What I still don't get is why folks are so hot on upping tax rate on the very folks that are capable of hiring employees? Isn't the whole point in getting a sagging economy turned around to get the unemployment numbers down? Last I checked, social programs don't hire people.
Re:Yes, the way to help the economy is cut taxes.
on
Tech Rich Get Richer
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· Score: 1
while raising taxes for the poor
Ummm, exactly when did this event happen?
Why should Bill Gates pay taxes so you can get your medication and go to the hospital?
Wow. Where to start with this one? Nevermind that the VAST majority (something like 80-90%) of tax revenues from income are from that tiny minority of rich folks. Don't bog your rant down with actually looking this up though, you're on one heck of a roll.
The best solution for all economic problems is to allow the rich to keep more of their own money.
There's a few odd things those "rich" folks do with money that "poor" folks generally don't. Those silly rich tend to invest in a variety of things. They'll start new businesses, or help fund others. Quite often this invested capital actually creates JOBS.
The clever bit here, which is a little known fact around socialist knitting clubs, is that "poor" people don't invest! Been around this here planet all my life, and I have yet to get hired for employment by a poor person. It really is the oddest thing. Seems that someone who isn't capable of making a payroll doesn't hire people. Obviously this must be a civil rights issue.
Taxes == Communism and only the poor are Communists.
Taking your sarcasm into account, let's just go and raise them taxes on all those evil "rich" folks and hand it out to who all them really smart politicians feel are more worthy to have that cash. Business and corporations are evil anyway, so if you close down a few or just bring them to their knees all the better.
To filter this thing out have Mozilla look for a header value of:
X-MailScanner: Found to be clean
It's in the header info on each and every one of these mails. You'll need to configure a custom header of "X-MailScanner" then look for a value of "Found to be clean" in order to get this to work.
Seems this virus is trying to fake out AV checking at the server.
If on the other hand you define spam as 'that which our filters decide is spam'... (I kid you not, folk do try to get that type of definition accepted). The exception would be satires like 'make penis fast'.
Here's a pretty good example of why you don't let automated filtering run the whole show. Too much of the ham gets caught as spam.
We need to start with robust authentication mechanisms that hold ISPs responsible for the messages sent from their domain.
The real problem here is how do you hold servers running in Taiwan or Singapore to account for mail flooding into the US or European markets? Shut out entire nations?
Re:My beef with FreeBSDs port system..
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FreeBSD Ports Tricks
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It would be a whole lot better if the ports tree was frozen together with the OS
May your wish become reality... ala kazzam, *pooof*
There ya go, now you can go to your favorite computer retail store, FreeBSD Mall, or even an absolutely free ISO, and get a RELEASE copy of FreeBSD.
Yes, just recently (several years ago) FreeBSD started putting things on CDs. These CDs include on them at no extra charge... packages! These "packages" are pretty well frozen in time, and install the exact same code on every machine that CD is used on.
later only security and bug fixes were merged into the ports
Boy, demanding fella. Well, that's exactly what happens with the FreeBSD ports! Between application releases bug fixes go into the ports tree via patches, aka diff files.
Case in point, there was a nasty layout problem with Konqueror that a KDE developer posted a patch for in the KDE bugzilla. I altered the files paths a bit and submitted to the KDE-FreeBSD project. This was then committed to the ports tree, which then produces new packages.
This process took all of 2 days. I don't honestly know if any other OS has this fix in their build process or packages. My guess is that the rest of the Unix world either needs to manually patch and compile their KDE or wait for 3.1.3a.
Bug fixes like this go into the applications in the ports tree every day, without having to wait for the originating project to release a new version. Best of all, since the FreeBSD ports utilize its own versioning scheme important changes, such as security fixes or major bugs, can flag "pkg_version" to let an admin know that there's an upgraded version to install.
there is no easy way to tell whether a package has been updated because of security issues/bugs or because the port maintainers simply feel like bumping the package version.
Port maintainers don't go willy nilly into bumping port revisions. Changes in maintanership, documentation, or other administrative issues do not warrant, nor do they get, a change in their port version.
As for an easy way to determine why a port was upgraded, a quick visit to Fresh Ports can give you the exact reason why the port was upgraded, by who, and when.
but that would be too much to ask from non-paid volunteers
No it's not really. In fact, these kinds of issues are addressed every single day in the ports tree. It may look like a tangled mess upon first glance, but I assure you it is anything but. There's over 9000 applications being maintained for the OS. Every day many are added, a few deleted, and several are updated for a variety of reasons. This tree is as alive as the free software community it reflects.
One part of this I don't get though. If they spent $15,000 for licensing you'd have to assume:
$548 per Photoshop use $58 per CrossOver Office use We're talking about $606 per PC. Just round this off to say 25 PCs worth of licensing for that $15,000.
A full price XP Pro license is about $270. Add Photoshop into the mix for 25 PCs you get about $20,450, not $50,000.
Either way you slice it, the real cost savings for these studios would have been to invest developer resources into making Gimp a better product, or develop a different image editor altogether. Just taking Windows out of the equation hardly makes that much of a difference.
I've recently started going through O'Reilly's "Learning Python" here myself. I'd spent a healthy bit of time trying to get C++ functionally working in my head, but I just couldn't get it. For someone who wants to code the logic and leave the nit picky stuff to someone else, Python seems to be a better approach.
Mostly what got me going was an article in Linux Journal recently concerning wxWindows. Just the notion that I could code up a GUI application that is truly cross platform with Python and this windowing kit has got me focused on learning this language. I'm also rather interested in the fact that Python also binds in with KDE's API, as that's my preferred desktop.
That is what all got me going. What I'm finding interesting as I learn this language is how it approaches various problems. Python is an interpereted language, but upon running a program the program is compiled into bytecode like with Java, except that the compile process is automatic. You can manually compile beforehand as well. Read a blurb in there about being able to convert a standing Python program to C, which then in turn can be compiled into a full executable. Haven't even begun to play with any of this stuff yet, but it is interesting.
I'm personally impressed with the OOP approach that Python takes. I mostly code in PHP these days, and will most likely continue to do so for web stuff. Still, I never did much care for PHP's approach to OOP. C++'s approach just up and lost me. Python's approach seems to make a lot more sense, and even at this early stage of learning it I can see how I would utilize it in the kinds of stuff I'm looking to write.
It has a module system similar to Perl's, and there's a LOT of them. Pretty much all the stuff I'm looking to do has some kind of module in play to help me along. I've only coded a little bit of Perl, but every time I did I really didn't care for the language. Too many esoteric symbols in place of where commands should be in play for my taste.
I know that in every Slashdot thread concerning Python there needs to be at least one person bitching about code indenting as a part of the syntax. I personally love this. I imagine that anyone who has had to follow up behind someone who didn't indent code might just appreciate this. Python's indenting schema is pretty much exactly what I've been doing now in PHP and JavaScript for years now anyway. My eyes are still tuned in to looking for that closing brace that isn't there, but my brain is slowly starting to come around.
At this early stage, about the only thing I'm finding a little confusing is how variables are handled. This is neither good or bad at this point, just that there's enough concepts I hadn't really dealt with before that there's a learning curve I haven't yet gotten through. From what I can tell, there's an odd mix of C++ style variables that act more like pointers than the scalars that I'm used to working with in PHP.
This far into it, I'm still having fun going through this beginner's book. Been playing around a bit with the wxPython tutorials, and getting lost in BoaConstructor. I'm still of the opinion that my time being invested here is being well spent. Seems like a pretty cool approach to getting an application slapped together.
Sure, anyone can use it, but they were really exclusive about contributions.
To the best of my knowledge this has never been true. Anyone can submit changes to the OS or the ports tree. You do enough of those over time that work in with the over all goals of the project and you're very likely to get commit rights.
I'm certainly no C programmer here. I have managed to contribute a few ports to the project though. It's nothing more than doing the work and submitting a PR (Problem Report) with the diff file.
More importantly, there is no "little club" to join. There are all kinds of sub-projects within the FreeBSD family. Love Gnome? Go help out with the Gnome-FreeBSD project. Big KDE fan? KDE-FreeBSD can always use port writers, programmers, and even testers. Whatever your interest within the project the only restriction there has ever been is in showing that you're competent about what efforts you're working on.
If your work is notable, you'll get commit rights to the tree. Once there you can then vote for the core members. Yeah, try voting Linus off the Linux project. Around FreeBSD, you can vote core folks right the heck outta there if they aren't doing their job.
As a FreeBSD user who has not yet dabbled with Gentoo I couldn't help but wonder why Zachary or Geert Bevin didn't go about working with FreeBSD rather than Gentoo in the first place.
The primary focus of Zachary's complaints center around...
1. Gentoo is a for-profit. 2. Managed by a single person. 3. Portage is cool. 4. He wants to profit from using in embedded devices.
To each of these points FreeBSD sounds like where he really wanted to be rather than with Gentoo. FreeBSD is most definitely a non-profit project. He would be dealing with an established, community based management team with tasks heavily delegated. It has a port system (that portage was based on). He could even use the kernel in embedded devices without GPL related concerns.
If you followed the link to Geert Belvin's parting shot I'm left wondering the exact same thing. The FreeBSD community would love to see more advanced work done on its ports system. A seperate project had been spawned off to do just this very thing a while back, then floundered in lack of progress.
To each of these folks I'd be curious why they didn't look beyond the Linux world and into FreeBSD, or perhaps one of the other BSD's.
most of them can claim to have a desktop linux box
Running an all FreeBSD desktop here myself.
most of these are cast aside Wind'rs boxes
I've got 2 PCs at home. One runs Windows, and is only turned on for occasional gaming. The other is FreeBSD, and I have to admit it's my fall back desktop when my laptop is at the shop. Both are running pretty much the same hardware, just the Windows box has a slightly better video card for gaming.
How about comparing how many folks actually buy a box solely for Linux on the Desktop.
As I stated, my laptop is usually my primary machine I use. I purchased it specifically to run FreeBSD. Windows lasted exactly one day, and could not be ordered without it.
Just did the same for a friend. He purchased a laptop and had me wipe Windows to install FreeBSD. He is definitely not a Unix geek. This Thinkpad R40 came with XP, and he had the option of leaving it on there or running KDE with the variety of Unix apps.
How about getting a spec on folks that use Linux on the Desktop as their primary desktop.
Two I can personally account for. More on the way!
Stats can be used to tell any lie.
That's why what you and I see personally hardly matters. Neither of us are capable of seeing the larger picture of what is going on in the market place. One of the reasons that studies such as this are interesting.
Does the Mac crowd simply have no memory at all? Haven't you seen this line before, over and over again?
Sorry, this is the exact same tune with every big Mac release. "Look how cheap our top of the line is to theirs" routine. They do this EVERY SINGLE TIME!
So then what happens?? The PC market drops, as usual, at a far faster rate then what Apple can keep pace with. 3-6 months later that cost difference you're talking about today vanishes. Shortly after that, Apple is looking damn expensive again.
I've probably just removed several of the devout from their happy place. Just how many times can the same group of people be spoon fed the exact same line of marketing? I guess the totals have yet to be tallied.
And what if there are few versions of the truth? Which one out of those stands on its own?
In this case you have theories, not truth. This may result from a lack of data, or misunderstanding of the data at hand. I would say that a situation such as this that you were at least on the road to the truth.
Truth != One
Examples? As in, a situation where all of the necessary data and facts have been collected, yet the final analysis requires multiple, possible contradicting, truths as a result.
Since we're talking in the abstract this should be interesting:)
Someone who is honestly seeking "truth" cannot rely on belief. Belief is knowledge without evidence. The stronger a belief, the less likely contradicting evidence will be accepted.
Truth, the real deal, stands on it's own. Evidence contradicting ideas previously thought of as truth are welcomed. Each new piece of data is a step closer to knowing what is true, whereas introducing new data into "belief" only muddles things up.
the earth was/is flat
The folks still saying that today aren't truly suggesting that is what they believe. It's more of a way to get folks to fully evaluate what they believe they know through the experience of others rather than evaluating it for themselves.
For example, try asking someone if the world is flat. Follow that up with asking them to prove that it isn't! Sure, the science minded crowd around here might find the logical breakdown rather boring, but outside of geekdom you might be amazed out how little thought is given to even this one fundamental truth.
Start it on source forge, or something, seems like out there must be something that would do for a start.
It's already started. Tell ya the truth, it ain't half bad. It's no Quark or InDesign, but it's still pretty decent. It's called Scribus and I just installed it here on my FreeBSD box.
Problem is, no matter how good Scribus gets there's still the little matter of something to replace Illustrator, and some kind of graphics app that can deal with CMYK. Still, it's one heck of a start at it! Just gotta love open source.
Yeah, right out the freaking door. And it can take ActiveX, it's broken Java, and the weekly major security patches right the heck along with it.
Right now both Mozilla and Konqueror (subsequently NS 7.0 and Safari) can see the proper transparency. No patches, and most certainly no proprietary product designed to hold together a monopoly in the era of the Internet.
Back when these things were all the rage I was in Junior High. Me and some friends picked up a book that described a series of moves based on various situations the cube might be in. You'd look for patterns in the colors you were looking to fix up then perform a series of moves based on that.
After mucking around with this over and over again all of our times got pretty darn good. I could have never solved that damn thing without some help, but with a little book smarts applied my time was right around 1 minute to solve it. A little WD-40 between the cubes helped a good bit too:)
Give me one today, I couldn't even begin to remember where to start.
I just read that story! Found it at a used book store a couple of weeks ago. It was in a collection of short stories entitled "6 x H". Doubt if that one is still in print, but it might be worth a look around the net for it.
Not only is it a fascinating look at someone building an impossible house, but it's especially fun for anyone who has ever bought a house before it was built.:)
Couldn't disagree more. He managed to get all those various components in there and looking like a truly professional job. Maybe you just don't like green or something. Heck, after seeing this post I've been starting into an evil glare at the 19" monitor across the way from me.
Second, he's running Windows XP.:)
Ohh. Ummm.... okay, got me there. So the guy has no taste or class. Great googly moogly, are there still people who run that junk?
linux a better workstation(better hardware/games some apps).
I know you're trying to be polite here, but that's one virtue I lack. There is so very little that seperates the end user functionality for the desktop as to not be relevant here.
FreeBSD fully supports the very latest desktop enviroments at all times. Like with the server software, upgrading desktop applications is FAR easier. There's no waiting around for the next RedHat or Suse release because they've so brain damaged the process of upgrading as to make it about impossible for a non-guru to do without their new CD.
Example, to update KDE... pkg_delete -f qt* portinstall kde
That is it. You wanna install pre-compiled packages instead of compiling source? That's available too! All without vendor branding, Bluecurve desktop morphing, or any of the other annoyances and "value adds" that distros kick in.
There are only two major weaknesses worth noting here. First, the installer is far from newbie friendly. It's not all that complex, but it definitely lacks polish.
The second weakness is with developers who are not writing Unix apps, but instead are creating Linux apps. Stuff like CrossOver and the like suffer from this, leaving the perception that FreeBSD isn't every bit the desktop OS that Linux is. That's like saying Linux sucks because a vendor will only release code for Windows.
I've been running FreeBSD on this laptop of mine for a couple of years now. I've always had the latest version of KDE, Gnome, Blackbox, Enlightenment, or whatever other window manager happened to suit me at the time. At no time have I ever been without the absolute latest desktop version for more than a week. And this is without the first foggiest clue as to how to manually compile any of these beasts, or having to research dependancies.
That's only a small portion of the story. When you also consider that I've also always run the latest version of FreeBSD STABLE with only once loading an OS CD into this drive. That was for the initial installation. Absolutely every single other update has come down CVS, then about an hour or so worth of compiling. You couldn't upgrade that fast from pulling down a Linux ISO, burning the CD, and then running the installer.
I'll grant you, Gentoo looks promising and all. Perhaps it may one day give FreeBSD a run for it's money. It doesn't have the over 8,600 ported applications, nor the maturity of code to compare today though.
but it still seems kind of sneaky to replace my referral with Slashdot's own.
This site, or any other advertising based site, does not exist for you to make money. This isn't your site, nor are you trying to pay your rent by keeping it maintained as your full time job. You sure as heck aren't paying for the bandwidth, server maintenance, or any of the overhead to keep this site going. I'll even wager a guess that you didn't both asking any of the editors if it was okay to try and cash in on your write up.
If you truly feel wronged by this, here's what you can do about it. Put together your very own site. Bust your ass on it for 6 or 7 years keeping the content fresh and interesting to then establish an audience. At that point, you can toss in all the affiliate payback links you'd ever care to do.
Even easier, put up an article on you're own site and submit the link! Incur your own bandwidth costs while enjoying the benefits of the large Slashdot audience your site does not have.
If this were my site, you're darn skippy I'd change that referral code to my own. If a contributing author expects payment for their work, it best darn well be established well in advance of publishing. And yes, working in backend affiliate links you hope the editors don't see is very much an attempt to cash in on the traffic that you could not otherwise generate yourself.
I'd have to guess that this whole kerfuffle is over issues of export compliance.
It's not. If it were, the funding would have never started. Otherwise, I'd have no problems with anything you posted except for the bait and switch that has been pulled. Especially just prior to an obvious, and scheduled well in advance, use of those funds.
Something else is going on. Be it Theo mouthing off, or some other concern that has yet to be made public. Whatever it is, it sure isn't export issues.
BTW, I do have to state that I love the fact you managed "kerfuffle" into your post.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Been in the FreeBSD ports tree for almost a week now. It is Shweet!
Got to give kudos to KPDF in KDE 3.4 as well. A much improved interface, with some very cool features added.
Show me some real statistics
I'll show you mine... now you can show us all yours. Just gots to love Google for hunting this stuff down.
Who pays the piper?
Who pays income taxes?
Income Tax: Who Pays? IRS Figures for 2000
What I still don't get is why folks are so hot on upping tax rate on the very folks that are capable of hiring employees? Isn't the whole point in getting a sagging economy turned around to get the unemployment numbers down? Last I checked, social programs don't hire people.
while raising taxes for the poor
Ummm, exactly when did this event happen?
Why should Bill Gates pay taxes so you can get your medication and go to the hospital?
Wow. Where to start with this one? Nevermind that the VAST majority (something like 80-90%) of tax revenues from income are from that tiny minority of rich folks. Don't bog your rant down with actually looking this up though, you're on one heck of a roll.
The best solution for all economic problems is to allow the rich to keep more of their own money.
There's a few odd things those "rich" folks do with money that "poor" folks generally don't. Those silly rich tend to invest in a variety of things. They'll start new businesses, or help fund others. Quite often this invested capital actually creates JOBS.
The clever bit here, which is a little known fact around socialist knitting clubs, is that "poor" people don't invest! Been around this here planet all my life, and I have yet to get hired for employment by a poor person. It really is the oddest thing. Seems that someone who isn't capable of making a payroll doesn't hire people. Obviously this must be a civil rights issue.
Taxes == Communism and only the poor are Communists.
Taking your sarcasm into account, let's just go and raise them taxes on all those evil "rich" folks and hand it out to who all them really smart politicians feel are more worthy to have that cash. Business and corporations are evil anyway, so if you close down a few or just bring them to their knees all the better.
Just an FYI
To filter this thing out have Mozilla look for a header value of:
X-MailScanner: Found to be clean
It's in the header info on each and every one of these mails. You'll need to configure a custom header of "X-MailScanner" then look for a value of "Found to be clean" in order to get this to work.
Seems this virus is trying to fake out AV checking at the server.
If on the other hand you define spam as 'that which our filters decide is spam'... (I kid you not, folk do try to get that type of definition accepted). The exception would be satires like 'make penis fast'.
Here's a pretty good example of why you don't let automated filtering run the whole show. Too much of the ham gets caught as spam.
We need to start with robust authentication mechanisms that hold ISPs responsible for the messages sent from their domain.
The real problem here is how do you hold servers running in Taiwan or Singapore to account for mail flooding into the US or European markets? Shut out entire nations?
It would be a whole lot better if the ports tree was frozen together with the OS
May your wish become reality... ala kazzam, *pooof*
There ya go, now you can go to your favorite computer retail store, FreeBSD Mall, or even an absolutely free ISO, and get a RELEASE copy of FreeBSD.
Yes, just recently (several years ago) FreeBSD started putting things on CDs. These CDs include on them at no extra charge... packages! These "packages" are pretty well frozen in time, and install the exact same code on every machine that CD is used on.
later only security and bug fixes were merged into the ports
Boy, demanding fella. Well, that's exactly what happens with the FreeBSD ports! Between application releases bug fixes go into the ports tree via patches, aka diff files.
Case in point, there was a nasty layout problem with Konqueror that a KDE developer posted a patch for in the KDE bugzilla. I altered the files paths a bit and submitted to the KDE-FreeBSD project. This was then committed to the ports tree, which then produces new packages.
This process took all of 2 days. I don't honestly know if any other OS has this fix in their build process or packages. My guess is that the rest of the Unix world either needs to manually patch and compile their KDE or wait for 3.1.3a.
Bug fixes like this go into the applications in the ports tree every day, without having to wait for the originating project to release a new version. Best of all, since the FreeBSD ports utilize its own versioning scheme important changes, such as security fixes or major bugs, can flag "pkg_version" to let an admin know that there's an upgraded version to install.
there is no easy way to tell whether a package has been updated because of security issues/bugs or because the port maintainers simply feel like bumping the package version.
Port maintainers don't go willy nilly into bumping port revisions. Changes in maintanership, documentation, or other administrative issues do not warrant, nor do they get, a change in their port version.
As for an easy way to determine why a port was upgraded, a quick visit to Fresh Ports can give you the exact reason why the port was upgraded, by who, and when.
but that would be too much to ask from non-paid volunteers
No it's not really. In fact, these kinds of issues are addressed every single day in the ports tree. It may look like a tangled mess upon first glance, but I assure you it is anything but. There's over 9000 applications being maintained for the OS. Every day many are added, a few deleted, and several are updated for a variety of reasons. This tree is as alive as the free software community it reflects.
a zombie process never runs, and thus can't 'eat other processes' like you claim
Obviously you've never configured this for running within a jailed environment. Only so many places to run in that tiny cyber-cell.
One part of this I don't get though. If they spent $15,000 for licensing you'd have to assume:
$548 per Photoshop use
$58 per CrossOver Office use
We're talking about $606 per PC. Just round this off to say 25 PCs worth of licensing for that $15,000.
A full price XP Pro license is about $270. Add Photoshop into the mix for 25 PCs you get about $20,450, not $50,000.
Either way you slice it, the real cost savings for these studios would have been to invest developer resources into making Gimp a better product, or develop a different image editor altogether. Just taking Windows out of the equation hardly makes that much of a difference.
I've recently started going through O'Reilly's "Learning Python" here myself. I'd spent a healthy bit of time trying to get C++ functionally working in my head, but I just couldn't get it. For someone who wants to code the logic and leave the nit picky stuff to someone else, Python seems to be a better approach.
Mostly what got me going was an article in Linux Journal recently concerning wxWindows. Just the notion that I could code up a GUI application that is truly cross platform with Python and this windowing kit has got me focused on learning this language. I'm also rather interested in the fact that Python also binds in with KDE's API, as that's my preferred desktop.
That is what all got me going. What I'm finding interesting as I learn this language is how it approaches various problems. Python is an interpereted language, but upon running a program the program is compiled into bytecode like with Java, except that the compile process is automatic. You can manually compile beforehand as well. Read a blurb in there about being able to convert a standing Python program to C, which then in turn can be compiled into a full executable. Haven't even begun to play with any of this stuff yet, but it is interesting.
I'm personally impressed with the OOP approach that Python takes. I mostly code in PHP these days, and will most likely continue to do so for web stuff. Still, I never did much care for PHP's approach to OOP. C++'s approach just up and lost me. Python's approach seems to make a lot more sense, and even at this early stage of learning it I can see how I would utilize it in the kinds of stuff I'm looking to write.
It has a module system similar to Perl's, and there's a LOT of them. Pretty much all the stuff I'm looking to do has some kind of module in play to help me along. I've only coded a little bit of Perl, but every time I did I really didn't care for the language. Too many esoteric symbols in place of where commands should be in play for my taste.
I know that in every Slashdot thread concerning Python there needs to be at least one person bitching about code indenting as a part of the syntax. I personally love this. I imagine that anyone who has had to follow up behind someone who didn't indent code might just appreciate this. Python's indenting schema is pretty much exactly what I've been doing now in PHP and JavaScript for years now anyway. My eyes are still tuned in to looking for that closing brace that isn't there, but my brain is slowly starting to come around.
At this early stage, about the only thing I'm finding a little confusing is how variables are handled. This is neither good or bad at this point, just that there's enough concepts I hadn't really dealt with before that there's a learning curve I haven't yet gotten through. From what I can tell, there's an odd mix of C++ style variables that act more like pointers than the scalars that I'm used to working with in PHP.
This far into it, I'm still having fun going through this beginner's book. Been playing around a bit with the wxPython tutorials, and getting lost in BoaConstructor. I'm still of the opinion that my time being invested here is being well spent. Seems like a pretty cool approach to getting an application slapped together.
Sure, anyone can use it, but they were really exclusive about contributions.
To the best of my knowledge this has never been true. Anyone can submit changes to the OS or the ports tree. You do enough of those over time that work in with the over all goals of the project and you're very likely to get commit rights.
I'm certainly no C programmer here. I have managed to contribute a few ports to the project though. It's nothing more than doing the work and submitting a PR (Problem Report) with the diff file.
More importantly, there is no "little club" to join. There are all kinds of sub-projects within the FreeBSD family. Love Gnome? Go help out with the Gnome-FreeBSD project. Big KDE fan? KDE-FreeBSD can always use port writers, programmers, and even testers. Whatever your interest within the project the only restriction there has ever been is in showing that you're competent about what efforts you're working on.
If your work is notable, you'll get commit rights to the tree. Once there you can then vote for the core members. Yeah, try voting Linus off the Linux project. Around FreeBSD, you can vote core folks right the heck outta there if they aren't doing their job.
As a FreeBSD user who has not yet dabbled with Gentoo I couldn't help but wonder why Zachary or Geert Bevin didn't go about working with FreeBSD rather than Gentoo in the first place.
The primary focus of Zachary's complaints center around...
1. Gentoo is a for-profit.
2. Managed by a single person.
3. Portage is cool.
4. He wants to profit from using in embedded devices.
To each of these points FreeBSD sounds like where he really wanted to be rather than with Gentoo. FreeBSD is most definitely a non-profit project. He would be dealing with an established, community based management team with tasks heavily delegated. It has a port system (that portage was based on). He could even use the kernel in embedded devices without GPL related concerns.
If you followed the link to Geert Belvin's parting shot I'm left wondering the exact same thing. The FreeBSD community would love to see more advanced work done on its ports system. A seperate project had been spawned off to do just this very thing a while back, then floundered in lack of progress.
To each of these folks I'd be curious why they didn't look beyond the Linux world and into FreeBSD, or perhaps one of the other BSD's.
most of them can claim to have a desktop linux box
Running an all FreeBSD desktop here myself.
most of these are cast aside Wind'rs boxes
I've got 2 PCs at home. One runs Windows, and is only turned on for occasional gaming. The other is FreeBSD, and I have to admit it's my fall back desktop when my laptop is at the shop. Both are running pretty much the same hardware, just the Windows box has a slightly better video card for gaming.
How about comparing how many folks actually buy a box solely for Linux on the Desktop.
As I stated, my laptop is usually my primary machine I use. I purchased it specifically to run FreeBSD. Windows lasted exactly one day, and could not be ordered without it.
Just did the same for a friend. He purchased a laptop and had me wipe Windows to install FreeBSD. He is definitely not a Unix geek. This Thinkpad R40 came with XP, and he had the option of leaving it on there or running KDE with the variety of Unix apps.
How about getting a spec on folks that use Linux on the Desktop as their primary desktop.
Two I can personally account for. More on the way!
Stats can be used to tell any lie.
That's why what you and I see personally hardly matters. Neither of us are capable of seeing the larger picture of what is going on in the market place. One of the reasons that studies such as this are interesting.
The Mac was $1000 less!
Does the Mac crowd simply have no memory at all? Haven't you seen this line before, over and over again?
Sorry, this is the exact same tune with every big Mac release. "Look how cheap our top of the line is to theirs" routine. They do this EVERY SINGLE TIME!
So then what happens?? The PC market drops, as usual, at a far faster rate then what Apple can keep pace with. 3-6 months later that cost difference you're talking about today vanishes. Shortly after that, Apple is looking damn expensive again.
I've probably just removed several of the devout from their happy place. Just how many times can the same group of people be spoon fed the exact same line of marketing? I guess the totals have yet to be tallied.
And what if there are few versions of the truth? Which one out of those stands on its own?
:)
In this case you have theories, not truth. This may result from a lack of data, or misunderstanding of the data at hand. I would say that a situation such as this that you were at least on the road to the truth.
Truth != One
Examples? As in, a situation where all of the necessary data and facts have been collected, yet the final analysis requires multiple, possible contradicting, truths as a result.
Since we're talking in the abstract this should be interesting
Someone who is honestly seeking "truth" cannot rely on belief. Belief is knowledge without evidence. The stronger a belief, the less likely contradicting evidence will be accepted.
:)
Truth, the real deal, stands on it's own. Evidence contradicting ideas previously thought of as truth are welcomed. Each new piece of data is a step closer to knowing what is true, whereas introducing new data into "belief" only muddles things up.
the earth was/is flat
The folks still saying that today aren't truly suggesting that is what they believe. It's more of a way to get folks to fully evaluate what they believe they know through the experience of others rather than evaluating it for themselves.
For example, try asking someone if the world is flat. Follow that up with asking them to prove that it isn't! Sure, the science minded crowd around here might find the logical breakdown rather boring, but outside of geekdom you might be amazed out how little thought is given to even this one fundamental truth.
Fun toys to play with the masses
Start it on source forge, or something, seems like out there must be something that would do for a start.
It's already started. Tell ya the truth, it ain't half bad. It's no Quark or InDesign, but it's still pretty decent. It's called Scribus and I just installed it here on my FreeBSD box.
Pretty screen shots here.
Problem is, no matter how good Scribus gets there's still the little matter of something to replace Illustrator, and some kind of graphics app that can deal with CMYK. Still, it's one heck of a start at it! Just gotta love open source.
"We've upped our standards, so up yours!"
:)
That statement is so singularly beautiful I could cry. XHTML should implement a standard meta tag for this.
You just know you're going to see sigs with that line now.
one can help IE out
Yeah, right out the freaking door. And it can take ActiveX, it's broken Java, and the weekly major security patches right the heck along with it.
Right now both Mozilla and Konqueror (subsequently NS 7.0 and Safari) can see the proper transparency. No patches, and most certainly no proprietary product designed to hold together a monopoly in the era of the Internet.
I could steal your liver without making a single incision.
"But I'm using it."
- Meaning of Life
she could solve it in less than a minute
:)
Back when these things were all the rage I was in Junior High. Me and some friends picked up a book that described a series of moves based on various situations the cube might be in. You'd look for patterns in the colors you were looking to fix up then perform a series of moves based on that.
After mucking around with this over and over again all of our times got pretty darn good. I could have never solved that damn thing without some help, but with a little book smarts applied my time was right around 1 minute to solve it. A little WD-40 between the cubes helped a good bit too
Give me one today, I couldn't even begin to remember where to start.
Read the story, it's quite interesting.
:)
I just read that story! Found it at a used book store a couple of weeks ago. It was in a collection of short stories entitled "6 x H". Doubt if that one is still in print, but it might be worth a look around the net for it.
Not only is it a fascinating look at someone building an impossible house, but it's especially fun for anyone who has ever bought a house before it was built.
First, it looks horrible.
:)
Couldn't disagree more. He managed to get all those various components in there and looking like a truly professional job. Maybe you just don't like green or something. Heck, after seeing this post I've been starting into an evil glare at the 19" monitor across the way from me.
Second, he's running Windows XP.
Ohh. Ummm.... okay, got me there. So the guy has no taste or class. Great googly moogly, are there still people who run that junk?
linux a better workstation(better hardware/games some apps).
I know you're trying to be polite here, but that's one virtue I lack. There is so very little that seperates the end user functionality for the desktop as to not be relevant here.
FreeBSD fully supports the very latest desktop enviroments at all times. Like with the server software, upgrading desktop applications is FAR easier. There's no waiting around for the next RedHat or Suse release because they've so brain damaged the process of upgrading as to make it about impossible for a non-guru to do without their new CD.
Example, to update KDE...
pkg_delete -f qt*
portinstall kde
That is it. You wanna install pre-compiled packages instead of compiling source? That's available too! All without vendor branding, Bluecurve desktop morphing, or any of the other annoyances and "value adds" that distros kick in.
There are only two major weaknesses worth noting here. First, the installer is far from newbie friendly. It's not all that complex, but it definitely lacks polish.
The second weakness is with developers who are not writing Unix apps, but instead are creating Linux apps. Stuff like CrossOver and the like suffer from this, leaving the perception that FreeBSD isn't every bit the desktop OS that Linux is. That's like saying Linux sucks because a vendor will only release code for Windows.
I've been running FreeBSD on this laptop of mine for a couple of years now. I've always had the latest version of KDE, Gnome, Blackbox, Enlightenment, or whatever other window manager happened to suit me at the time. At no time have I ever been without the absolute latest desktop version for more than a week. And this is without the first foggiest clue as to how to manually compile any of these beasts, or having to research dependancies.
That's only a small portion of the story. When you also consider that I've also always run the latest version of FreeBSD STABLE with only once loading an OS CD into this drive. That was for the initial installation. Absolutely every single other update has come down CVS, then about an hour or so worth of compiling. You couldn't upgrade that fast from pulling down a Linux ISO, burning the CD, and then running the installer.
I'll grant you, Gentoo looks promising and all. Perhaps it may one day give FreeBSD a run for it's money. It doesn't have the over 8,600 ported applications, nor the maturity of code to compare today though.
but it still seems kind of sneaky to replace my referral with Slashdot's own.
This site, or any other advertising based site, does not exist for you to make money. This isn't your site, nor are you trying to pay your rent by keeping it maintained as your full time job. You sure as heck aren't paying for the bandwidth, server maintenance, or any of the overhead to keep this site going. I'll even wager a guess that you didn't both asking any of the editors if it was okay to try and cash in on your write up.
If you truly feel wronged by this, here's what you can do about it. Put together your very own site. Bust your ass on it for 6 or 7 years keeping the content fresh and interesting to then establish an audience. At that point, you can toss in all the affiliate payback links you'd ever care to do.
Even easier, put up an article on you're own site and submit the link! Incur your own bandwidth costs while enjoying the benefits of the large Slashdot audience your site does not have.
If this were my site, you're darn skippy I'd change that referral code to my own. If a contributing author expects payment for their work, it best darn well be established well in advance of publishing. And yes, working in backend affiliate links you hope the editors don't see is very much an attempt to cash in on the traffic that you could not otherwise generate yourself.
I'd have to guess that this whole kerfuffle is over issues of export compliance.
:)
It's not. If it were, the funding would have never started. Otherwise, I'd have no problems with anything you posted except for the bait and switch that has been pulled. Especially just prior to an obvious, and scheduled well in advance, use of those funds.
Something else is going on. Be it Theo mouthing off, or some other concern that has yet to be made public. Whatever it is, it sure isn't export issues.
BTW, I do have to state that I love the fact you managed "kerfuffle" into your post.