We used ``9/9/99'' to signify ``lifetime dues paied'' in my OA lodge... I've seen 9/99 used for non-expirable things in several places. My guess is that people with theoretical non-expirable things such as credit cards or insurance will suddenly find in October that it has expired.
They have a clue alright... it's just that they're not concerned with your privacy or rights. They are much more concerned about keeping order. If they can stop 1 terrorist by infringing on everyone's rights, then they think it is worth it.
You think that they don't know that if you use strong encryption that they can't read your email? Of course they know that. But they don't care that you don't want them to read your email. They want to be able to read it, screw you. And they realize that few enough people care today that they can go ahead and abridge rights now, and then people will never have them later to miss... they can seize the right now, before people realize they have it. And they know that if most people never become accustomed to it, they won't ever want it or miss it.
If you never saw a computer, never used email, and nobody else did, then you wouldn't miss it. If someone took it away from you now, you'd be pretty angry. I know I would. And it is the same way with all sorts of rights -- if people learn that they have a right, they will fight to keep it, however if they never think they have a right they won't really care.
Why do you think it's so hard to take away guns from people here in the US? Because it's our right to have guns. Law abiding citizens have the right, given to us by our government, to own firearms. I don't know if that was a good idea, and that isn't the point of the argument. The point is that when the government makes movements to abridge that right, people get angry. Because they have learned to exercise the right.
Take a few LED's, amplify changes in voltages they produce (LED's will make voltage from light). Significant change implies movement in the area.
My friend used this setup to make an auto-cat-squirter for his garden. It was cool... anything tried to go in the garden and the sprinkler turned on...
I think this is largely Netscape's issue... I think Netscape is taking smaller fonts and making them larger by scaling... 9pt at 18pt or whatnot (but doesn't do a good job of scaling like TeX)
HMm... I'm still going to go for the DualHead support because (A) one day I might have enough room for a couple of monitors (maybe 1 monitor + 1 LCD screen?) (B) the second output can be TV-out for playing games on a large screen (Go Koules!), and (C) who can argue with a 360mhz ramdac?
Plus, the 2D performance of the matrox cards is just amazing. If I can get 10% better performance in the 2D world over a TNT2 then even if the 3D performance is half as good I'd go for the Matrox card.
You can use smbmount for the Windows machines, possibly some sort of appletalk client (netatalk? I haven't used the mac tools) for the macintosh. And then you can just use tar or cpio...
One think you should remember is that you may not want to do full backups on the machines that don't have the compatable tape drive -- you won't be able to load the data off of the server to the client without getting the OS installed even after a disk crash!
What I'd do is use netatalk and samba to have the same (home, maybe) mounted on all the machines... that way you have a centralized point that has all your important data. Additional data could be left only on the server.
The problem with linux and large enterprise servers is mostly in it's style of development. Most people don't have access to an Ultra Enterprise 10000 ``starfire'' and several disk arrays to just sit around and play with -- they are stuck with (relatively) cheap PC's and Suns and Alphas. Only large companies can afford to shell out millions to buy the equipment, and millions more to pay programmers to develop for it. That's why Sun Enterprise equipment is almost mission-critical-environment ready -- and linux isn't. You can't yank a processor board out of a machine running Linux and still have the thing hum along. Yet.
(sigh) One who has not seen the light of a Unified Filesystem...
The Unix directory structure is fantastic. It is designed for ease of administration and ease of user use.
You have a unified filesystem, where you always install programs into/usr and always put config files in/etc and so on... that is information only required by the administrator. And it is so easy to install new stuff and have everything recognise it... just be able to have it in a "bin" directory.
The user doesn't need to see any of this. A UNIX user should never be able to play with stuff in/usr. Or even/var for that matter. Everything should come out of their/home/directory. Our Windows users at the site have much more problems finding their files than our UNIX users... the windows programs put the files in the application directories... whereas our UNIX users know that it is somewhere in their home directory.
This works well for an administered system with n users, where n is between 1 and infinity. Now, the problem might arise that users need to change something in/etc or something like that... then it might be a problem... but if they use a package system (slackware packages, debian packages, red hat packages, whatever) all that is set up for them... they just use the install tool and it puts all the files where they need to go.
The windows system, like the Mac system, is horrible. Having a seperate directory structure for programs and data is the way to go.
I think that LFTM(tm) could have consitency across machines without being limited to either a single wm or distribution.
Let me explain.
I work for a fairly large corporation. We have lots of unix machines for various engineers who do lots of CAD and stuff like that.
The environment, however, looks the same across platforms. Whether you run an Alpha or a Sun, everything is in the same place as your home machine. Likewise, it doesn't matter if gimp is in/usr/bin(DistroA) or/usr/local/bin(DistroB) So long as the Gimp Icon is available from a toolbar or menu.
This is also what we see on windows and Mac installations. People don't precisely know where important system utilities are when they sit down, but they know to look around in the start or apple menu.
Also, being limited to one window manager is silly. We have three supported window managers here: OpenLook, CDE, and Mwm. You have a file in your home directory that your init script uses to decide which one to start up -- and it's the same wm across machines and across platforms. If you want to change it, it's a menu option. Having the same window manager shouldn't be manditory across platforms -- but perhaps there should be a standard list of window managers that should be available. And it should be easy for users to switch to their window manager of choice when they need to.
I certainly agree that for a LinuxForTheMasses distribution that the command line and administration knowledge should not be necessary. I could not live without my command line -- it's the perfect file manager, program launcher, and with vim, word processor. But my mother has enough problems remembering where to double-click, remembering the syntax for various commands isn't something she's interested in.
I think we've started to see some of this in the server market -- the Cobalt Qube is configurable with buttons on the front and web pages -- no knowledge of Unix administration is necessary. And I think that Gnome and KDE are coming up with a good base on which to add the features we need for LFTM. Just give it a few years to mature. It will come.
Re:Religion: REALITY CHECKPOINT - do not pass!
on
Spoonful of Quickies
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· Score: 1
And nobody has a right to denegrate anybody's religion, or lack thereof. If people disagree with somebody's religious viewpoints - fine. Saying you're right and everybody else is wrong and will be eternally damned if you don't believe them is not.
Sure it is... it's covered in that ``free speech part...'' I'm not saying it's a good thing to do, but it is within their rights.
Anyway, you're right. You probably won't find God listening to CAP alerts. Scriptures can certainly help you, though. And it's not everyone else who deserves hell. It's everyone period.
But who is this CAP alert designed for?
It's designed for the typical christian parent who maybe doesn't watch too much TV (maybe no cable...) and who has little kids that want to go see this movie. The parent doesn't know much about the movie. Obviously this little kid shouldn't see the movie.
This is NOT designed for the typical slashdot reader (16-25 year old male).
Every time someone sees an angel in the Bible they have one reaction... they are scared out of their boots. Usually the first thing an angel says when they appear is ``be not afraid...''
As to the movie, yes, it's offensive. This article is trying to point itself towards christian parents of 8-10 year olds who are begging to go see it. Not to the typical (16-25 year old male) slashdot reader. 8-10 year olds don't need to see this kind of movie; people who know right and wrong and understand satire and can handle the offensiveness of the movie are (usually) Ok.
That being said, would your parents want to see this movie? Especially with you when you were between the ages of 8 and 10? I know mine wouldn't...
What you need is an Enterprise Server x000 from Sun. Plop in a few I/O boards and processor boards. Plug in your GBIC's. Off you go. You can even use two Enterprise Servers to talk to the SAME Storage array, as I recall. And you can plug in processors and RAM to your heart's content. Plus, you can hot-swap all the hardware.
Sun is a great company, and will be around for a long time.
I'd suggest the Enterprise Server 4000, as you can fit 3 or 4 processor/ram boards in it, and still have enough slots available to talk to 8 or more storage arrays. You can also get your quad-fast-ethernet card, and it works like a champ.
Solaris is designed to work with lots of processors, lots of ram, and lots of disk space. You'll have much more success than you would clicking on stuff in Windows NT.
We have Enterprise Servers here running several hundred TB's of data for all sorts of things... oracle databases, simulation data files, testing data files... it works great. And you don't have to sit at the thing in order to administrate it.. just use your favorite method to export your display back to your local X machine (or use the text utilities).
That mpeg is a great format for cross-platform movie viewing. Sparkle (or whatever nowdays) for Mac, mtv for Linux, sunvideo for Sun, random_mpeg_player for windows. Other than that, I'd say that AVI can be viewed by all windows people (of course), most of them can be viewed by xanim. And there are certainly viewers available for Mac. (IE comes to mind (shudder)) In fact, don't recent qt viewers have support for AVI? I don't remember, it's been a long time since I've been forced to use a Mac...
You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you.
And they just might be.
I'm not in a militia. Why? Lots of reasons. But why does the government, media, and (therefore?) the public think that they are evil in general? What militia has bombed a Chinese embassy in the recent past because ``our maps were old?'' What militia thinks they have a right to all my personal information?
Oh, maybe they're evil because they have guns. Because we all know that guns are evil, right? While many states are making it worthwile to get conceal-and-carry permits, lots of people with influence want to take away your right to arm yourself.
Now, I'm not some sort of crazy personal armory. I don't own a gun. But I also have done research, and know that owning a gun isn't a bad idea.
What if we switched this discussion from guns and militias to computers?
Does the government have the right to know how much computing power you have? What if you amass computing power to help a foreign country do nuclear simulations? Computing power is a dangerous thing... maybe we should keep a record of all computer parts everyone owns in a ``safe place.'' The government wouldn't let anyone see that information who didn't need to, nor would they sell it... promise.
Why not run your email through the government filter? Only criminals would get into trouble! And why should you encrypt your data? What do you have to hide? Bomb plans?
For that matter, the government should be able to have root authority on all your machines... you could be hiding plans to shoot everyone in a high school... if the government could find those plans near the outlawed game of DOOM (which only criminals and people with violent minds play) they could save children's lives.
And that's what this is all about, right? The children. And protecting those children is why all people who are in contact with minors should have surveillence cameras in each room of their house. Think about how much child abuse could be stopped each year!
Go back and ask the framers of the constitution if ``necessary and proper'' includes eavesdropping on private conversations and censorship. Ask them if it is worthwile to infringe on rights if it can bring criminals to justice faster. Ask them if they would find it acceptable if the govermnent knew how much money they have, where it is, and how it was being spent.
I think we have a horrible government. I only wish there was somewhere better to move to. As many problems as the USA has, it's still the country for me... the least of the evils.
This is all just a big E theme. That's it. Amiga will make their own distribution (RedHat with AmigaFS support compiled into the kernel) and will ship with an AmigaOS theme for E and GTK.
No, no... it's a good thing.
on
Storm Linux
·
· Score: 2
You have some distributions that are geared towards making sure stuff is stable before making architectural changes, like Slackware.
You have some distributions that are geared towards making small systems, like the Linux Router Project.
You have some distributions that are based off of one another, like the 158 RedHat based distributions... but each one has its own merit. Each one is different. And since most / all of the software is open, new changes can be incorporated back into RedHat if they are good and they are what RedHat is interested in. RedHat might not be interested in having to support a MkLinux port -- but having MkLinux have a RedHat base allows the MkLinux people to get a great headstart on having a nice distribution.
And are these distributions incompatable? If a distribution is libc5, then maybe they can't run libc6 binaries. (But then again, there are incompatabilities between glibc 2.07 and 2.1... but I digress)... But things tend to compile out-of-the-tarball on most distributions I have seen.
If the Debian people love their package manager, then they will do everything to make it the best. Likewise, RedHat folks try to make the unbeatable RPM. Slackware folks just stick to a tarball with a script. Does this mean that if everyone used Slackware that tar would would have features like rpm or dpkg? Of course not. Different distributions foster growth and new ideas. Different distributions appeal to different groups of users with different tastes or hardware platforms.
And having their own distribution probably helps Stormix keep tabs on the systems that they have to support. They can make sure that the packages they want to support are in their distribution and that packages they don't want to deal with aren't. This is an amazing feature of Linux, one that will make it (in my opinion) great for companies doing support. They don't lose anything (compatability with debian means most things work really easy) and they gain immensely (they control what they have to support). And after they've modified the distro how they want, why not offer it to everyone else? It costs them little. If three random users have it fill a need, great. And if no one uses it besides their customers, well that is fine, too.
When 80% of the pages on the web are ``JimBob's Personal Web Page'' or ``Click HERE FOR 31337 Pr0N!'' do we really need (or want?) all those web pages bogging down the search engines? I'd say that only about 10% of the web is useful information. If the crawlers can get that (and if it's useful, it will get linked to (in theory) from other web pages) then that's probably all we'd want...
One problem I have with engines are sites with changing sidebars... when the sidebars mention one of my keywords because it was a recent article when the crawler went by, but the article has nothing to do with what I want...
Please, people, let's not flame these people for violating the GPL before we even see the product. It could be that they switched form one pure system to another, or it could be that they've ported GNU software to BeOS -- both of which are legal.
Don't flame these people, and read the Linux-Advocacy HOWTO.
Slashdot Mirror
We used ``9/9/99'' to signify ``lifetime dues paied'' in my OA lodge... I've seen 9/99 used for non-expirable things in several places. My guess is that people with theoretical non-expirable things such as credit cards or insurance will suddenly find in October that it has expired.
Hey, don't talk about ESR that way! :-)
I guess ESR isn't a ``millenial'' nut... just a normal nut like the rest of us
You think that they don't know that if you use strong encryption that they can't read your email? Of course they know that. But they don't care that you don't want them to read your email. They want to be able to read it, screw you. And they realize that few enough people care today that they can go ahead and abridge rights now, and then people will never have them later to miss... they can seize the right now, before people realize they have it. And they know that if most people never become accustomed to it, they won't ever want it or miss it.
If you never saw a computer, never used email, and nobody else did, then you wouldn't miss it. If someone took it away from you now, you'd be pretty angry. I know I would. And it is the same way with all sorts of rights -- if people learn that they have a right, they will fight to keep it, however if they never think they have a right they won't really care.
Why do you think it's so hard to take away guns from people here in the US? Because it's our right to have guns. Law abiding citizens have the right, given to us by our government, to own firearms. I don't know if that was a good idea, and that isn't the point of the argument. The point is that when the government makes movements to abridge that right, people get angry. Because they have learned to exercise the right.
My friend used this setup to make an auto-cat-squirter for his garden. It was cool... anything tried to go in the garden and the sprinkler turned on...
See? I called it on the first story.
Amiga is only a theme for E now. And that's it.
I think this is largely Netscape's issue... I think Netscape is taking smaller fonts and making them larger by scaling... 9pt at 18pt or whatnot (but doesn't do a good job of scaling like TeX)
Plus, the 2D performance of the matrox cards is just amazing. If I can get 10% better performance in the 2D world over a TNT2 then even if the 3D performance is half as good I'd go for the Matrox card.
But, that's just me. I use 2D much more than 3d.
One think you should remember is that you may not want to do full backups on the machines that don't have the compatable tape drive -- you won't be able to load the data off of the server to the client without getting the OS installed even after a disk crash!
What I'd do is use netatalk and samba to have the same (home, maybe) mounted on all the machines... that way you have a centralized point that has all your important data. Additional data could be left only on the server.
'Cause they haven't ... yet.
The problem with linux and large enterprise servers is mostly in it's style of development. Most people don't have access to an Ultra Enterprise 10000 ``starfire'' and several disk arrays to just sit around and play with -- they are stuck with (relatively) cheap PC's and Suns and Alphas. Only large companies can afford to shell out millions to buy the equipment, and millions more to pay programmers to develop for it. That's why Sun Enterprise equipment is almost mission-critical-environment ready -- and linux isn't. You can't yank a processor board out of a machine running Linux and still have the thing hum along. Yet.
That the initial version of the IA64 chip won't be all that fast... stick with IA32 unless you need to develop for IA64...
The Unix directory structure is fantastic. It is designed for ease of administration and ease of user use.
You have a unified filesystem, where you always install programs into /usr and always put config files in /etc and so on... that is information only required by the administrator. And it is so easy to install new stuff and have everything recognise it... just be able to have it in a "bin" directory.
The user doesn't need to see any of this. A UNIX user should never be able to play with stuff in /usr. Or even /var for that matter. Everything should come out of their /home/directory. Our Windows users at the site have much more problems finding their files than our UNIX users... the windows programs put the files in the application directories... whereas our UNIX users know that it is somewhere in their home directory.
This works well for an administered system with n users, where n is between 1 and infinity. Now, the problem might arise that users need to change something in /etc or something like that... then it might be a problem... but if they use a package system (slackware packages, debian packages, red hat packages, whatever) all that is set up for them... they just use the install tool and it puts all the files where they need to go.
The windows system, like the Mac system, is horrible. Having a seperate directory structure for programs and data is the way to go.
Let me explain.
I work for a fairly large corporation. We have lots of unix machines for various engineers who do lots of CAD and stuff like that.
The environment, however, looks the same across platforms. Whether you run an Alpha or a Sun, everything is in the same place as your home machine. Likewise, it doesn't matter if gimp is in /usr/bin(DistroA) or /usr/local/bin(DistroB) So long as the Gimp Icon is available from a toolbar or menu.
This is also what we see on windows and Mac installations. People don't precisely know where important system utilities are when they sit down, but they know to look around in the start or apple menu.
Also, being limited to one window manager is silly. We have three supported window managers here: OpenLook, CDE, and Mwm. You have a file in your home directory that your init script uses to decide which one to start up -- and it's the same wm across machines and across platforms. If you want to change it, it's a menu option. Having the same window manager shouldn't be manditory across platforms -- but perhaps there should be a standard list of window managers that should be available. And it should be easy for users to switch to their window manager of choice when they need to.
I certainly agree that for a LinuxForTheMasses distribution that the command line and administration knowledge should not be necessary. I could not live without my command line -- it's the perfect file manager, program launcher, and with vim, word processor. But my mother has enough problems remembering where to double-click, remembering the syntax for various commands isn't something she's interested in.
I think we've started to see some of this in the server market -- the Cobalt Qube is configurable with buttons on the front and web pages -- no knowledge of Unix administration is necessary. And I think that Gnome and KDE are coming up with a good base on which to add the features we need for LFTM. Just give it a few years to mature. It will come.
Sure it is... it's covered in that ``free speech part...'' I'm not saying it's a good thing to do, but it is within their rights.
Anyway, you're right. You probably won't find God listening to CAP alerts. Scriptures can certainly help you, though. And it's not everyone else who deserves hell. It's everyone period.
But who is this CAP alert designed for?
It's designed for the typical christian parent who maybe doesn't watch too much TV (maybe no cable...) and who has little kids that want to go see this movie. The parent doesn't know much about the movie. Obviously this little kid shouldn't see the movie.
This is NOT designed for the typical slashdot reader (16-25 year old male).
Every time someone sees an angel in the Bible they have one reaction... they are scared out of their boots. Usually the first thing an angel says when they appear is ``be not afraid...''
As to the movie, yes, it's offensive. This article is trying to point itself towards christian parents of 8-10 year olds who are begging to go see it. Not to the typical (16-25 year old male) slashdot reader. 8-10 year olds don't need to see this kind of movie; people who know right and wrong and understand satire and can handle the offensiveness of the movie are (usually) Ok.
That being said, would your parents want to see this movie? Especially with you when you were between the ages of 8 and 10? I know mine wouldn't...
Sun is a great company, and will be around for a long time.
I'd suggest the Enterprise Server 4000, as you can fit 3 or 4 processor/ram boards in it, and still have enough slots available to talk to 8 or more storage arrays. You can also get your quad-fast-ethernet card, and it works like a champ.
Solaris is designed to work with lots of processors, lots of ram, and lots of disk space. You'll have much more success than you would clicking on stuff in Windows NT.
We have Enterprise Servers here running several hundred TB's of data for all sorts of things... oracle databases, simulation data files, testing data files... it works great. And you don't have to sit at the thing in order to administrate it.. just use your favorite method to export your display back to your local X machine (or use the text utilities).
And they just might be.
I'm not in a militia. Why? Lots of reasons. But why does the government, media, and (therefore?) the public think that they are evil in general? What militia has bombed a Chinese embassy in the recent past because ``our maps were old?'' What militia thinks they have a right to all my personal information?
Oh, maybe they're evil because they have guns. Because we all know that guns are evil, right? While many states are making it worthwile to get conceal-and-carry permits, lots of people with influence want to take away your right to arm yourself.
Now, I'm not some sort of crazy personal armory. I don't own a gun. But I also have done research, and know that owning a gun isn't a bad idea.
What if we switched this discussion from guns and militias to computers?
Does the government have the right to know how much computing power you have? What if you amass computing power to help a foreign country do nuclear simulations? Computing power is a dangerous thing... maybe we should keep a record of all computer parts everyone owns in a ``safe place.'' The government wouldn't let anyone see that information who didn't need to, nor would they sell it... promise.
Why not run your email through the government filter? Only criminals would get into trouble! And why should you encrypt your data? What do you have to hide? Bomb plans?
For that matter, the government should be able to have root authority on all your machines... you could be hiding plans to shoot everyone in a high school... if the government could find those plans near the outlawed game of DOOM (which only criminals and people with violent minds play) they could save children's lives.
And that's what this is all about, right? The children. And protecting those children is why all people who are in contact with minors should have surveillence cameras in each room of their house. Think about how much child abuse could be stopped each year!
Go back and ask the framers of the constitution if ``necessary and proper'' includes eavesdropping on private conversations and censorship. Ask them if it is worthwile to infringe on rights if it can bring criminals to justice faster. Ask them if they would find it acceptable if the govermnent knew how much money they have, where it is, and how it was being spent.
I think we have a horrible government. I only wish there was somewhere better to move to. As many problems as the USA has, it's still the country for me... the least of the evils.
Sorry for the rant. It's a slow day at work.
This is all just a big E theme. That's it. Amiga will make their own distribution (RedHat with AmigaFS support compiled into the kernel) and will ship with an AmigaOS theme for E and GTK.
You have some distributions that are geared towards making small systems, like the Linux Router Project.
You have some distributions that are based off of one another, like the 158 RedHat based distributions... but each one has its own merit. Each one is different. And since most / all of the software is open, new changes can be incorporated back into RedHat if they are good and they are what RedHat is interested in. RedHat might not be interested in having to support a MkLinux port -- but having MkLinux have a RedHat base allows the MkLinux people to get a great headstart on having a nice distribution.
And are these distributions incompatable? If a distribution is libc5, then maybe they can't run libc6 binaries. (But then again, there are incompatabilities between glibc 2.07 and 2.1... but I digress)... But things tend to compile out-of-the-tarball on most distributions I have seen.
If the Debian people love their package manager, then they will do everything to make it the best. Likewise, RedHat folks try to make the unbeatable RPM. Slackware folks just stick to a tarball with a script. Does this mean that if everyone used Slackware that tar would would have features like rpm or dpkg? Of course not. Different distributions foster growth and new ideas. Different distributions appeal to different groups of users with different tastes or hardware platforms.
And having their own distribution probably helps Stormix keep tabs on the systems that they have to support. They can make sure that the packages they want to support are in their distribution and that packages they don't want to deal with aren't. This is an amazing feature of Linux, one that will make it (in my opinion) great for companies doing support. They don't lose anything (compatability with debian means most things work really easy) and they gain immensely (they control what they have to support). And after they've modified the distro how they want, why not offer it to everyone else? It costs them little. If three random users have it fill a need, great. And if no one uses it besides their customers, well that is fine, too.
You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you.
Who is they?
You know... THEM...
Postfix, by the way, is a fantastic piece of software. End sendmail, use postfix. It's probably a drop-in replacement for you.
One problem I have with engines are sites with changing sidebars... when the sidebars mention one of my keywords because it was a recent article when the crawler went by, but the article has nothing to do with what I want...
What about fruit? How many levels does the fruit go for?
Don't flame these people, and read the Linux-Advocacy HOWTO.