>>"What if there was peace, love and understanding on the Earth, so we wouldn't feel the pressure to leave?"
We are what we are; we will take our problems with us. People imagine that some magic ideology and some kind of all-knowing government will change things, but that's a fantasy.
Sure, but my opinion isn't. I've no reason to present evidence.
The fact is that Slashdor does not engage in journalism or news production of any form. It simply points to stories written by other people, prefacing them with the biased remarks of both the story submitter and the Slashdot staff.
If anyone relies on/. for news, they have my sympathy. No news here, just public exhibitions of bias and ignorance.
This was about a decision that people don't have a right to avoid identiying themselves when asked by a police officer who has reasonable grounds to believe they were involved in a crime. How does that connect with people wanting to be private on the very public Internet? Tangentially, I think, but it sure fuels the passions of the tin-foil brigades.
To repeat, who's to say what's important? Do you want the media to decide this? How? You're beating on one example of something you think is important that wasn't reported to your liking. The fact that you think this issue is important doesn't mean either that it is important or that the mass media should cover it.
>>"how common is it that a dozen similar bills are introduced at the same time..."
The Supreme Court only hears cases it wants to hear because the Constitution gives it that power. The Supreme Court is the judicial branch of government, equal to the Congress and the Executive Branch. That's why it's called the "Supreme" Court. (You do remember separation-of-powers and all that?)
The Court determines its own cases, just as Congress determine the legislation it passes and the President determines the legislation he will propose.
Of course, the article is flamebait. Since when did/. publish news? YOu don't really think the squad of adolescents running this thing have a clue what they're talking about?
Again, how is anyone supposed to know beforehand which bills will be passed, important or not?
Let's say a dozen bills are introduced dealing with the same subject. Let's then suppose that a news outlet decides the subject is important. Do you expe ct them to report on each of the 12 bills, or to, somehow, predict which one will actually pass?
As I said earlier, if a bill is important to you, you don't need to rely on the media. You can follow its progress in Congress yourself.
Besides, the media's job is not to decide what's important. Their job is to provide content of interest to the widest possible audience.
Sure, let's invent time travel so newscasters can go back and report on a new law as soon as it's introduced.
The Congress passes hundreds of bills each session. Do you expect the media to predict which will pass and which won't?
In any case, nothing has happened here. Congress has not passed this bill. The bill survived a vote in a single committee. (That committee probably has a website, too, so you could look it up and see what it says about this issue.) It will be considered by other committees before, and if, it comes to a vote in the House. If it passes there, then it goes on to the Senate.
As I said, except for this week's scare sotry about spyware, the BBC had no reason to run this story. Committee votes on bills happen every day, plus there are several other similar spyware bills under consideration, as well. The fact that one of them was just approved by one committee gave the agency that wrote this piece (Reuters, I suspect) a good hook.
The world is full of information that doesn't make the evening news every day. Like what happens in Congress. Try looking for it.
Unless, of course, you'd rather sit on your duff and wait for someone else to tell you what's going on...and then bitch and whine because you don't know anything.
We've been terraforming this planet for thousands of years, ever since we started farming. Asking if terraforming Mars is ethical is like asking of it is ethical to plant a wheat field.
The question of ethicality is always posed a if it is an either-or proposition: Either something is ethical or it is not. That's how this question will certainly be framed by the anti-human wing of the environmental movement.
Now, ignoring the fact that different people have different ethical frameworks, humans have every right to move and migrate and exploit any territory they can lay their hands on. We have an obligation to act responsibly and wisely, but that does not include being ashamed of being human and rejecting the legitimate role we play as a sentient species in the Universe.
Earth is populated today because people migrated from one place to the next. Mars is the next place.
First, the BBC doesn't have a scoop. I've been reading about the story for days. This piece is almost certainly a pickup from Reuters or another agency. (If it was a Beeb piece, the story would have a Beeb byline.)
Second, you haven't seen it on the evening TV news because it isn't that much of a story. The bill, one of several on the same issue, made it through one House subcommittee. If it passes and is signed into law, then it might merit mentioning on "major US media outlets?.
If spyware wasn't in the news this week, you'd likely not be seeing this story get any play at all. The story is, in fact, getting play because it make a nice sidebar for the other story this week about most PC's being infested with dozens of spyware programs.
I used the DOS version of 5.1 for as long as I could get away with it. Sometimes an applicaton reaches the point where it is as good as it is going to get. Nothing as good since.
Ditto Lotus Magellan and Lotus Agenda, while we're lamenting great DOS apps that died with the OS. Nothing since for any OS does what they did as well as they did.
1. Slackware's installation routine does not detect or configure my monitor, my video card, my printer, my sound card, or my mouse. All that must be done by the user.
2. As I said, you need to configure X yourself. Slackware isn't going to do it for you. Yes, there are tools with X that attempt to do that. My experience has been that they are faulty. In any case, those tools are only useful to someone who already knows they exist and how to use them. Nothing occurs during the SLackware install process to inform the user about these utilities, short of vague admontions in Patrick V.'s mail to root to check out the man pages. (My guess is that mail usually goes unread these days because new users don't have a clue how to read it and Slack doesn't give them any help getting a clue.)
3. Run pkgtool, select 'Setup", then select "Mouse". Shazam, a way to configure your mouse. Of course, it just runs mouseconfig, but Slackware's not going to tell you that program even exists.
>>..the auto-detection of network devices has been in the installer for a while now. Also, recent releases of Slackware have hotplug support.
True. But most of the complainers want Slackware to find and configure everything.
>> Apparently you're also unfamiliar with "X -configure"
I know about it. It's part of X, not Slackware. I always use xf86config/xorgconfig.
>>...pkgtool is a tool for installing/removing packages. It does NOT have configuration options (outside of startup script selection) or setup for input devices.
That's pretty much what I said:" (set up your mouse, decide what services will run, etc.)"
Swaret isn't part of Slackware. I use it to stay uptodate with -current, but that's it. It's fine to pull down the latest updates, but I'm not about to let it or any other tool have free rein to install software. I don't let Swaret install updates automatically (no "--update -a" stuff), and almost everything else gets installed from source. If I didn't like it that way, I wouldn't be using Slackware.
Never met Winer, but I'm aware of his reputation. Doesn't change things, though. If people want to be annoyed because they got next-to-no notice that their free hosting service was coming to an end, fine. If they just want to play "Let's bash Winer", then that's silly. I haven't seen anyone make a credible case that he has a requirement to continue supporting thousands of free sites if he doesn't want to do that.
Slackware does not do automatic package dependency resolution. Many people seem to consider that a sine qua non of using Linux. If you do, too, Slackware isn't for you. In the other hand, you'll never need to deal with botched automatic dependency resolution or trying to understand how installing from source will impact your dependency gizmo.
Slackware does not do automatic hardware detection and configuration. You need to know how to partition your disk(s) with fdisk or cfdisk before you even run the setup program. You need to know if you want to use CUPS or lprng or something else with your printer and how to set it up. You need to know the specs about your video card and monitor, and you need to configure X yourself.
I know all those things and can run thorugh Slackware's curses-based setup program as fast as I can use the keyboard.
Slackware has a little configuration tool called "pkgtool" that allows you to do some basic configuration (set up your mouse, decide what services will run, etc.). Beyond that, well...the beauty of Unix is that everything is configured with a text file.
I like Slackware because it doesn't get in my way with a big layer of poorly documented packaging and configured gizmos. Everything is visible. When I change something, I know exactly what has been changed. When I need to install software, I don't need to wait until someone releases it in the package format used by my distribution. I can download the source and install it myself. Case in point: When KDE 3.2.3 was released a few days ago, I might have downloaded the source and installed it myself as soon as KDE madeit available. As it was, the files were available on the Slack site within 48 hours.
Finally, Slackware does minimal tweaking of the packages it offers. What you install is pretyt much exactly as it was released by the developers. That's a great boon when something breaks. You don't need to worry about what SLackware has done to the code and not told you about.
No, the new version is not out. He's just moved the -current branch along to the point of calling it RC1. New CD's will be available via Torrent when 10.0 is officially released. And, you'll also be able to buy a nice Slackware box, too.
In the meantime, grab swaret or slakpkg and update yourself all the way to today's version of -current. Then, you will be at RC1. (If you use slackpkg, pull down the current 1.2.2 version from an updated mirror. It's in the/extra directory of their slackware-current tree. It will contain an uptodate list of -current mirrors.
Also, don't be surprised if it takes the mirrors a few days to catch up.
Slackware has a nice set of tools to install, upgrade and remove packages.
What Slackware doesn't do is automatically resolve dependencies. You're on you own for that. And, frankly, given my experiences using the Debians and RedHats of this world, automatic dependency resolution is a disaster waiting to happen.
A little bit of reading before you install something should tell you about its prerequisites. If a maintainer can't be bothered to tell you what his code assumes is already on your machine, don't use hise code.
Agree. I've been using Slack just about as long as you. Everytime I use another distribution I eventually bang my head against their packaging and configuration schemes. Life's too short to waste it learning about proprietary voodoo.
Agree that the animosity I've seen expressed by some is inexplicable. The web seems to give a lot of people permission to be completely self-centered. It's as if they think other people are obligated to give them something.
>> Do you think it's acceptable for the newspaper to be able to answer authoritatively "Which articles did reallocate look at?"
Acceptable by what standards? Pretty much everything we do on the net is trackable, and tracked. The only way to prevent that tracking is via restrictive legislation. As for me, I fear the precedent set by that legislation much more than I fear the risk of a newspaper knowing what articles I read. Why? Because the precdent to ban something I don't support means something I do support can be similiarly banned.
As he's said (just in case, you know, a few Slashdotter's don't actually know what they're talkng about because they don't read anything beyond/.'s well-spun lede), the blogs were hosted on servers belonging to Userland, the California corporation Winer founded but left two years ago after heart bypass surgery. Userland apparently recently cleaned its corporate house, letting go of several activities and interests that they were supporting but which do not, and will not, bring in any revenue. That included the blogs.
Winer seems to have wanted to migrate the blogs to Cambridge, Mass, where he is now a visiting fellow at Harvard. However, when he loaded up a server with the blogs, it turned to molasses. (If memeory serves, they run on a Windows server.)
The obvious solution was to buy more hardware and spread the blogs among several servers. I can't really blame Winer for not doing that: He'd become a defacto freebie hosting service (there are no ads on these free sites, so no chance for any revenue); he'd need to hire staff to perform the migrations and manage the servers (his comments clearly indicated that the doctors have told him to stay away from the stress of programming and admin'ing); and he's about to leave Harvard and move elsewhere.
As far as the TOS goes, I once briefly used another free Userland/Winer blogging facility and, I believe, those TOS clearly indicated that there the sites were hosted, in effect, at the pleasure of Userland. They made no claims about support, uptime, or lifetime.
That said, the notice to the users was very abrupt. We don't know if this had been in the works for weeks or for hours. If the decision to take down the sites was made weeks ago, then the notice to users should have been given weeks ago. If the decision was made abruptly, everyone was left holding the bag.
Perhaps a better solution would have been for Userland to send out the shutdown notices and for no one to make any attempt to keep the sites alive.
Slashdot Mirror
>>"What if there was peace, love and understanding on the Earth, so we wouldn't feel the pressure to leave?"
We are what we are; we will take our problems with us. People imagine that some magic ideology and some kind of all-knowing government will change things, but that's a fantasy.
Sure, but my opinion isn't. I've no reason to present evidence.
The fact is that Slashdor does not engage in journalism or news production of any form. It simply points to stories written by other people, prefacing them with the biased remarks of both the story submitter and the Slashdot staff.
It's just a blog.
If anyone relies on /. for news, they have my sympathy. No news here, just public exhibitions of bias and ignorance.
This was about a decision that people don't have a right to avoid identiying themselves when asked by a police officer who has reasonable grounds to believe they were involved in a crime. How does that connect with people wanting to be private on the very public Internet? Tangentially, I think, but it sure fuels the passions of the tin-foil brigades.
Rubbish. They're sophomoric tabloid artists trying to drive traffic to this site. Their simple ignorance and lack of experience is on display daily.
>>'I'm saying "mention the important ones"
To repeat, who's to say what's important? Do you want the media to decide this? How? You're beating on one example of something you think is important that wasn't reported to your liking. The fact that you think this issue is important doesn't mean either that it is important or that the mass media should cover it.
>>"how common is it that a dozen similar bills are introduced at the same time..."
Very.
The Supreme Court only hears cases it wants to hear because the Constitution gives it that power. The Supreme Court is the judicial branch of government, equal to the Congress and the Executive Branch. That's why it's called the "Supreme" Court. (You do remember separation-of-powers and all that?)
/. publish news? YOu don't really think the squad of adolescents running this thing have a clue what they're talking about?
The Court determines its own cases, just as Congress determine the legislation it passes and the President determines the legislation he will propose.
Of course, the article is flamebait. Since when did
Again, how is anyone supposed to know beforehand which bills will be passed, important or not?
Let's say a dozen bills are introduced dealing with the same subject. Let's then suppose that a news outlet decides the subject is important. Do you expe ct them to report on each of the 12 bills, or to, somehow, predict which one will actually pass?
As I said earlier, if a bill is important to you, you don't need to rely on the media. You can follow its progress in Congress yourself.
Besides, the media's job is not to decide what's important. Their job is to provide content of interest to the widest possible audience.
Sure, let's invent time travel so newscasters can go back and report on a new law as soon as it's introduced.
The Congress passes hundreds of bills each session. Do you expect the media to predict which will pass and which won't?
In any case, nothing has happened here. Congress has not passed this bill. The bill survived a vote in a single committee. (That committee probably has a website, too, so you could look it up and see what it says about this issue.) It will be considered by other committees before, and if, it comes to a vote in the House. If it passes there, then it goes on to the Senate.
As I said, except for this week's scare sotry about spyware, the BBC had no reason to run this story. Committee votes on bills happen every day, plus there are several other similar spyware bills under consideration, as well. The fact that one of them was just approved by one committee gave the agency that wrote this piece (Reuters, I suspect) a good hook.
The world is full of information that doesn't make the evening news every day. Like what happens in Congress. Try looking for it.
Unless, of course, you'd rather sit on your duff and wait for someone else to tell you what's going on...and then bitch and whine because you don't know anything.
We've been terraforming this planet for thousands of years, ever since we started farming. Asking if terraforming Mars is ethical is like asking of it is ethical to plant a wheat field.
The question of ethicality is always posed a if it is an either-or proposition: Either something is ethical or it is not. That's how this question will certainly be framed by the anti-human wing of the environmental movement.
Now, ignoring the fact that different people have different ethical frameworks, humans have every right to move and migrate and exploit any territory they can lay their hands on. We have an obligation to act responsibly and wisely, but that does not include being ashamed of being human and rejecting the legitimate role we play as a sentient species in the Universe.
Earth is populated today because people migrated from one place to the next. Mars is the next place.
First, the BBC doesn't have a scoop. I've been reading about the story for days. This piece is almost certainly a pickup from Reuters or another agency. (If it was a Beeb piece, the story would have a Beeb byline.)
Second, you haven't seen it on the evening TV news because it isn't that much of a story. The bill, one of several on the same issue, made it through one House subcommittee. If it passes and is signed into law, then it might merit mentioning on "major US media outlets?.
If spyware wasn't in the news this week, you'd likely not be seeing this story get any play at all. The story is, in fact, getting play because it make a nice sidebar for the other story this week about most PC's being infested with dozens of spyware programs.
Netscape didn't go belly up because they delayed release of one more version of the browser. They gave the thing away, remember? Still do.
They went belly up because they were everyone's third or fourth choice for web amd server technology.
I used the DOS version of 5.1 for as long as I could get away with it. Sometimes an applicaton reaches the point where it is as good as it is going to get. Nothing as good since.
Ditto Lotus Magellan and Lotus Agenda, while we're lamenting great DOS apps that died with the OS. Nothing since for any OS does what they did as well as they did.
1. Slackware's installation routine does not detect or configure my monitor, my video card, my printer, my sound card, or my mouse. All that must be done by the user.
2. As I said, you need to configure X yourself. Slackware isn't going to do it for you. Yes, there are tools with X that attempt to do that. My experience has been that they are faulty. In any case, those tools are only useful to someone who already knows they exist and how to use them. Nothing occurs during the SLackware install process to inform the user about these utilities, short of vague admontions in Patrick V.'s mail to root to check out the man pages. (My guess is that mail usually goes unread these days because new users don't have a clue how to read it and Slack doesn't give them any help getting a clue.)
3. Run pkgtool, select 'Setup", then select "Mouse". Shazam, a way to configure your mouse. Of course, it just runs mouseconfig, but Slackware's not going to tell you that program even exists.
>> ..the auto-detection of network devices has been in the installer for a while now. Also, recent releases of Slackware have hotplug support.
...pkgtool is a tool for installing/removing packages. It does NOT have configuration options (outside of startup script selection) or setup for input devices.
True. But most of the complainers want Slackware to find and configure everything.
>> Apparently you're also unfamiliar with "X -configure"
I know about it. It's part of X, not Slackware. I always use xf86config/xorgconfig.
>>
That's pretty much what I said:" (set up your mouse, decide what services will run, etc.)"
Swaret isn't part of Slackware. I use it to stay uptodate with -current, but that's it. It's fine to pull down the latest updates, but I'm not about to let it or any other tool have free rein to install software. I don't let Swaret install updates automatically (no "--update -a" stuff), and almost everything else gets installed from source. If I didn't like it that way, I wouldn't be using Slackware.
Never met Winer, but I'm aware of his reputation. Doesn't change things, though. If people want to be annoyed because they got next-to-no notice that their free hosting service was coming to an end, fine. If they just want to play "Let's bash Winer", then that's silly. I haven't seen anyone make a credible case that he has a requirement to continue supporting thousands of free sites if he doesn't want to do that.
Slackware does not do automatic package dependency resolution. Many people seem to consider that a sine qua non of using Linux. If you do, too, Slackware isn't for you. In the other hand, you'll never need to deal with botched automatic dependency resolution or trying to understand how installing from source will impact your dependency gizmo.
Slackware does not do automatic hardware detection and configuration. You need to know how to partition your disk(s) with fdisk or cfdisk before you even run the setup program. You need to know if you want to use CUPS or lprng or something else with your printer and how to set it up. You need to know the specs about your video card and monitor, and you need to configure X yourself.
I know all those things and can run thorugh Slackware's curses-based setup program as fast as I can use the keyboard.
Slackware has a little configuration tool called "pkgtool" that allows you to do some basic configuration (set up your mouse, decide what services will run, etc.). Beyond that, well...the beauty of Unix is that everything is configured with a text file.
I like Slackware because it doesn't get in my way with a big layer of poorly documented packaging and configured gizmos. Everything is visible. When I change something, I know exactly what has been changed. When I need to install software, I don't need to wait until someone releases it in the package format used by my distribution. I can download the source and install it myself. Case in point: When KDE 3.2.3 was released a few days ago, I might have downloaded the source and installed it myself as soon as KDE madeit available. As it was, the files were available on the Slack site within 48 hours.
Finally, Slackware does minimal tweaking of the packages it offers. What you install is pretyt much exactly as it was released by the developers. That's a great boon when something breaks. You don't need to worry about what SLackware has done to the code and not told you about.
No, the new version is not out. He's just moved the -current branch along to the point of calling it RC1. New CD's will be available via Torrent when 10.0 is officially released. And, you'll also be able to buy a nice Slackware box, too.
/extra directory of their slackware-current tree. It will contain an uptodate list of -current mirrors.
In the meantime, grab swaret or slakpkg and update yourself all the way to today's version of -current. Then, you will be at RC1. (If you use slackpkg, pull down the current 1.2.2 version from an updated mirror. It's in the
Also, don't be surprised if it takes the mirrors a few days to catch up.
Slackware has a nice set of tools to install, upgrade and remove packages.
What Slackware doesn't do is automatically resolve dependencies. You're on you own for that. And, frankly, given my experiences using the Debians and RedHats of this world, automatic dependency resolution is a disaster waiting to happen.
A little bit of reading before you install something should tell you about its prerequisites. If a maintainer can't be bothered to tell you what his code assumes is already on your machine, don't use hise code.
Agree. I've been using Slack just about as long as you. Everytime I use another distribution I eventually bang my head against their packaging and configuration schemes. Life's too short to waste it learning about proprietary voodoo.
Agree that the animosity I've seen expressed by some is inexplicable. The web seems to give a lot of people permission to be completely self-centered. It's as if they think other people are obligated to give them something.
>> Do you think it's acceptable for the newspaper to be able to answer authoritatively "Which articles did reallocate look at?"
Acceptable by what standards? Pretty much everything we do on the net is trackable, and tracked. The only way to prevent that tracking is via restrictive legislation. As for me, I fear the precedent set by that legislation much more than I fear the risk of a newspaper knowing what articles I read. Why? Because the precdent to ban something I don't support means something I do support can be similiarly banned.
As he's said (just in case, you know, a few Slashdotter's don't actually know what they're talkng about because they don't read anything beyond /.'s well-spun lede), the blogs were hosted on servers belonging to Userland, the California corporation Winer founded but left two years ago after heart bypass surgery. Userland apparently recently cleaned its corporate house, letting go of several activities and interests that they were supporting but which do not, and will not, bring in any revenue. That included the blogs.
Winer seems to have wanted to migrate the blogs to Cambridge, Mass, where he is now a visiting fellow at Harvard. However, when he loaded up a server with the blogs, it turned to molasses. (If memeory serves, they run on a Windows server.)
The obvious solution was to buy more hardware and spread the blogs among several servers. I can't really blame Winer for not doing that: He'd become a defacto freebie hosting service (there are no ads on these free sites, so no chance for any revenue); he'd need to hire staff to perform the migrations and manage the servers (his comments clearly indicated that the doctors have told him to stay away from the stress of programming and admin'ing); and he's about to leave Harvard and move elsewhere.
As far as the TOS goes, I once briefly used another free Userland/Winer blogging facility and, I believe, those TOS clearly indicated that there the sites were hosted, in effect, at the pleasure of Userland. They made no claims about support, uptime, or lifetime.
That said, the notice to the users was very abrupt. We don't know if this had been in the works for weeks or for hours. If the decision to take down the sites was made weeks ago, then the notice to users should have been given weeks ago. If the decision was made abruptly, everyone was left holding the bag.
Perhaps a better solution would have been for Userland to send out the shutdown notices and for no one to make any attempt to keep the sites alive.
Cute. That'll tell those Evil Marketroids bent on ruining your life.
I guess you pay in cash, otherwise your name would be on the check or otherwise ssociated with your payment.