I know several places (including Linux Systems Labs and, of course, my vague CD selling business) let you designate funds to give to Debian. I'm not sure if anyone does it for the FSF, though (but it would be a good idea).
I've thought a bit more about this, and come to the conclusion that -private lets developers participate more (not less) than having just a public list.
Why? Well, imagine there's a group of people in Debian privy to more info than the rest of us, say like the guys who work for Novare or VA or the DPL. Without a -private list, they have to pick and choose who gets the information (for the sake of this discussion, let's call the chosen group The Cabal;-). The Cabal inherently leaves lots of people out of the process. Wouldn't it be better to let everyone whose identity we've verified participate?
Thus, everyone is part of the Cabal. I much prefer this to the model of other projects, which is basically that at "some point" you get to join the "star chamber" where the real decisions get made (like *BSD's "core" groups, or the [I'm speculating here] Alan Cox-Linus Torvalds brain ethertap).
Building a distribution is a lot like making sausages: the end product is usually nice, but you really don't want to know how it got that way.
Without divulging what takes place on -private directly (the rules say "don't quote anyone elsewhere w/o permission", but the de facto rule is you don't refer to discussions on -private unless they're already general knowledge... a kind of Clintonesque compartmentalization if you will), I will say there are a lot of "sausage" things going on there: discussions about the Corel license, the new-maintainer situation, serious security issues, and whether or not there is a "Debian Cabal";-). It mainly deals with sensitive "political" issues, or topics of internal organization, rather than development issues. Non-sensitive issues should be on -devel or the new -discuss (I think that's what it's called) list.
Also, to respond to your comment about -devel having flamewars. Yes, moderation avoids that problem neatly (because the flamewars are abrogated by moderators). -devel isn't moderated, nor should it be (and who would moderate it?). I suspect if we were to move to a more hierarchical scheme, many developers would quit.
In the case of the US, widescreen TVs are currently being targetted at Early Adopters. Also, in lots of places, there's no "software" for HDTV, so there's insufficient demand. I doubt HDTV is even being broadcast in more than 10 media markets at the moment.
Yes, widescreen is nice, but it's hardly essential. And I can live with "letterboxing" even on a plain old TV (which looks really good with a digital source and something to filter out the Macrovision crap). I suspect if the "HDTV adaptors" are as good as they can be, few people will upgrade to widescreen.
(Hell, I'd have to buy new furniture just to fit a widescreen in my den! And most everyone else in the U.S. is in a similar boat, unless they want a smaller screen surface area...)
MS's support for reducing the funding of the antitrust division of DOJ should not be a surprise to anyone. In the context of a DOJ that is seen by many to be out of control and using extraconstitutional and extralegal means to implement public policy decisions, it is no wonder that they are receiving lots of support. Consider:
Congress is trying to withold money from DOJ for its lawsuit against the tobacco industry, which is a DOJ effort to extract revenue from the public through "stealth" taxes (a settlement with the tobacco industry, the costs of which must be passed onto consumers).
DOJ obstruction of investigations into abuse of government power by (among others) the DOJ.
DOJ obstruction of investigations into corruption in the 1996 Democratic presidential campaign.
In that context, who can blame MS for believing they're being picked on by a Department of Justice that is willing to go well beyond its statutory authority? And who can blame them for wanting laws changed to prevent future abuses?
I'm planning on visiting to reap the karmic rewards of touring the showfloor, without actually paying for anything (well, except a couple of tanks of gas [it's a six hour drive each way] and two nights in a hotel, plus meals). I might even get some signatures on my PGP and GnuPG keys after 3+ years, and meet some of the people I've flamed (and been flamed by) on debian-devel. Sounds like fun, no?
Somehow, supporting the right of someone to express an opinion has become conflated with supporting someone in expressing an opinion.
Jordan, thanks for finally hitting something on the head that's bothered me for the longest time. I quit the ACLU because they keep going beyond protecting the right of people to do things; they have crossed over into protecting the privilege of having their exercise of that right subsidized by society. It's an important distinction to be made: if I want to make a picture of the Bill Gates covered by cow dung, that should be my right; I shouldn't expect the government to give me money to do it.
Should people be beaten up for expressing their beliefs? No. Nor should we (as a society through taxes) pay people to express their beliefs. If their beliefs have merit, people will give them money regardless.
(And Mencken couldn't get a job today because he never bought into the bias toward government action that is inherent in all the media. He might get to write op-ed pieces, but he'd never be allowed to report on anything.)
Sony is hard core on IEEE 1394 (PSX2 will have Firewire ports)
They've also put Firewire ports on their high-end VAIO laptops (my VAIO F-270 has a 1394 port, as well as USB... not that I've used either). If they're sticking them on laptops, they're probably on their VAIO desktops too.
You can also get PCI Firewire cards for not-mucho-dinero, though I suspect they're slower than an on-motherboard solution.
If you watch CNBC (i.e. have no life, or are paranoid that your RHAT is going the way of Montgomery Ward stock) you may have seen the ad for MyTrack (YADB). Their tagline is "Trade like a pro." The disclaimer is "'Trade like a pro' does not imply that there are no differences between an investor using MyTrack and a professional investor."
But the commercial is kinda cute. ("His fish are named Dow and Jones... He rides the bull, he pets his cat.")
Perhaps they'd also like to patent the idea of a bartender recognizing you and adding to your tab. It's exactly the same thing (substitute your personal appearance with a cookie, and billing info with the bouncer at the door).
AFAIK, there is no real way to do it. I'd recommend backing up your/etc and/home (or sticking them on a separate partition).
I wrote a little setp-by-step guide to moving from one dist to another in the Linux/m68k FAQ (it talks about "Watchtower," a glorified set of tar files, but it really applies to any Linux installation, distro or not).
Also contributing to the hacker's success were incomplete security updates on our test site. At the time we began the tests, Red Hat Software Inc. had 21 security updates available for Red Hat 6.0, which had been out for only a couple of months. (PC Week Labs will apply the patches to the Linux server and update the scripts for further testing.) While any operating system needs patches and updates, there is no central repository for testing or approving patches to the Linux system. Kernel patches can be obtained from a verified source such as kernel.org, but most other components have no central infrastructure.
ABC's Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? The plot: 16 people stuck on an island, with Regis Philbin shouting "Is that your final answer?" at them repeatedly until all but one go insane.
Most places have acceptable use policies that indicate that individuals using their systems are subject to monitoring. At Ole Miss, you have to sign a copy of the AUP to get an account (hell, you have to sign a copy to get an additional account). I'm not seeing what's so surprising here.
I believe Kalle wrote most of the new material; Matt may have reviewed it at some point but I don't think he was actively involved. Same deal with the 2nd Ed. (Lar did most of the new stuff in that edition, IIRC). All of the appendices are new and by different authors too (except maybe the bibliography).
The colophon says that Matt is working on some sort of clustering project at UC-Berkeley, so I guess that's what he's still doing. I think he said so in a recent interview that was linked to from/.
I think it's part of a broader problem with mass-media: the best phrase I've come up with is the nationalization of the error term, which explains what it is (but hardly is catchy enough). The basic concept is that at the fringes of society, "weird behavior" takes place; the mass-communications technology encourages the propogation of knowledge about instances of this "weird behavior" well out of proportion with its occurrence in nature. (For example: more children have been killed by airbags than in school shootings since 1996.)
The necessary corrective is to assume that if it isn't frequent enough to be non-newsworthy, it's not a real problem. Liquor stores being robbed is a real problem (witness the complete and utter lack of blaring headlines about it); Columbinesque behavior isn't.
Let me get this straight... the NAACP is wasting its members' money buying up domain names. If I were a white supremecist, I'd be laughing my ass off. Better yet, I'd get in the business myself:
Register offensive site name.
Put up vaguely offensive site.
Wait for NAACP/ADL/Dershowitz/whoever to make me an offer.
Wait for KKK/Aryan Nation/Pat Buchanan to make counteroffer.
Tell both you're putting the name on eBay.
Sell offensive site name at profit to whoever.
Repeat, lather. After a few iterations, buy into VALinux IPO, sell shares 1 week later, move to Bermuda.
It's actually a pretty diabolical plot. And it's a DoS against the NAACP, since they're giving the racist bigot moolah instead of spending it on whatever the NAACP does these days.
The really interesting part here is that the actual report on the U.S. doesn't really say any of the things that the CNET article attributes to it. So it's closer to journalist FUD (an all-to-common phenomenon) than government FUD... but FUD nonetheless.
What's really funny is that I remember someone actually proposing something like this for real. Search the debian-devel archives about 6-12 months ago...
P.S. Nice to see another ex-Amigan (or ex-AmigaOSian if I want to include myself in the group). Now, I want this settled once and for all: you had nothing to do with DirectX and ActiveX, right? (If not, you should sue the balls off M$ for creating trademark confusion...);-)
The Libertarians have many interesting points, but they can't be described as being in favour of strict enforcement of the (actual, American) Bill of Rights, since this is fundamentally a statist document which provides for e.g. conscription in time of war.
The Bill of Rights nowhere explicitly gives government the right to conscript people in time of war. Indeed, the 13th Amendment, with its prohibition on involuntary servitude, would seem to prohibit the government from making people involuntarily become part of the military. I don't think anything in the Bill of Rights is objectionable to Libertarians... perhaps some interpretations of the Bill of Rights ("the right to travel" == "the right to get welfare somewhere you move to if you got it where you came from") but even that's nebulous.
Your other points on corporate censorship (etc.) do trouble me, however. For the most part, however, unnatural monopolies are encouraged by regulation (because big companies can afford to comply, while smaller ones can't), so I still think less regulation is the way to go.
the Debian folk do not consider it liberal enough.
True enough. Sometimes the best you can do is not what everyone would like. But that's RSA's fault, not Debian's (or even ISC's). If they didn't insist on raking in the dough from their patented algorithm (a concept nobody outside the U.S. recognizes), there would be no problem here. And that's the key point here: the blame falls 90% on RSA's shoulders (and the other 10% goes to the IETF, for basically creating a broken standard). I don't know what else the ISC could have done in this situation.
Not to disagree with Bruce, but "technically superior" hasn't been proved yet for DENTS. However, I do think the more modular architecture will make DENTS easier to extend and improve in the long run. And a few of its ideas (algorithmic name assignments) are very important for large-scale hosting and reverse-lookups.
Also, in recent discussion on debian-devel, one guy from ISC said that even he was disturbed that BIND is the only production DNS implementation out there (because any BIND security problem becomes a problem everywhere on the 'net). That alone should be a good reason to get DENTS out the door. (Modern internet standards have to have multiple interoperable implementations, to avoid this very problem.)
Slashdot Mirror
I know several places (including Linux Systems Labs and, of course, my vague CD selling business) let you designate funds
to give to Debian. I'm not sure if anyone does it for the FSF, though (but it would be a good idea).
I've thought a bit more about this, and come to the conclusion that -private lets developers participate more (not less) than having just a public list.
;-). The Cabal inherently leaves lots of people out
Why? Well, imagine there's a group of people in Debian privy to more info than the rest of us,
say like the guys who work for Novare or VA or the DPL. Without a -private
list, they have to pick and choose who gets the information (for the sake of this discussion,
let's call the chosen group The Cabal
of the process. Wouldn't it be better to let everyone whose identity we've verified participate?
Thus, everyone is part of the Cabal. I much prefer this to the model of other projects, which is basically that at "some point" you get to join the "star chamber" where the real decisions get made (like *BSD's "core" groups, or the [I'm speculating here] Alan Cox-Linus Torvalds brain ethertap).
The CD-ROM issue is being addressed for 2.2; the -boot guys are working on an autodetection script which should be way cool.
I'm never asked about byte compiling for Emacs... I guess that's been changed since 2.0 or 2.1 (I do remember it being asked a long time ago).
I didn't find the exim script too confusing, though it's not clear what to use for a dial-up link (option 1 or 2 usually).
Building a distribution is a lot like making sausages: the end product is usually nice, but you really don't want to know how it got that way.
;-). It mainly deals with sensitive "political" issues, or topics of internal organization, rather than development issues. Non-sensitive issues should be on -devel or the new -discuss (I think that's what it's called) list.
Without divulging what takes place on -private directly (the rules say "don't quote anyone elsewhere w/o permission", but the de facto rule is you don't refer to discussions on -private unless they're already general knowledge... a kind of Clintonesque compartmentalization if you will), I will say there are a lot of "sausage" things going on there: discussions about the Corel license, the new-maintainer situation, serious security issues, and whether or not there is a "Debian Cabal"
Also, to respond to your comment about -devel having flamewars. Yes, moderation avoids that problem neatly (because the flamewars are abrogated by moderators). -devel isn't moderated, nor should it be (and who would moderate it?). I suspect if we were to move to a more hierarchical scheme, many developers would quit.
In the case of the US, widescreen TVs are currently being targetted at Early Adopters. Also, in lots of places, there's no "software" for HDTV, so there's insufficient demand. I doubt HDTV is even being broadcast in more than 10 media markets at the moment.
Yes, widescreen is nice, but it's hardly essential. And I can live with "letterboxing" even on a plain old TV (which looks really good with a digital source and something to filter out the Macrovision crap). I suspect if the "HDTV adaptors" are as good as they can be, few people will upgrade to widescreen.
(Hell, I'd have to buy new furniture just to fit a widescreen in my den! And most everyone else in the U.S. is in a similar boat, unless they want a smaller screen surface area...)
In that context, who can blame MS for believing they're being picked on by a Department of Justice that is willing to go well beyond its statutory authority? And who can blame them for wanting laws changed to prevent future abuses?
Take a look at Debian's vendor listing for a distributor near you.
I'm planning on visiting to reap the karmic rewards of touring the showfloor, without actually paying for anything (well, except a couple of tanks of gas [it's a six hour drive each way] and two nights in a hotel, plus meals). I might even get some signatures on my PGP and GnuPG keys after 3+ years, and meet some of the people I've flamed (and been flamed by) on debian-devel. Sounds like fun, no?
Somehow, supporting the right of someone to express an opinion has become conflated with supporting someone in expressing an opinion.
Jordan, thanks for finally hitting something on the head that's bothered me for the longest time. I quit the ACLU because they keep going beyond protecting the right of people to do things; they have crossed over into protecting the privilege of having their exercise of that right subsidized by society. It's an important distinction to be made: if I want to make a picture of the Bill Gates covered by cow dung, that should be my right; I shouldn't expect the government to give me money to do it.
Should people be beaten up for expressing their beliefs? No. Nor should we (as a society through taxes) pay people to express their beliefs. If their beliefs have merit, people will give them money regardless.
(And Mencken couldn't get a job today because he never bought into the bias toward government action that is inherent in all the media. He might get to write op-ed pieces, but he'd never be allowed to report on anything.)
Sony is hard core on IEEE 1394 (PSX2 will have Firewire ports)
They've also put Firewire ports on their high-end VAIO laptops (my VAIO F-270 has a 1394 port, as well as USB... not that I've used either). If they're sticking them on laptops, they're probably on their VAIO desktops too.
You can also get PCI Firewire cards for not-mucho-dinero, though I suspect they're slower than an on-motherboard solution.
If you watch CNBC (i.e. have no life, or are paranoid that your RHAT is going the way of Montgomery Ward stock) you may have seen the ad for MyTrack (YADB). Their tagline is "Trade like a pro." The disclaimer is "'Trade like a pro' does not imply that there are no differences between an investor using MyTrack and a professional investor."
But the commercial is kinda cute. ("His fish are named Dow and Jones... He rides the bull, he pets his cat.")
Perhaps they'd also like to patent the idea of a bartender recognizing you and adding to your tab. It's exactly the same thing (substitute your personal appearance with a cookie, and billing info with the bouncer at the door).
AFAIK, there is no real way to do it. I'd recommend backing up your /etc and /home (or sticking them on a separate partition).
I wrote a little setp-by-step guide to moving from one dist to another in the Linux/m68k FAQ (it talks about "Watchtower," a glorified set of tar files, but it really applies to any Linux installation, distro or not).
ABC's Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? The plot: 16 people stuck on an island, with Regis Philbin shouting "Is that your final answer?" at them repeatedly until all but one go insane.
What do you think, America?
Most places have acceptable use policies that indicate that individuals using their systems are subject to monitoring. At Ole Miss, you have to sign a copy of the AUP to get an account (hell, you have to sign a copy to get an additional account). I'm not seeing what's so surprising here.
I believe Kalle wrote most of the new material; Matt may have reviewed it at some point but I don't think he was actively involved. Same deal with the 2nd Ed. (Lar did most of the new stuff in that edition, IIRC). All of the appendices are new and by different authors too (except maybe the bibliography).
/.
The colophon says that Matt is working on some sort of clustering project at UC-Berkeley, so I guess that's what he's still doing. I think he said so in a recent interview that was linked to from
I think it's part of a broader problem with mass-media: the best phrase I've come up with is the nationalization of the error term, which explains what it is (but hardly is catchy enough). The basic concept is that at the fringes of society, "weird behavior" takes place; the mass-communications technology encourages the propogation of knowledge about instances of this "weird behavior" well out of proportion with its occurrence in nature. (For example: more children have been killed by airbags than in school shootings since 1996.)
The necessary corrective is to assume that if it isn't frequent enough to be non-newsworthy, it's not a real problem. Liquor stores being robbed is a real problem (witness the complete and utter lack of blaring headlines about it); Columbinesque behavior isn't.
It's actually a pretty diabolical plot. And it's a DoS against the NAACP, since they're giving the racist bigot moolah instead of spending it on whatever the NAACP does these days.
The really interesting part here is that the actual report on the U.S. doesn't really say any of the things that the CNET article attributes to it. So it's closer to journalist FUD (an all-to-common phenomenon) than government FUD... but FUD nonetheless.
Waiting to be moderated down...
What's really funny is that I remember someone actually proposing something like this for real. Search the debian-devel archives about 6-12 months ago...
;-)
P.S. Nice to see another ex-Amigan (or ex-AmigaOSian if I want to include myself in the group). Now, I want this settled once and for all: you had nothing to do with DirectX and ActiveX, right? (If not, you should sue the balls off M$ for creating trademark confusion...)
ELECT JEDILUKE for California State Senate!
Now, now, we don't want the Federal Elections Commission coming over and regulating Slashdot just because we're campaigning, do we?
The Libertarians have many interesting points, but they can't be described as being in favour of strict enforcement of the (actual, American) Bill of Rights, since this is fundamentally a statist document which provides for e.g. conscription in time of war.
The Bill of Rights nowhere explicitly gives government the right to conscript people in time of war. Indeed, the 13th Amendment, with its prohibition on involuntary servitude, would seem to prohibit the government from making people involuntarily become part of the military. I don't think anything in the Bill of Rights is objectionable to Libertarians... perhaps some interpretations of the Bill of Rights ("the right to travel" == "the right to get welfare somewhere you move to if you got it where you came from") but even that's nebulous.
Your other points on corporate censorship (etc.) do trouble me, however. For the most part, however, unnatural monopolies are encouraged by regulation (because big companies can afford to comply, while smaller ones can't), so I still think less regulation is the way to go.
the Debian folk do not consider it liberal enough.
True enough. Sometimes the best you can do is not what everyone would like. But that's RSA's fault, not Debian's (or even ISC's). If they didn't insist on raking in the dough from their patented algorithm (a concept nobody outside the U.S. recognizes), there would be no problem here. And that's the key point here: the blame falls 90% on RSA's shoulders (and the other 10% goes to the IETF, for basically creating a broken standard). I don't know what else the ISC could have done in this situation.
Not to disagree with Bruce, but "technically superior" hasn't been proved yet for DENTS. However, I do think the more modular architecture will make DENTS easier to extend and improve in the long run. And a few of its ideas (algorithmic name assignments) are very important for large-scale hosting and reverse-lookups.
Also, in recent discussion on debian-devel, one guy from ISC said that even he was disturbed that BIND is the only production DNS implementation out there (because any BIND security problem becomes a problem everywhere on the 'net). That alone should be a good reason to get DENTS out the door. (Modern internet standards have to have multiple interoperable implementations, to avoid this very problem.)