent decision, I cannot help but feel the dangers involved: If such world powers move to Unix, *and* also save themselves from crippling DRM technologies being cooked up here in the west, by the west's CPU manufacturers, they will end up with an easy technical hegemony. They will have fast, secure, free systems while the west wallows in the proto-fascist and muddy results of "war against {Piracy, Drugs, Terrorism, Anything-not-Christian,...}". Imagine the incredulence of a chinese teenager 10 years from now when (s)he hears that our CPU's refuse to run any software not mandated by the state, and that posessing CPU's not so protected will get one executed without a trial. Imagine that, when that same teenager can run and toy with Linux from a young age, and be creative and innovative with it.
Ring! Ring! A Bell should be ringing in our heads now! Or does it "toll" for us, instead?
They'd better watch out for Belgians with Pies.
No seriously, I think the most powerful statement we can make is to completely ignore the M$ booth.
Have the curious journalists make snapshots of the empty M$ booth.
The M$ era is over, and it's about time we showed the world... Which we will not do by making a big deal out of this..
It is *irrelevant*. Please act accordingly.
Now what does that tell us about the majority of people.. but you already knew that..
I name Yello Biafra.
He'll resist corporate rule forever.
Finally, "The March is Over"
try Calendra.
I've been to their 1-day tech course in Paris, France, and I must say I'm very impressed. Never been much of a believer in RAD tools, a hardline coder.. But this one shakes my beliefs bigtime.
just an unbalanced quote in the href.
remove the last quote from the URL and you'll be fine.
If Linux Kernel development were ever to become sensitive to market pressure, it would quickly degrade into the quality we've come to expect from many other OS's. It just takes time to do these things right. We've already seen the first signs of yielding to market pressure, when other Kernel hackers threatened to release their own 2.4 kernels end of 2000, because they (he) felt Linus was dragging his feet. This is not a good sign and it's important for everyone to catch on to this situation now that's it's not yet too late. Reminds me of what I heard when Red Hat went public. "The greatest danger to Linux is not M$, it's Red Hat". Not meant personally, against Bob & Co, but against the pressures of the commercial world that were being introduced into the Linux community. Pressures we'd never had to contend with. And once you're talking billions of dollars, you're basically playing on Bill's (and George's) turf. You're in a different world, with a different culture, in fact, as anyone that has read The Cathedral And The Bazaar must realise. It's possible that things will go smoothly though. An equilibrium is most certainly possible Take a hint from what Sun has been doing with Solaris kernels. Even though they are clearly a commercial organisation, they have *never* let market pressure threaten software quality at kernel level. I'm figuring Linus sees this and will be as strong.
Consider yourselves lucky these Belgian dudes didn't use one of their alternate names. Koeieuier is pronounced approximatively "Coup-Ya-Ey-Yer" (say that 0xA times fast.).
And if such an organisation were created, which I find an excellent idea, a first place for them to host their communications could be havenCo.
Wow! You look at Office 2001 for the Mac, but remember that's their 4th go at it. It was a well-known fact amongst Mac techies that people who complained about their Macs being "very slow", "very unstable" either:
- Had old hardware and/or
- Had loads of crappy system extensions or
- were running MS Office, exclusively.
In doing major software installs, nearly all the problems you got had something to do with M$ software. Sometimes in the weirdest possible ways.
I often wondered whether Office for Mac was just a clever ploy to hinder the acceptance of MacOS.
I have a Mac here (next to Solaris and Linux Box),
and I won't allow any M$ software near it. Still.
Don't believe them! Ever!
We don't need them, after all.
Even though I have my reservations regarding the press (I have been misrepresented and ridiculed in a Belgian IT mag, presumably because I had made some unpleasant statements about what I think is their prime sponsor, Microsoft), it is good to see some decent reporters are still out there. The press must be able to function and present all sides of the facts, without fear of repression. The little freedom of press we have remaining (see the dictatorsship of the large press agencies) must be fiercely protected, in the hope that one day the courageous individuals that keep it up will make honest journalism it the rule, rather than the exception, once again. As far as I'm concerned, the protection of sources should be a fundamental right.
Censorship is unacceptable, even for such nauseating and indeed insulting items as these Nazi gadgets. It is far more "fascist" to support such censorship demands than to allow a bunch of immature frustrated lowlifes to sell and buy their swastika trinkets. Tanj! They'll be turned into martyrs, next. If the French are so worried about being reminded of WWII, why don't they send their secret service after some Nazi-trinket-production plants? They could sent them after Greenpeace, couldn't they! They sunk a Greenpeace ship, killed one of her crew in the process. Why the double standards here?
As usual, there is a middle ground, a place where GUI-decadents and CLI-saurians meet. Many, many people run (many) shell "terminal" windows at once. There is a place and time and application for both worlds. Just like the best music (IMHO) is made from combining the electronic and the acoustic, the best working environment for me has the best of both GUI and CLI. So let's cut out the old X/Y warz (Gods, I'm so tired of those) and do some *on*-topic things.
From what I can see so far the WAVE program will not go away. Hence, it's probably time to start a counter-offensive. Some variations on existing Copyleft gear denouncing WAVE for what it is, maybe a new design or two, may be a start. Give it a name, a URL, announce it here. Some synomyms for "Breakwave", (you know, the Pier, the thing that keeps waves out of a harbor) please.
Don't be so sure. A student over here in Belgium was convicted for linking to sites containing mp3 music "warez". It's referred to as the IFPI-Skynet case. It's a scandal, it's ridiculous, it's proto-fascism But it happened..
Don't be so sure. A student over here in Belgium was convicted for linking to sites containing mp3 music "warez". It's referred to as the IFPI-Skynet case. It's a scandal, it's ridiculous, it's proto-fascism But it happened.. I have nothing but contempt for these new lawmakers. Please everyone, do all the mirroring and linking you can.