Re:The problem of rewriting/forking XFree
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XFree86 Politics
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· Score: 1
nifty^H^H^H^H^Hcrap
Why do people insist on using 5 million ^H's in jokes like this? Do they fear most will not know what ^W does? (on most systems) Is it because on many systems they have stty erase ^? instead and that is supposed to be part of the joke (eg I was trying to erase this, but...)? I dunno, it drives me nuts. I tried doing these and after about 3-4 ^H's it just looks stupid and unwieldly, not to mention it is a tired joke... (and very old, predating/. by quite a bit I'd imagine).
I am just curious.
I agree that Flash is overused, and most sites that use it are crap (those that use it for navigation come to mind; there is a special hell for those bastards who thought that was a good idea); I should mention all good web develpers agree on this point. Flash is for nitrozac cartoons, etc, not for normal navigational controls, etc that can be done more efficiently/portably in plain html, not for forms, not for normal goddamn text.
It helps to some degree, although I do not use windows unless some random employer forces me (and even then I make them really try, and even then I try to get around it any way I can). I also did not mean antagonism, but I do know it is often a problem to get suspend to work, especially in dual-boot situations. I do not think it should be so, but I do not have the geek-cojones it takes to make it so, or at least to challenge AC etc in a contest of coding skill;). I do know that at one point Dell was able to get some of their inspiron and latitude notebooks to work with suspend with redhat 7.x, but I do not recall what they did to get it to work or if they ever got it to work reliably, and this was long ago.
I suppose that if I ever get around to owning a laptop I might mess with it more. I understand suspend is useful precisely for the purpose of not having to start up your apps again and being able to just stop right where you are in whatever you are doing and move on somewhere. I also know there is generally considerable pain in doing it, and those times when an employer provides a laptop I have generally kept all pm turned off, not suspended for fear of lockups (which did happen almost anytime I let my thinkpad 600x sleep in whatever OS).
I usually am reasonably near a power source, and though it is an abberration of laptop use I am usually plugged into it as well as some ethernet. I also generally use my computer more than 30-90 minutes at a stretch.. far more, and therefore no battery is going to work for me, anyway. Still for the purpose of moving about, etc, a working suspend would be nice. And as for the shutdown on power off, well, I would like my desktops to do that, too, and many (most?) modern desktops/desktop mbs support acpi.
My challenge to you was more an attempt at gleaning some information from you, and I thank you for your responses;).
I recognize that this works in Windows, and that it has worked indeed even with Windows 98 and 2000. I am reasonably certain I mentioned that it had been done both in Windows and Linux. What I am saying is that in both systems it is notoriously unreliable for the reasons given above. I am glad you found a combination that works for you. Could you share with the class what laptop this is?
I should also mention that the laptops always have better pm features for two reasons:
1) That is what pm was made for; you need to conserve battery life on laptops and if you make a laptop where pm does not work right you get screwed in support.
2) Usually you have more unified design w/r/t case/ps/mb which is never the case with white box desktops and not necessarily the case with oem desktops.
Nevertheless, I have certainly seen more than my share of notebook/OS combinations in which it does not work, and as anyone who has had a suspend corrupt their disk utterly will tell you, it really, really sucks. So again, if you have a combo that works, share with us, because it very often does not, and if it does not, you (the user/customer) have very littel control over what you can do, and no one manufacturer can necessarily help you (because agian this is a bios+mb+ps+os solution, evrryone having to be on the same page and not making crap, which is why standards like acpi are created in the first place.
Well, I haven't been following this *super closely* but my understanding is this is the first *stable* release that supported transactions. Now to be fair, InnoDB has been available seperately for quite some time, and InnoDB is really where most of these features come from, but the decision to include InnoDB in the main distribution of MySQL has been a long time in coming, and even then, it was an alpha/beta/gamma thing.
Alan Cox has said many times that he does not like ACPI, and has often explained why, but he has also agreed we are going to have to live with it. I agree that supporting ACPI for those who want it is a Good Thing for Linux, and indeed there is support in the kernel. Whether it is good support is something people who use it must decide for themselves, and whether unified people who follow kernel traffic rather more than I do. (My impression is that $PARENT_OF_THREAD was saying no to both, and it's likely true, but then AC has pointed out, again, why ACPI is pretty much doomed to be bad, and it does suck on Windows as well, like most things do.)
I personally never use acpi features, and have an unnatural hatred of power management in general stemming from the many very bad implementations hardware and software wise I have encountered, and the sometimes irreperable damage they cause, not to mention the nazi aspect where various OS's seem to assume you want and need power management (even with aix and solaris which *do not* run on laptops!) and install it, turn it on, and then you find your disk and network pulled out from under you when you are trying to use your damned computer, among other things. This problem crosses every architecture I have messed with, and that is a lot of architectures.
I would like, however, to see one day an x86 hardware/software combination which leads to a situation like with SGIs and Macs where pressing the power button gives you a graceful shutdown. That is too simple a problem not to have been ever fixed, and it helps in many situations, besides protecting you from clueless people who have somehow made it into your server room. As I understand it, ACPI is supposed to make that possible, but it causes so many other problems (random and not-so-random lockups, lockups on shutdowns, etc) that I am still not willing to use it at all.
But seriously, this is just the kind of stuff we *don't* need in the Open Source community or computing in general. This kind of ego-driven politics is exactly the reason humans get so little done in general, much less in computers.
Granted, the point of Open Source is if you don't like what maintainers of code are doing you are free to take your own direction. And a fork very similar to this one produced one of my favorite operating systems, OpenBSD. But just as in the case of OpenBSD the original project (NetBSD) would have benefitted greatly had the maintaining organization been able to find a way to work with the disgruntled forking developer (Theo de Raadt) I have a feeling we have the same problem here, in that a useful developer is going to leave the Xfree project and take many otehrs with him.
Which is why in this case it is a very very bad thing. Because ultimately the future of Linux GUI development is going to be murky for awhile, there will be more confusion than there already is, and talents will be diverted rather than concerted, which will exacerbate the serious problems we already have with the Linux GUI models.
I hope that somehow a diplomatic solution can be found, and the Xfree team can avert war;).
You cant check my door to see if it's unlocked, not on my home, or on my car, or at my place of business.
Ok, so next time you go to the grocery store and see if they are open you will turn yourself in at the nearest police station, correct? And on what charge? Who doesn't do that? Who hasn't gone to a store or other business expecting them to be open and found the door was indeed locked? Your analogy is just dead stupid.
IANAL and I have never felt the need to portscan others' machines, as usually the services I legitimately want to connect to are well-advertised in other ways. But I could see trying to connect to a port or something for troubleshooting purposes. Still, there really isn't a good analogy. I think the best thing is to examine the matter at hand.
Portscanning is not breaking into a system. It is checking a system to see what services it is advertising to the world on the internet. The purpose of the internet is to communicate and the purpose of advertising services is generally because you want someone, perhaps anyone, to connect to them and use them.
Now what is getting everyone's panties in a bunch, besides a basic misunderstanding of the matter at hand, is the fact that it is possible there are services being advertised unintentionally, which an admin does not know about. And those services may have some exploitable hole, mainly because the daemon listening on that port is not maintained precisely because it was not supposed to be there in the first place and the admins don't know about it.
Now we can argue forever over the idea of this meaning the admin is a Bad Admin and "deserves what he gets." But that is not really on, either. It is a precise example (not an analog) of blaming a victim of a crime for the actions of a criminal. Yes, it is the responsibility of everyone to take necessary precautions against being the victim of various crimes, and the admin is even more responsible for looking out for things like this.
But there are many reasons the admin might not do this. There may not be an admin in charge of the box in question for whatever reason, or the admin can't update whatever needs updating because it will break something, or the admin has too much to do (even more prevalent in this economy / security environment where less people seem to be called upon to do more than ever), or for whatever reason the admin does not know about the box/service/exploit.
So in summation I would say that the portscan in itself does not appear to be illegal, and though some people do not like it and for that reason perhaps one might avoid it it is a far cry from hacking the machine and there are many legitimate reasons to scan. It is also nothing like banging on all the doors and windows of your house. Perhaps if I unleashed one of those multi-exploit worms on you it would be something like that, but a person portscanning your box is just checking the signs on your store to see what hours they are available, checking to see if the store is open, as it were.
I think though that the guy who wrote the essay in his slashdot journal on analogies had the best idea, which is that analogies in general detract from useful debate of arguments in general. However the yen for creating fables/fairy tales/parables seems universally human, so we keep going round on things like this.:P
Well, heck, it was the rc3 changelog I was looking at, and the slackware one was unaccessable... still, all I can say is Hooray! I have been waiting for the final release to come out before upgrading...
I seem to recall a Gateway machine that was built exactly like that... flat screen with the cpu and drive bolted to the back of it, kb & mouse dangling off as usual...
I guess you are talking about the UK. In the US, I have specifically been told that the post office cannot fail on purpose to deliver junk mail because they are getting paid to deliver it. Of course, only bills and junk mail come in the mail to me, and they constitute pretty much all of the usps' business anymore, so I guess they can't be blamed.
I forget where I read it, probably here somewhere, but commercial speech is not protected in the same way that personal speech is. Therefor, companies will at least have a harder time pursuing any argument based on free speech than a non-profit/political group would.
In the US as a rule commercial speech is protected far more than non-commercial speech, precisely because corporations pay for our election process. Not only that, but my right to speak about corporations is less powerful than their right to speak sbout me. For instance, any monkey can set up a business and put things in a credit report I can't read without paying for, but if I say something bad (and TRUE) about a company I might get sued into oblivion.
Besides the obvious answer of Congresspeople generally having staff, even at home, to do everything including wipe their ass, you do realize you are talking about the people who:
1) Think it is a good idea to pay farmers not to grow food
2) Think it is a good idea to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building more missiles we would never fire, which if we fired a very small fraction of them there would be no planet from which to fire the rest
3) Think it is perfectly acceptable to pay 10-100 times as much as you and I would to buy services and contract buildings ($500 hammers, etc).
In other words, rich, wasteful, and not too bright as a rule.
I would add that spam filtering should be mandated at all US ISPs and access points. Hell, if we have the fbi sniffing all our packets now (ala Carnivore) why not have them do something useful, like get rid of the spam?:)
Nobody is saying the telemarkers are not legitimate. But if the call is an intrusion, it is a problem for the person being called. It does not matter whether the caller represents a "legitimate" enterprise.
Well, I am going to contradict you slightly. Telemarketers are not legitimate. First off, the whole industry of telemarketing and spamming is rife with fraud, with a significant majority of products offered either nonexistent or grossly misrepresented. Secondly, most telemarketing/spamming companies have no legitimate business model. Whether you consider telemarketing and spamming legitemate business models (I don't)or not, a good chunk of these companies are only harvesting information to be sold to other telemarketers.
If the product was valid in any way, if a sane person under normal circumstances would purchase it, then it could be marketed using normal means, (eg put in a store, put on the internet, advertised on radio and television, etc) rather than being sold *only* under situations in which the consumer makes a highly pressured spur of the moment decision and has virtually no way of proving what he/she was promised. There are laws governing false advertising, but in many states it would be illegal for you to record the telemarketing call to use as evidence later, even if it was technically feasible (remember you do not know when the call is coming and may not be prepared to record the call even if you have set up equipment to do so).
Also, why do telemarketing and spamming companies go out of their way to contact people who explicitly do not want to be contacted (eg countermeasures against countermeasures, exercising loopholes, etc)? Clearly they do not mean to engage in legitemate business with real customers if they focus so much effort on reaching people who are not going to be their customers. Oh, and by the way, the telemarketers are already countering Bush's law and others like it with a supreme court case in which they allege that stopping them from calling you in the middle of dinner is infringing their freedom fo speech. Since a similar case was decided in favour of door-to-door salespeople, I would imagine this one has a good chance of winning as well, even though my freedom to say certian things and make real political speech is already "legally" infringed.
With respect to the fraud, allowing telemarketing and spamming to continue just opens the door wide open for the social engineering efforts of various criminals who take advantage of naive people and steal their money/information/identity. These surveys and such just make it easier, because it will not seem odd they are asking you a lot of questions about your life when they are conducting a "survey." With telemarketing and spam directly linked to al qaeda (at least in the case of some of the Nigerian money spammers) and international gangs of varying nefariousness (the rest of the Nigerian money spammers are at best involved in gangs which are known to be involved in the international traffic of drugs and human beings, among other things). One would think our leaders would be better about this.
I have not known a single company who employed these "tools" that did not also have 1) a shady, nonexistent, or criminal business model 2) a grossly misrepresented or nonexistent product. MCI Worldcom is a very good example, and I am glad they finally got what they deserved, but I was irked to find that somehow the carcass is still sending telemarketing calls (even in greater numbers than before!) this reminds me of whoever the evil bastards are who keep providing big incentives to buy Daewoo stuff hoping no one will notice there is no Daewoo anymore.
Think of all the tax dollars that go to attorney generals and police officers chasing pretty much every telemarketer in every town in our country. Ask any police officer or anyone who works in an attorney general's office what they think of telemarketers (and door-to-door for that matter). This is not a business model that is good for anyone (consumer, business, government).
Interestingly enough, I had a similar problem to yours when Qwest called me. In fact, not only did they not take me off their list, but they said they would call me again, and then even though I called back and talked to everyone I could telling them not to call me, they did in fact call me back later. I reported all this to teh ftc, but nothing happened. Oh, well, don't use Qwest then. I make it a point not only never to purchase things as a result of telemarketing calls, but also never to purchase anything from a company who engages in such practices, advising others to do the same, and if there was more I could do to punish such companies, I would. I think every telemarketing/spamming company deserves to go out of business completely and have all officers responsible in jail for life, but that is just me.
What will it be like when the "worker drone" jokes aren't jokes anymore, and we work 60 hours a week, just to pay rent? 60 hours a week? What a slacker! most of us work 80-90 hour weeks.:P
That's the thing - I don't want to build a kernal for my home machine. Most people don't want to even know the option exists. They want to configure their desktop, but not their sound-drivers. Maybe someone will come up with a nice GUI interface for tweaking your kernal, and doing an automagic rebuild. Stick it in some system-panel, and let the advanced users play with it.
I would like to build a kernal for my server, to make it as small and fast as possible. I want to choose which file system I use, which scheduler, etc.
Firstly, the idea behind Gnome and KDE was to provide a set of widgets and apis for the GUI so applications would start to have more UI conformance, like Apple and Microsoft and any sane person studying interfaces understands is helpful. However, there is not an awful lot of UI consistency in Linux, and there are certainly more than two ways to do things.
Even among Gnome and KDE Apps there is a noticable lack of consistency akin to early Windows (circa 3.x) problems, but even without that problem there is the matter of many different types of interfaces. In a given set of tools, you might expect X applications, Gnome apps, KDE, tkl, something completely from the console, emacs, and some ncurses to name a few. So not only are the applications inconsistent in their interfaces within a given GUI environment, but there are any number of ways the program might present a UI. I believe this is what the poster was talking about.
Even if we confine ourselves to analysing the interface of basic tools used for regular administartion tasks and included with a given distribution, we see this problem.
I do agree, however, with your assessment of CDE.;)
I got the $3000 price for the HP Linux Distro from the Slashdot article announcing its availability. That's what I get for believing slashdot, I suppose.;) (or more likely, HP came out with a free version that did not have the support the $3000 version had.)
As for the pricetag on Solaris x86, well, that's too bad for you. If you run Solaris on SPARC like God intended, it is free to download the iso from the link I so thoughtfully provided. Solaris 8 was free for download for both architectures, IIRC. Sparcs are cheap on Ebay and even several years old desktops are reasonably powerful compared to PCs and can run the latest versions of Solaris with no problems.
I would imagine that Sun is charging a bit for x86 Solaris because they make money on Hardware, though they do sell x86 hardware as well. You will also notice that as of Solaris 9 they have slowed down the x86 development. I was actually surprised to see they went ahead and came out with it after many moons passed while the future of x86 Solaris was left unstated (starting with the announcement that Solaris 9 SPARC was available, but Solaris 9 x86 was not.)
I think also some of this threw off the people who, in stark contrast to the hobbyists x86 Solaris seems to have been meant for, started to buy real x86 servers and throw x86 Solaris on them instead of buying SPARCs. These people are likely the ones Sun would like most to discourage from using x86 Solaris, and from what I can tell the uncertainty factor worked very well for Sun in that regard.
Isn't it ironic that in a community of command-line using, code-writing, keyword-searching geekazoids, so few seem to give a damn about typos? You'd think that folks would have been indoctrinated to respect precise spelling and typing and punctuation and capitalization by now, and that the typos would come from the pointy-clicky Word users who are used to having to click on big buttons and having red squiggles tell them when their atrocious spelling has reared its ugly head once again.
It seems the big lie theory works after all.:) Do you really believe the majority of slashdot users are surfing in with lynx from some tty deep in the bowels of a data center? Most are using Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows.:)
Slashdot Mirror
nifty^H^H^H^H^Hcrap
Why do people insist on using 5 million ^H's in jokes like this? Do they fear most will not know what ^W does? (on most systems) Is it because on many systems they have /. by quite a bit I'd imagine).
stty erase ^?
instead and that is supposed to be part of the joke (eg I was trying to erase this, but...)?
I dunno, it drives me nuts. I tried doing these and after about 3-4 ^H's it just looks stupid and unwieldly, not to mention it is a tired joke... (and very old, predating
I am just curious.
I agree that Flash is overused, and most sites that use it are crap (those that use it for navigation come to mind; there is a special hell for those bastards who thought that was a good idea); I should mention all good web develpers agree on this point. Flash is for nitrozac cartoons, etc, not for normal navigational controls, etc that can be done more efficiently/portably in plain html, not for forms, not for normal goddamn text.
Damn, this became a rant. :P
Above comment refs unpersons. Moderation necessary.
It helps to some degree, although I do not use windows unless some random employer forces me (and even then I make them really try, and even then I try to get around it any way I can). I also did not mean antagonism, but I do know it is often a problem to get suspend to work, especially in dual-boot situations. I do not think it should be so, but I do not have the geek-cojones it takes to make it so, or at least to challenge AC etc in a contest of coding skill ;). I do know that at one point Dell was able to get some of their inspiron and latitude notebooks to work with suspend with redhat 7.x, but I do not recall what they did to get it to work or if they ever got it to work reliably, and this was long ago.
I suppose that if I ever get around to owning a laptop I might mess with it more. I understand suspend is useful precisely for the purpose of not having to start up your apps again and being able to just stop right where you are in whatever you are doing and move on somewhere. I also know there is generally considerable pain in doing it, and those times when an employer provides a laptop I have generally kept all pm turned off, not suspended for fear of lockups (which did happen almost anytime I let my thinkpad 600x sleep in whatever OS).
I usually am reasonably near a power source, and though it is an abberration of laptop use I am usually plugged into it as well as some ethernet. I also generally use my computer more than 30-90 minutes at a stretch.. far more, and therefore no battery is going to work for me, anyway. Still for the purpose of moving about, etc, a working suspend would be nice. And as for the shutdown on power off, well, I would like my desktops to do that, too, and many (most?) modern desktops/desktop mbs support acpi.
My challenge to you was more an attempt at gleaning some information from you, and I thank you for your responses ;).
I recognize that this works in Windows, and that it has worked indeed even with Windows 98 and 2000. I am reasonably certain I mentioned that it had been done both in Windows and Linux. What I am saying is that in both systems it is notoriously unreliable for the reasons given above. I am glad you found a combination that works for you. Could you share with the class what laptop this is?
I should also mention that the laptops always have better pm features for two reasons:
1) That is what pm was made for; you need to conserve battery life on laptops and if you make a laptop where pm does not work right you get screwed in support.
2) Usually you have more unified design w/r/t case/ps/mb which is never the case with white box desktops and not necessarily the case with oem desktops.
Nevertheless, I have certainly seen more than my share of notebook/OS combinations in which it does not work, and as anyone who has had a suspend corrupt their disk utterly will tell you, it really, really sucks. So again, if you have a combo that works, share with us, because it very often does not, and if it does not, you (the user/customer) have very littel control over what you can do, and no one manufacturer can necessarily help you (because agian this is a bios+mb+ps+os solution, evrryone having to be on the same page and not making crap, which is why standards like acpi are created in the first place.
Well, I haven't been following this *super closely* but my understanding is this is the first *stable* release that supported transactions. Now to be fair, InnoDB has been available seperately for quite some time, and InnoDB is really where most of these features come from, but the decision to include InnoDB in the main distribution of MySQL has been a long time in coming, and even then, it was an alpha/beta/gamma thing.
Alan Cox has said many times that he does not like ACPI, and has often explained why, but he has also agreed we are going to have to live with it. I agree that supporting ACPI for those who want it is a Good Thing for Linux, and indeed there is support in the kernel. Whether it is good support is something people who use it must decide for themselves, and whether unified people who follow kernel traffic rather more than I do. (My impression is that $PARENT_OF_THREAD was saying no to both, and it's likely true, but then AC has pointed out, again, why ACPI is pretty much doomed to be bad, and it does suck on Windows as well, like most things do.)
I personally never use acpi features, and have an unnatural hatred of power management in general stemming from the many very bad implementations hardware and software wise I have encountered, and the sometimes irreperable damage they cause, not to mention the nazi aspect where various OS's seem to assume you want and need power management (even with aix and solaris which *do not* run on laptops!) and install it, turn it on, and then you find your disk and network pulled out from under you when you are trying to use your damned computer, among other things. This problem crosses every architecture I have messed with, and that is a lot of architectures.
I would like, however, to see one day an x86 hardware/software combination which leads to a situation like with SGIs and Macs where pressing the power button gives you a graceful shutdown. That is too simple a problem not to have been ever fixed, and it helps in many situations, besides protecting you from clueless people who have somehow made it into your server room. As I understand it, ACPI is supposed to make that possible, but it causes so many other problems (random and not-so-random lockups, lockups on shutdowns, etc) that I am still not willing to use it at all.
What a Forking Mess!
But seriously, this is just the kind of stuff we *don't* need in the Open Source community or computing in general. This kind of ego-driven politics is exactly the reason humans get so little done in general, much less in computers.
Granted, the point of Open Source is if you don't like what maintainers of code are doing you are free to take your own direction. And a fork very similar to this one produced one of my favorite operating systems, OpenBSD. But just as in the case of OpenBSD the original project (NetBSD) would have benefitted greatly had the maintaining organization been able to find a way to work with the disgruntled forking developer (Theo de Raadt) I have a feeling we have the same problem here, in that a useful developer is going to leave the Xfree project and take many otehrs with him.
Which is why in this case it is a very very bad thing. Because ultimately the future of Linux GUI development is going to be murky for awhile, there will be more confusion than there already is, and talents will be diverted rather than concerted, which will exacerbate the serious problems we already have with the Linux GUI models.
I hope that somehow a diplomatic solution can be found, and the Xfree team can avert war ;).
You cant check my door to see if it's unlocked, not on my home, or on my car, or at my place of business.
Ok, so next time you go to the grocery store and see if they are open you will turn yourself in at the nearest police station, correct? And on what charge?
Who doesn't do that? Who hasn't gone to a store or other business expecting them to be open and found the door was indeed locked? Your analogy is just dead stupid.
IANAL and I have never felt the need to portscan others' machines, as usually the services I legitimately want to connect to are well-advertised in other ways. But I could see trying to connect to a port or something for troubleshooting purposes. Still, there really isn't a good analogy. I think the best thing is to examine the matter at hand.
Portscanning is not breaking into a system. It is checking a system to see what services it is advertising to the world on the internet. The purpose of the internet is to communicate and the purpose of advertising services is generally because you want someone, perhaps anyone, to connect to them and use them.
Now what is getting everyone's panties in a bunch, besides a basic misunderstanding of the matter at hand, is the fact that it is possible there are services being advertised unintentionally, which an admin does not know about. And those services may have some exploitable hole, mainly because the daemon listening on that port is not maintained precisely because it was not supposed to be there in the first place and the admins don't know about it.
Now we can argue forever over the idea of this meaning the admin is a Bad Admin and "deserves what he gets." But that is not really on, either. It is a precise example (not an analog) of blaming a victim of a crime for the actions of a criminal. Yes, it is the responsibility of everyone to take necessary precautions against being the victim of various crimes, and the admin is even more responsible for looking out for things like this.
But there are many reasons the admin might not do this. There may not be an admin in charge of the box in question for whatever reason, or the admin can't update whatever needs updating because it will break something, or the admin has too much to do (even more prevalent in this economy / security environment where less people seem to be called upon to do more than ever), or for whatever reason the admin does not know about the box/service/exploit.
So in summation I would say that the portscan in itself does not appear to be illegal, and though some people do not like it and for that reason perhaps one might avoid it it is a far cry from hacking the machine and there are many legitimate reasons to scan. It is also nothing like banging on all the doors and windows of your house. Perhaps if I unleashed one of those multi-exploit worms on you it would be something like that, but a person portscanning your box is just checking the signs on your store to see what hours they are available, checking to see if the store is open, as it were.
I think though that the guy who wrote the essay in his slashdot journal on analogies had the best idea, which is that analogies in general detract from useful debate of arguments in general. However the yen for creating fables/fairy tales/parables seems universally human, so we keep going round on things like this. :P
Well, heck, it was the rc3 changelog I was looking at, and the slackware one was unaccessable ... still, all I can say is Hooray! I have been waiting for the final release to come out before upgrading...
1) Slackware 9.0 has not been released yet. Slackware 9.0rc1 was released and does not have the patch for this.
2) I found no reference to this patch in the changelog
for slackware-current.
In my 6 months of professional development at a 3 man shop
As soon as I read teh above, I knew he was making a jab at the typical Slashdotting mySQL weenie. ;)
Man, and how many versions back does this promise go, anyway? I would not hold my breath. Still, it is nice they finally have transactions.
I was wondering the same thing, so I read the article, and yes, it includes InnoDB and therefore transactions.
I seem to recall a Gateway machine that was built exactly like that... flat screen with the cpu and drive bolted to the back of it, kb & mouse dangling off as usual...
According to their website, it is available for Windows, IRIX, Linux and Mac OS X. And the unlimited package is only $6999! Go buy it now! :)
I guess you are talking about the UK. In the US, I have specifically been told that the post office cannot fail on purpose to deliver junk mail because they are getting paid to deliver it. Of course, only bills and junk mail come in the mail to me, and they constitute pretty much all of the usps' business anymore, so I guess they can't be blamed.
I forget where I read it, probably here somewhere, but commercial speech is not protected in the same way that personal speech is. Therefor, companies will at least have a harder time pursuing any argument based on free speech than a non-profit/political group would.
In the US as a rule commercial speech is protected far more than non-commercial speech, precisely because corporations pay for our election process. Not only that, but my right to speak about corporations is less powerful than their right to speak sbout me. For instance, any monkey can set up a business and put things in a credit report I can't read without paying for, but if I say something bad (and TRUE) about a company I might get sued into oblivion.
Besides the obvious answer of Congresspeople generally having staff, even at home, to do everything including wipe their ass, you do realize you are talking about the people who:
1) Think it is a good idea to pay farmers not to grow food
2) Think it is a good idea to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building more missiles we would never fire, which if we fired a very small fraction of them there would be no planet from which to fire the rest
3) Think it is perfectly acceptable to pay 10-100 times as much as you and I would to buy services and contract buildings ($500 hammers, etc).
In other words, rich, wasteful, and not too bright as a rule.
I would add that spam filtering should be mandated at all US ISPs and access points. Hell, if we have the fbi sniffing all our packets now (ala Carnivore) why not have them do something useful, like get rid of the spam? :)
Nobody is saying the telemarkers are not legitimate. But if the call is an intrusion, it is a problem for the person being called. It does not matter whether the caller represents a "legitimate" enterprise.
Well, I am going to contradict you slightly. Telemarketers are not legitimate. First off, the whole industry of telemarketing and spamming is rife with fraud, with a significant majority of products offered either nonexistent or grossly misrepresented. Secondly, most telemarketing/spamming companies have no legitimate business model. Whether you consider telemarketing and spamming legitemate business models (I don't)or not, a good chunk of these companies are only harvesting information to be sold to other telemarketers.
If the product was valid in any way, if a sane person under normal circumstances would purchase it, then it could be marketed using normal means, (eg put in a store, put on the internet, advertised on radio and television, etc) rather than being sold *only* under situations in which the consumer makes a highly pressured spur of the moment decision and has virtually no way of proving what he/she was promised. There are laws governing false advertising, but in many states it would be illegal for you to record the telemarketing call to use as evidence later, even if it was technically feasible (remember you do not know when the call is coming and may not be prepared to record the call even if you have set up equipment to do so).
Also, why do telemarketing and spamming companies go out of their way to contact people who explicitly do not want to be contacted (eg countermeasures against countermeasures, exercising loopholes, etc)? Clearly they do not mean to engage in legitemate business with real customers if they focus so much effort on reaching people who are not going to be their customers. Oh, and by the way, the telemarketers are already countering Bush's law and others like it with a supreme court case in which they allege that stopping them from calling you in the middle of dinner is infringing their freedom fo speech. Since a similar case was decided in favour of door-to-door salespeople, I would imagine this one has a good chance of winning as well, even though my freedom to say certian things and make real political speech is already "legally" infringed.
With respect to the fraud, allowing telemarketing and spamming to continue just opens the door wide open for the social engineering efforts of various criminals who take advantage of naive people and steal their money/information/identity. These surveys and such just make it easier, because it will not seem odd they are asking you a lot of questions about your life when they are conducting a "survey." With telemarketing and spam directly linked to al qaeda (at least in the case of some of the Nigerian money spammers) and international gangs of varying nefariousness (the rest of the Nigerian money spammers are at best involved in gangs which are known to be involved in the international traffic of drugs and human beings, among other things). One would think our leaders would be better about this.
I have not known a single company who employed these "tools" that did not also have 1) a shady, nonexistent, or criminal business model 2) a grossly misrepresented or nonexistent product. MCI Worldcom is a very good example, and I am glad they finally got what they deserved, but I was irked to find that somehow the carcass is still sending telemarketing calls (even in greater numbers than before!) this reminds me of whoever the evil bastards are who keep providing big incentives to buy Daewoo stuff hoping no one will notice there is no Daewoo anymore.
Think of all the tax dollars that go to attorney generals and police officers chasing pretty much every telemarketer in every town in our country. Ask any police officer or anyone who works in an attorney general's office what they think of telemarketers (and door-to-door for that matter). This is not a business model that is good for anyone (consumer, business, government).
Interestingly enough, I had a similar problem to yours when Qwest called me. In fact, not only did they not take me off their list, but they said they would call me again, and then even though I called back and talked to everyone I could telling them not to call me, they did in fact call me back later. I reported all this to teh ftc, but nothing happened. Oh, well, don't use Qwest then. I make it a point not only never to purchase things as a result of telemarketing calls, but also never to purchase anything from a company who engages in such practices, advising others to do the same, and if there was more I could do to punish such companies, I would. I think every telemarketing/spamming company deserves to go out of business completely and have all officers responsible in jail for life, but that is just me.
What will it be like when the "worker drone" jokes aren't jokes anymore, and we work 60 hours a week, just to pay rent? :P
60 hours a week? What a slacker! most of us work 80-90 hour weeks.
That's the thing - I don't want to build a kernal for my home machine. Most people don't want to even know the option exists. They want to configure their desktop, but not their sound-drivers. Maybe someone will come up with a nice GUI interface for tweaking your kernal, and doing an automagic rebuild. Stick it in some system-panel, and let the advanced users play with it.
I would like to build a kernal for my server, to make it as small and fast as possible. I want to choose which file system I use, which scheduler, etc.
make xconfig
is pretty darn close. ;)
Firstly, the idea behind Gnome and KDE was to provide a set of widgets and apis for the GUI so applications would start to have more UI conformance, like Apple and Microsoft and any sane person studying interfaces understands is helpful. However, there is not an awful lot of UI consistency in Linux, and there are certainly more than two ways to do things.
Even among Gnome and KDE Apps there is a noticable lack of consistency akin to early Windows (circa 3.x) problems, but even without that problem there is the matter of many different types of interfaces. In a given set of tools, you might expect X applications, Gnome apps, KDE, tkl, something completely from the console, emacs, and some ncurses to name a few. So not only are the applications inconsistent in their interfaces within a given GUI environment, but there are any number of ways the program might present a UI. I believe this is what the poster was talking about.
Even if we confine ourselves to analysing the interface of basic tools used for regular administartion tasks and included with a given distribution, we see this problem.
I do agree, however, with your assessment of CDE. ;)
I got the $3000 price for the HP Linux Distro from the Slashdot article announcing its availability. That's what I get for believing slashdot, I suppose. ;) (or more likely, HP came out with a free version that did not have the support the $3000 version had.)
As for the pricetag on Solaris x86, well, that's too bad for you. If you run Solaris on SPARC like God intended, it is free to download the iso from the link I so thoughtfully provided. Solaris 8 was free for download for both architectures, IIRC. Sparcs are cheap on Ebay and even several years old desktops are reasonably powerful compared to PCs and can run the latest versions of Solaris with no problems.
I would imagine that Sun is charging a bit for x86 Solaris because they make money on Hardware, though they do sell x86 hardware as well. You will also notice that as of Solaris 9 they have slowed down the x86 development. I was actually surprised to see they went ahead and came out with it after many moons passed while the future of x86 Solaris was left unstated (starting with the announcement that Solaris 9 SPARC was available, but Solaris 9 x86 was not.)
I think also some of this threw off the people who, in stark contrast to the hobbyists x86 Solaris seems to have been meant for, started to buy real x86 servers and throw x86 Solaris on them instead of buying SPARCs. These people are likely the ones Sun would like most to discourage from using x86 Solaris, and from what I can tell the uncertainty factor worked very well for Sun in that regard.
Isn't it ironic that in a community of command-line using, code-writing, keyword-searching geekazoids, so few seem to give a damn about typos? You'd think that folks would have been indoctrinated to respect precise spelling and typing and punctuation and capitalization by now, and that the typos would come from the pointy-clicky Word users who are used to having to click on big buttons and having red squiggles tell them when their atrocious spelling has reared its ugly head once again.
It seems the big lie theory works after all. :) Do you really believe the majority of slashdot users are surfing in with lynx from some tty deep in the bowels of a data center? Most are using Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows. :)