Yes, of course its a good thing that they are looking at Linux, but it is wholly bizzare that these kind of things are still centerally planned in England, and that these kind of day-to-day technical decisions are made by a government minister in Whitehall and distributed down the hiereachy - presumably all the way to the cleaning in the end.
This is a result of previous government directives to start looking at Linux solutions in the government. This is something that has not trickled down all the officials to get as far as being a policy announcement in the left wing press here (of which the Observer is just one example.
Obviously this is a better situation than before, when government directives insisted that Microsoft solutions be looked at first, so far as anyone can tell simply because Tony Blair did not understand computers but did enjoy Bill Gates' company when they met - they are a similar age, and see themselves as similar global figures, and I personally think they have a similar contemptable attitude to people who are ultimately their paymasters. Now Tony Blair is politically weaker, following the recent Gulf war not being popular within the Labour Party, but really it would be better if this was happening according to other reasons.
If that is Marcelo Tosatti's attitude, I have one word for you - FreeBSD. For a Linux/Unix enthusiast who knows how to fix things and can grok the source enough to pick out as few obvious pitfalls, then maybe running bleeding edge everything is fun. But for commercial users its just crazy. The FreeBSD developers seems to appreciate this point a lot more, and I would trust FreeBSD 4.9 over Linux 2.4 anyday for production grade work, precisely because of this attitude. If the Linux 2.4 mainainters want people to move over to 2.6 now, then checking out FreeBSD makes a lot of sense. I did after Linux 2.4.11 (the "Do not use" kernel) and I've never looked back.
You might find that on certain lines if you don't travel at peak times. There have been some quite incredible things happeneing in the last few years, quite closely mirroring the events in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. The government seized control of the rail tracks themselves, now they've seized the maintainence companies, and there have been all kinds of cooked up failures, where one accident leads to an insane overreaction by the government's new rail "executive", the Stratigic Rail Authority. And all the while the service level drops, more trains are late, and you just get used to *never* relying on it. Almost every time I take a train there is something wrong - either the driver doesn't turn up (expecially a problem for the early morning serivces), or the train is so late it is cancelled and the next one replaces it. They seem to operate with no slack or redundacy at all, and to hell with people planning to use them for actual time based appointments.
That being said, GNER are one of the best. Only beaten by Hull Trains who are superb.
Weird. In England about a third of state schools are church controlled. Not just for the government operated Anglican Church either - there are probably as many Catholic state schools as Anglican, and there are also state schools for other Christian denominations, as well as Jewish state schools. There are some Muslim state schools just about to open too. This happens *while* the school is still a government operated/tax-funded school.
Northern Ireland goes even further. Thhere are basically no secular schools there at all, or none I've ever heard about. Every state school has a religious affiliation. Northern Ireland is regarded has having by far the highest educational standards in the UK, and in England the religious state schools are always the most popular and get the best results (of the government school system). Most parents prefer to send their children to *any* religious school as a consequence, even when it doesn't represent their own religion.
Windows 3.0 was pretty hard going on my (dad's) 4MB 386/33, and that was a powerful machine in its day. To be honest, it wasn't umtil 486s at double the speed and memory (and by then 3.1) that it became usable. Most people just kept it for eye candy, and used DOS programs for the main work - at least I did, anyway.
Machines today are *much* better. But I think that may be the Unix illusion. I've just retired my k6-2/333 mainboard and replaced it with a Mini-ITX 1ghz. This is a mchine that's been running some varity of Linux from 1999 to 2002, and FreeBSD for the last 18 months. It is only in the last six months or so I have felt really constrained by its lack of power. Even so, I'm not upgrading it to a massively powerful cpu. Had I been using Windows I'm sure I would have felt the need to upgrade much earlier, and even now I'd be finding a 2.2Ghx P4 to be just too slow. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
This is an excellent point - this is one example of how capitalism is not a perfect system
A free market system is where generators own their own networks and peer or don't peer with other power companies as it suits them. What this system is an example of is a centrally planned system, where the political fasions of the day become laws about how the industry is required to work. In this case it spefied that electricty must be traded etc., but that does not alter the fact this the electricity system bears a much closer resemblence to the Soviet system of state-directed but non-monopolistic (monoplies were banned) providers, conforming to centrally driven targets and regualtions first, often at the expense of consumers. It's the road to ruin, and calling it "capitialism" is a gross misuse of the term.
"great advantages of moving to a hydrogen economy"
Hydrogen has an escape velocity sufficiently great to escape the earth's gravitational pull. That means that is doesn't exist naturally on earth. That means that you have to make it from other things. Because hydrogen makes heat (i.e. is exothermic) when burnt, making hydrogen is endothermic, which means you have to put heat in, in other words burn some kind of other fuel. This manufacturing process is necessarily less efficient than just burning the original fuel, whether it be mineral oil/gas, or agricultural products like wood or plant oil.
This is a matter of scientific law. No amount of environmental wishful thinking can change these laws. You can't have a hydrogen economy. You can talk about it to other people who lack the scietific background to grasp why it can't be done, and you can run cars on the stuff with relatively little conversion. But what you can't ever have is the efficency of mineral or agricultural fuels, becuase necessasily they are used to make the hydrogen in the first place, and that process itself is inefficent.
Also, you need to see fuel-cells in their proper context, which is as a store of electricity - lightwieght high power batteries. Even if they get the technology right you are still limited to conventional power sources for them, which is either charging them from the power in your house, or charging them somewhere else and changing them often. Both of these are merely enegy displacement, and are still less effecient than burning , say, natural gas in an internal combustion engine.
It already is regulated. That is what Order 888 is. Genuinely independent, private companies would be able to choose how much they wanted to trade and how much they wanted to keep internal, and would probably own most or all of their own production and transmission equipemtn.
What you see with US electricty is a *classic* example of the failures of central planning, even if in these cases the operations being centrally planned are notionally private companies. Government mandated pseudo-trades are conceptually striaght out of the Soviet Union in the 60s, as is the resulting poliutically mismanaged disruption to consumers. Go back to the situation where private power companies owned their own networks, and only interconnected when it was in their interest, and things will enormously improve.
Is the legality of Microsoft's merely having ripped-off and marketed code developed by IBM, AT&T and UCB really the point?
Microsoft didn't "rip off" BSD/X/Apache/MIT code, or for that matter not QDOS and probably not AT&T. They used then in complience with the terms they were licenced under. For BSD style code, the reason it is licenced in that way is to allow other companies to make commericial products out of it. That is the whole point. How else is it that so many OSes managed to get TCP/IP support, and get it working well? Becuase it was possible to freely use the BSD code for it. (Linux is unusual in having its own implementation, a good thing for tcp/ip biodiversity.) Using the term "ripped off" here is quite wrong and totally misleading.
The suspicion is, of course, that Microsoft keeps their source code under wraps, not because it's so good that others might steal it, but because it's so badly hacked, and so obviously a cut-and-paste job that it will completely discredit the Microsoft developers.
I don't know the state of their source code (but rumour has it that its crap, true), but I do know the overwhelming reason for keeping it under wraps is becuase it is fully commercial code that they plan to make money on, and they don't want it in the public domain. If you support copyright (I don't BTW), as GPL enthusiasts explicetly do for GPL to work) then I think logically you have to respect Microsoft's right to copyright too, within proper fair use for their customers.
As long as they retain the copyright message etc. they are allowed to use BSD and X source code - in fact, they are encouraged to. They had a licence from AT&T for Xenix, and they bought the source code outright for QDOS. So the only significant thing is whether Microsoft have incorporated GPLed code into propriatory productcs. If they have they would have to remove the code and/or pay compensation, or licence it seperately & non-GPL from the copyright owners
While Microsoft were (at least up until now) happy to see SCO try and trash Linux, I personally doubt they are really at risk of significant breaches of the GPL. One reason for saying this is that there are past examples of Microsoft releasing GPLed code from their experimental labs, in situations where what they wrote was based on GPLed code - there is GPL download stuff on the MS Services for Unix page too.
Not that I've ever used it - no point when better real Unixes are free:-). But the point is, they are making sure they are GPL complient here, and I've no reason to doubt they don't do that everywhere, sticking to BSD, X and Apache/MIT licenced code for their propriatery products.
You will find that more people start broadcasting with more intelligent transmission/reception equipment, old analog stuff becomes progressivly useless as they lack the precision needed to seperate signal from noise. This has already happened to traditional ham radio people and people running WWII radio kit. These days there is a background hiss from things like DSL lines that lucky people can go up into their attic to escape from, and other people simply end up plugging the kit directly into their computer and going over IP instead.
That will unquestionably happen to the likes of Radio 4, and even if you like the old ways there is nothing you can do to prevent this technological change from rendering you old equipment useless.
For one, you might like to ask yourself why your FM reception is interrupted in W1, when obviously pirate radio operators are broadcasting to someone - i.e. people who can pick up their transmissions fine. Your problem is you are using an outdated radio. If you bought something new and more upmarket, like what people who listen to pirate radio have, you would be able to pick up "Thought for the Day" just fine.
Let's not forget the article is about interference on the FM band as seen by a law from 1949. Maybe my attitude is a drag for you, but not everyone who disagrees with you is a bad guy, maybe they had a case for introducing that law in 1949 that no longer applies. So do something about it, but respect that good faith
But we have a slight problem about good faith in England though, as the present government (or both opposition parties) are wildly techno-illiterate and have no desire or abilty to reciprocate good faith behavior by anyone who lives here.
- EM spectrum usage allocation back then wasn't tainted with issues anywhere like it is now.
Just becasue various analog radio and TV operators, including the government's own independentish broadcasting arm, have what they feel is an asset in the current spectrum allocations, does not mean they can be allowed to strangle progress and the repleacement of the current regulated system with fully open personal access to the airwaves. The tragedy of the commons simply no longer applies to broadcasting, as the technological improvements of the last couple of years have changed everything. Multiple overlapping signals are now possible, and desireable.
I have personal experience of antiquated legal attitudes to spectrum usage impacting a nice idea a friend and I came up with, but I didn't put myself above the law.
Unfortunately, that was what I meant by knee-jerk pro-authority attitudes. You have to do what's right in life, not what the law says - especially if you are in England and law is just a vehicle for the day to day political reqirements of the government. If you want to change a stupid, outdated and damaging law, the best thing to do is break it. Maybe the laws on radio useage were drawn up originally with the tragedy of the commons in mind, but if they benefited anyone then they certainly aren't now.
Modern wideband / spread spectrum technology flat out contradicts what you've just said. See the artical of a few weeks ago. Multiple overlapping transmission and reception with intelligent tunerless radio equipment. Just as one doesn't need ownership of the colour green in order to distinguish individual blades of green grass, you don't need ownership of a particular radio frequency to communicate effectivly. You might also like to check out the GNU Radio project, where these technologies are already being implemented in an open source project.
I don't normally flame people on Slashdot, but IMO your knee-jerk pro-authority attitude is the root cause of all our problems in England. Having people with your sort of attitude around is a real drag. The kind of things you want don't make anyone safer, they make life harder and more dangerous for everyone.
Judge by your online c.v. that your last proper job was ended in March 2002 and you are going to waste money going Slovakia? I know Europe gasoline is not cheap
I've found another job now. My online CV is out of date, that's all.
Up until now there has been no reason not to have the main event in the US, and in fact there have already been some mini-LBW events in Canada and New York State. All it takes is someone to propose a suitable locations and organise the hall rental.
Now, though, one big problem is going to be the US Government's insistance on having fingerprints and DNA samples built into passports in order to enter the US without a visa (that costs $70) via the visa-waiver programme. Foreign visitors hate that kind of thing - being treated as a criminal, being fingerprinted, hair samples etc. While those kind of restrictions are in force there isn't going to a US Linux Beer Hike that will actually appeal to non-Americans. Its a shame really, becuase there are some great locations in the US. I was originally hoping to propose the Mount Washingotn area in New Hampshire, as its an area I know quite well. There is no chance of that with Biometric ID requirements for tourists though.
To mainland Europe? Do you have an amphibious assault vehicle? And if so, do you take it out often? And if so, are you on a quest for global domination? I just happen to be the greatest criminal mind of our time...
Actually I was planning to only drive as far as Dover, then take the car ferry to Calais, and drive the rest of the way...
Re:No Knee-jerk Privacy responses please...
on
Twist on DNA Privacy
·
· Score: 1
The problem is contamination. If someone at the DNA lab mixes your sample with that of something found at the scene of the crime - or planted there - people effectively have no defence, even though they haven't done anything. In this case, the murder took place 28 years ago. It is unlikely that anyone is going to come up with real, non-fakable/fixable evidence against the man now, no is there much he can say in his defence - after all, it was nearly 30 years ogo. However, nothing stops anyone from contaminating the samples, delberately or accidently. This is a recipe for terrible abuses, and in the UK there is a history of miscarriges of justice following courts the police's word at face value.
Unlikely. Assuming the signal have been picked up yet, even our of state of radio technology allows us to process overlapping signals now - see the GNU Radio project as an example of this kind of "wideband" technology. So broadcasting isn't spam, it's just using the possibilites of the electromagnetic waveband in a way that's relitively limited in usefulness to us. If there are aliens, then either they are more advanced - in which case there is no problem, or they are less advanced and can learn from our technological breakthroughs.
Right. This is to do with broadcasts, and the
network segment up to the users host. On telephone
modem or DSL, the last segment is usually a point to point link, in
other words, a netowrk with only two hosts, this
end and the other. That way broadcasts only go so
far as the other end of the point to point link.
Windows uses broadcasts to discover other nodes
on the network, and the other end of the point to
point link won't route them by default.
With a traditional ethernet network everyone can see your smb broadcasts, so it feels less secure - people can see you "on the net". It isn't really less secure though, and as a network technology Ethernet is far superior. Explain the situation vis-a-vis the other tenents, and offer to sell them custom firewalls.
4.8 is the latest to be released. 5.0 is branched from the 5-CURRENT development tree in cvs, 4.8 is branched from the 4-STABLE cvs tree. If you are a beginner you will probably prefer to use -STABLE releases rather than -CURRENT ones.
As I see it, until the actual release is announced, some or all of those isos are going to have non-working floppy images on them, or not be 4.8-RELEASE at all. I cvsuped one machine a couple of days ago and I still got 4.8RC instead.
My firewall has no floppy or CDROM. Nah nah ni nah na... May be I should see if I can get its 400MB disks out next. I already know at least one of them is failing.
I don't think that correct. AFAIK, the tag is there in the CVS tree, and it will still be there after the release, by which time it will include changes to the floppy disk images, which are built with make release in/usr/src.
No, you can't do that yet. You can run Linux applications on FreeBSD under the binary compitiblity libraries, but you can't run a whole Linux sysytem. Not enough/usr/compat/linux/ stuff apparently.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a result of previous government directives to start looking at Linux solutions in the government. This is something that has not trickled down all the officials to get as far as being a policy announcement in the left wing press here (of which the Observer is just one example.
Obviously this is a better situation than before, when government directives insisted that Microsoft solutions be looked at first, so far as anyone can tell simply because Tony Blair did not understand computers but did enjoy Bill Gates' company when they met - they are a similar age, and see themselves as similar global figures, and I personally think they have a similar contemptable attitude to people who are ultimately their paymasters. Now Tony Blair is politically weaker, following the recent Gulf war not being popular within the Labour Party, but really it would be better if this was happening according to other reasons.
If that is Marcelo Tosatti's attitude, I have one word for you - FreeBSD. For a Linux/Unix enthusiast who knows how to fix things and can grok the source enough to pick out as few obvious pitfalls, then maybe running bleeding edge everything is fun. But for commercial users its just crazy. The FreeBSD developers seems to appreciate this point a lot more, and I would trust FreeBSD 4.9 over Linux 2.4 anyday for production grade work, precisely because of this attitude. If the Linux 2.4 mainainters want people to move over to 2.6 now, then checking out FreeBSD makes a lot of sense. I did after Linux 2.4.11 (the "Do not use" kernel) and I've never looked back.
That being said, GNER are one of the best. Only beaten by Hull Trains who are superb.
Northern Ireland goes even further. Thhere are basically no secular schools there at all, or none I've ever heard about. Every state school has a religious affiliation. Northern Ireland is regarded has having by far the highest educational standards in the UK, and in England the religious state schools are always the most popular and get the best results (of the government school system). Most parents prefer to send their children to *any* religious school as a consequence, even when it doesn't represent their own religion.
Machines today are *much* better. But I think that may be the Unix illusion. I've just retired my k6-2/333 mainboard and replaced it with a Mini-ITX 1ghz. This is a mchine that's been running some varity of Linux from 1999 to 2002, and FreeBSD for the last 18 months. It is only in the last six months or so I have felt really constrained by its lack of power. Even so, I'm not upgrading it to a massively powerful cpu. Had I been using Windows I'm sure I would have felt the need to upgrade much earlier, and even now I'd be finding a 2.2Ghx P4 to be just too slow. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
A free market system is where generators own their own networks and peer or don't peer with other power companies as it suits them. What this system is an example of is a centrally planned system, where the political fasions of the day become laws about how the industry is required to work. In this case it spefied that electricty must be traded etc., but that does not alter the fact this the electricity system bears a much closer resemblence to the Soviet system of state-directed but non-monopolistic (monoplies were banned) providers, conforming to centrally driven targets and regualtions first, often at the expense of consumers. It's the road to ruin, and calling it "capitialism" is a gross misuse of the term.
Hydrogen has an escape velocity sufficiently great to escape the earth's gravitational pull. That means that is doesn't exist naturally on earth. That means that you have to make it from other things. Because hydrogen makes heat (i.e. is exothermic) when burnt, making hydrogen is endothermic, which means you have to put heat in, in other words burn some kind of other fuel. This manufacturing process is necessarily less efficient than just burning the original fuel, whether it be mineral oil/gas, or agricultural products like wood or plant oil.
This is a matter of scientific law. No amount of environmental wishful thinking can change these laws. You can't have a hydrogen economy. You can talk about it to other people who lack the scietific background to grasp why it can't be done, and you can run cars on the stuff with relatively little conversion. But what you can't ever have is the efficency of mineral or agricultural fuels, becuase necessasily they are used to make the hydrogen in the first place, and that process itself is inefficent.
Also, you need to see fuel-cells in their proper context, which is as a store of electricity - lightwieght high power batteries. Even if they get the technology right you are still limited to conventional power sources for them, which is either charging them from the power in your house, or charging them somewhere else and changing them often. Both of these are merely enegy displacement, and are still less effecient than burning , say, natural gas in an internal combustion engine.
What you see with US electricty is a *classic* example of the failures of central planning, even if in these cases the operations being centrally planned are notionally private companies. Government mandated pseudo-trades are conceptually striaght out of the Soviet Union in the 60s, as is the resulting poliutically mismanaged disruption to consumers. Go back to the situation where private power companies owned their own networks, and only interconnected when it was in their interest, and things will enormously improve.
Microsoft didn't "rip off" BSD/X/Apache/MIT code, or for that matter not QDOS and probably not AT&T. They used then in complience with the terms they were licenced under. For BSD style code, the reason it is licenced in that way is to allow other companies to make commericial products out of it. That is the whole point. How else is it that so many OSes managed to get TCP/IP support, and get it working well? Becuase it was possible to freely use the BSD code for it. (Linux is unusual in having its own implementation, a good thing for tcp/ip biodiversity.) Using the term "ripped off" here is quite wrong and totally misleading.
The suspicion is, of course, that Microsoft keeps their source code under wraps, not because it's so good that others might steal it, but because it's so badly hacked, and so obviously a cut-and-paste job that it will completely discredit the Microsoft developers.
I don't know the state of their source code (but rumour has it that its crap, true), but I do know the overwhelming reason for keeping it under wraps is becuase it is fully commercial code that they plan to make money on, and they don't want it in the public domain. If you support copyright (I don't BTW), as GPL enthusiasts explicetly do for GPL to work) then I think logically you have to respect Microsoft's right to copyright too, within proper fair use for their customers.
While Microsoft were (at least up until now) happy to see SCO try and trash Linux, I personally doubt they are really at risk of significant breaches of the GPL. One reason for saying this is that there are past examples of Microsoft releasing GPLed code from their experimental labs, in situations where what they wrote was based on GPLed code - there is GPL download stuff on the MS Services for Unix page too.
Not that I've ever used it - no point when better real Unixes are free :-). But the point is, they are making sure they are GPL complient here, and I've no reason to doubt they don't do that everywhere, sticking to BSD, X and Apache/MIT licenced code for their propriatery products.
That will unquestionably happen to the likes of Radio 4, and even if you like the old ways there is nothing you can do to prevent this technological change from rendering you old equipment useless.
For one, you might like to ask yourself why your FM reception is interrupted in W1, when obviously pirate radio operators are broadcasting to someone - i.e. people who can pick up their transmissions fine. Your problem is you are using an outdated radio. If you bought something new and more upmarket, like what people who listen to pirate radio have, you would be able to pick up "Thought for the Day" just fine.
But we have a slight problem about good faith in England though, as the present government (or both opposition parties) are wildly techno-illiterate and have no desire or abilty to reciprocate good faith behavior by anyone who lives here.
- EM spectrum usage allocation back then wasn't tainted with issues anywhere like it is now.
Just becasue various analog radio and TV operators, including the government's own independentish broadcasting arm, have what they feel is an asset in the current spectrum allocations, does not mean they can be allowed to strangle progress and the repleacement of the current regulated system with fully open personal access to the airwaves. The tragedy of the commons simply no longer applies to broadcasting, as the technological improvements of the last couple of years have changed everything. Multiple overlapping signals are now possible, and desireable.
I have personal experience of antiquated legal attitudes to spectrum usage impacting a nice idea a friend and I came up with, but I didn't put myself above the law.
Unfortunately, that was what I meant by knee-jerk pro-authority attitudes. You have to do what's right in life, not what the law says - especially if you are in England and law is just a vehicle for the day to day political reqirements of the government. If you want to change a stupid, outdated and damaging law, the best thing to do is break it. Maybe the laws on radio useage were drawn up originally with the tragedy of the commons in mind, but if they benefited anyone then they certainly aren't now.
I don't normally flame people on Slashdot, but IMO your knee-jerk pro-authority attitude is the root cause of all our problems in England. Having people with your sort of attitude around is a real drag. The kind of things you want don't make anyone safer, they make life harder and more dangerous for everyone.
I've found another job now. My online CV is out of date, that's all.
Now, though, one big problem is going to be the US Government's insistance on having fingerprints and DNA samples built into passports in order to enter the US without a visa (that costs $70) via the visa-waiver programme. Foreign visitors hate that kind of thing - being treated as a criminal, being fingerprinted, hair samples etc. While those kind of restrictions are in force there isn't going to a US Linux Beer Hike that will actually appeal to non-Americans. Its a shame really, becuase there are some great locations in the US. I was originally hoping to propose the Mount Washingotn area in New Hampshire, as its an area I know quite well. There is no chance of that with Biometric ID requirements for tourists though.
Some time after that pesky mid-Atlantic tectonic plate boundery with boiling lava spilling out of it heals over :-)
To mainland Europe? Do you have an amphibious assault vehicle? And if so, do you take it out often? And if so, are you on a quest for global domination? I just happen to be the greatest criminal mind of our time...
Actually I was planning to only drive as far as Dover, then take the car ferry to Calais, and drive the rest of the way...
The problem is contamination. If someone at the DNA lab mixes your sample with that of something found at the scene of the crime - or planted there - people effectively have no defence, even though they haven't done anything. In this case, the murder took place 28 years ago. It is unlikely that anyone is going to come up with real, non-fakable/fixable evidence against the man now, no is there much he can say in his defence - after all, it was nearly 30 years ogo. However, nothing stops anyone from contaminating the samples, delberately or accidently. This is a recipe for terrible abuses, and in the UK there is a history of miscarriges of justice following courts the police's word at face value.
Unlikely. Assuming the signal have been picked up yet, even our of state of radio technology allows us to process overlapping signals now - see the GNU Radio project as an example of this kind of "wideband" technology. So broadcasting isn't spam, it's just using the possibilites of the electromagnetic waveband in a way that's relitively limited in usefulness to us. If there are aliens, then either they are more advanced - in which case there is no problem, or they are less advanced and can learn from our technological breakthroughs.
With a traditional ethernet network everyone can see your smb broadcasts, so it feels less secure - people can see you "on the net". It isn't really less secure though, and as a network technology Ethernet is far superior. Explain the situation vis-a-vis the other tenents, and offer to sell them custom firewalls.
4.8 is the latest to be released. 5.0 is branched from the 5-CURRENT development tree in cvs, 4.8 is branched from the 4-STABLE cvs tree. If you are a beginner you will probably prefer to use -STABLE releases rather than -CURRENT ones.
As I see it, until the actual release is announced, some or all of those isos are going to have non-working floppy images on them, or not be 4.8-RELEASE at all. I cvsuped one machine a couple of days ago and I still got 4.8RC instead.
My firewall has no floppy or CDROM. Nah nah ni nah na... May be I should see if I can get its 400MB disks out next. I already know at least one of them is failing.
I don't think that correct. AFAIK, the tag is there in the CVS tree, and it will still be there after the release, by which time it will include changes to the floppy disk images, which are built with make release in /usr/src.
No, you can't do that yet. You can run Linux applications on FreeBSD under the binary compitiblity libraries, but you can't run a whole Linux sysytem. Not enough /usr/compat/linux/ stuff apparently.