And as far as "bugs" go. The debate is basically this. The programs that had date problems during the 2000 rollover were doing exactly what the people who designed and wrote them meant for them to do. That is take two numbers and assume that they should have a 19 in front of them for purposes of determining a date. A bug is when a application does something other than what the people who wrote it meant for it to do. The fact that they never thought that said apps would be in use beyond 1999 and thus did the wrong thing does not make it a bug that makes it a bad design choice. I was not saying that there were not problems and that they did not need to be fixed. I am saying that in a strict sense they were not bugs just badly designed programs. The 2038 problem is once again not a bug. The system and all the applications will be doing exactly what they were meant to do. It will simply be the wrong thing to do if we don't change the system between now and then.
As every true geek knows a bug and doing the wrong thing are not the same thing.
My problem with the freaks statement was that you indicated that geeks choose to be who and what they are that is freaks or non-mundane as I like to say (This is humour something else you seem to be lacking and that most geeks have). I do not think this is true. I think there is a strong component of nature there and that nurture also plays a strong role. But is is IMO *not* a choice as you said it was.
All real nerds know better than to call it Y2K. Since Y2K would be 2024. So Y2K38 would be 2062. So you would have called the thing that happened 5 years ago the Year 2000 bug and the thing that his coming up the Year 2038 even. This is, of course, becuase 5 years ago it was almost certainly a bug although that point could be debated. And while the year 2038 event might cause problems I can't think of any way it could be called a bug.
You are right about fake nerds. But not, I think, about fake freaks. Although that would be way OT so I won't go into it here.
And yes you have just been shown to be a pouser yourself. Hell you likely even thought Jan 01 2000 was the first day of a new millenium or century or some such bullshit.
I would happily pay say.us $25 a month for a real time BBC feed. Say something like the model HBO and other "premimum" channels here use. I'm not sure what a TV License costs but I'm thinking that would more than cover it.
Hell I'd almost pay that much for a *quality* online feed. And I know I'm not the only one. Seems to me they need to think just a bit out of the box.
Yeah I'll be very very sad if mine should ever give up the ghost. Everything on it just feels right. And I've yet to find a new trackball that fits my hand so well.
OS X is not DFSG free. This is a deal breaker for me and many others and a real reason not to use it. You might be willing to give up your freedom for a shiny OS but many of us are not.
That being said Debian runs better on my G3 tower than it would on any X86 machine I could have gotten for the same price.
Yeah you did. It will be interesting to see if you dev types can make us bitchy admin types happy with what just might be a not bad idea. Till then "worse is better".
Yes techincally speaking it is human readable. Just much harder to parse than plaintext. At 0300 hrs with the phone ringing off the hook Warren Zevon oggs on and screaming fuck at the top of your lungs over and over again while trying to get a system up 5 minutes ago while being *sure* that nothing you do could affect another app.
In that situation there are 3 things I can trust. Myself, Vi, and blessed plaintext. Everything else just introduces the chance of errors.
No I was saying that XML created by a config frontend is not portable. This in the sense that if I learn how to configure something using that frontend and with that XML I can not count on it being on the HP-UX box that I get called up to fix. I can count on Vi and plain text config files to be there. Granted it may take me a minute or two to find them but once I do the syntax for a given app is the same and Vi is the same. These are good things when the shit has well and truly hit the fan. Gconf and XML just can't give me that.
Portablity. By using frontends to do things I lose the ability to do those things acrose a wide variety of platforms. OTOH if I know where config files are and/or what they are named and how to hack them by hand I can admin any system that has a given app installed. In a average day I work on RH, Suse, Debian, HP-UX, OpenBSD, and Solaris. Using only tools that I can be almost sure will be on any one of those systems is very important to me and something that I really think should be important to others.
Also I see a trend towards frontends as a slippery slope to a binary only registery. Which means that at 0300 hrs dialed in on a slow modem to a remote machine I'm not going to be able to vim up a config file and hack knowing that there is almost no chance of fucking up something else. I just can't get that kind of a warm fuzzy from some registery like frontend.
I was talking about a "real" firewall. I thought the parent was also. Must have missed something. Yeah if you were calling "personal firewalls" stupid I have to agree.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens if/when Napster goes out of business?
_ go _away/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/04/napster
Yeah. Cause nobody ports free software.
http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/
Assuming that they have written good portable code compiling it for any OS should be pretty easy. See here for why.
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/index.html
And as far as "bugs" go. The debate is basically this. The programs that had date problems during the 2000 rollover were doing exactly what the people who designed and wrote them meant for them to do. That is take two numbers and assume that they should have a 19 in front of them for purposes of determining a date. A bug is when a application does something other than what the people who wrote it meant for it to do. The fact that they never thought that said apps would be in use beyond 1999 and thus did the wrong thing does not make it a bug that makes it a bad design choice. I was not saying that there were not problems and that they did not need to be fixed. I am saying that in a strict sense they were not bugs just badly designed programs. The 2038 problem is once again not a bug. The system and all the applications will be doing exactly what they were meant to do. It will simply be the wrong thing to do if we don't change the system between now and then.
As every true geek knows a bug and doing the wrong thing are not the same thing.
My problem with the freaks statement was that you indicated that geeks choose to be who and what they are that is freaks or non-mundane as I like to say (This is humour something else you seem to be lacking and that most geeks have). I do not think this is true. I think there is a strong component of nature there and that nurture also plays a strong role. But is is IMO *not* a choice as you said it was.
Meh, I was in a hurry and typoed, should have been 2048. My bad. My point being no true geek would define a K as being 1000.
So do you think that Jan 01 2000 was the first day of a millennium?
All real nerds know better than to call it Y2K. Since Y2K would be 2024. So Y2K38 would be 2062. So you would have called the thing that happened 5 years ago the Year 2000 bug and the thing that his coming up the Year 2038 even. This is, of course, becuase 5 years ago it was almost certainly a bug although that point could be debated. And while the year 2038 event might cause problems I can't think of any way it could be called a bug.
You are right about fake nerds. But not, I think, about fake freaks. Although that would be way OT so I won't go into it here.
And yes you have just been shown to be a pouser yourself. Hell you likely even thought Jan 01 2000 was the first day of a new millenium or century or some such bullshit.
So one follows the Unix Philosophy and the other doesn't. I know which I would rather use.
Coupling, nuff said.
Drivers are in the kernel and/or source and you can compile them. As a Gentoo user you compile everything, right?
So WTF do you mean by Gentoo drivers?
I would happily pay say .us $25 a month for a real time BBC feed. Say something like the model HBO and other "premimum" channels here use. I'm not sure what a TV License costs but I'm thinking that would more than cover it.
Hell I'd almost pay that much for a *quality* online feed. And I know I'm not the only one. Seems to me they need to think just a bit out of the box.
Yeah I'll be very very sad if mine should ever give up the ghost. Everything on it just feels right. And I've yet to find a new trackball that fits my hand so well.
No no. A old-skool Logitech TrackMan Marble Wheel is the only pointing device worth having.
apt-get install foo, is too hard for you?
Debian and enough HE can solve all of lifes problems.
Don't use borken OSes?
But this makes a very good IE removal tool.
I've purchased more CDs in the last 6 months after having friends give me oggs of them than I did in the 10 years before that.
The point is you have 2 datapoints. Not enough to draw any conclusions from at all.
DFSG free has nothing at all to do with cost. One of the points of free software is that you can resell it.
s
http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guideline
OS X is not DFSG free. This is a deal breaker for me and many others and a real reason not to use it. You might be willing to give up your freedom for a shiny OS but many of us are not.
That being said Debian runs better on my G3 tower than it would on any X86 machine I could have gotten for the same price.
Yeah you did. It will be interesting to see if you dev types can make us bitchy admin types happy with what just might be a not bad idea. Till then "worse is better".
Good luck.
From where I sit it is "not portable" because I can't know that it will be on any *nix system I have to work with.
Yes techincally speaking it is human readable. Just much harder to parse than plaintext. At 0300 hrs with the phone ringing off the hook Warren Zevon oggs on and screaming fuck at the top of your lungs over and over again while trying to get a system up 5 minutes ago while being *sure* that nothing you do could affect another app.
In that situation there are 3 things I can trust. Myself, Vi, and blessed plaintext. Everything else just introduces the chance of errors.
No I was saying that XML created by a config frontend is not portable. This in the sense that if I learn how to configure something using that frontend and with that XML I can not count on it being on the HP-UX box that I get called up to fix. I can count on Vi and plain text config files to be there. Granted it may take me a minute or two to find them but once I do the syntax for a given app is the same and Vi is the same. These are good things when the shit has well and truly hit the fan. Gconf and XML just can't give me that.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141637&cid=118 67656
Long story short it gimps people who could otherwise learn to be good admins.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=141637&cid=118 67656
Long story short. I'm a Net and sometimes Unix Admin. Not a Linux user. That post explains it in full.
Portablity. By using frontends to do things I lose the ability to do those things acrose a wide variety of platforms. OTOH if I know where config files are and/or what they are named and how to hack them by hand I can admin any system that has a given app installed. In a average day I work on RH, Suse, Debian, HP-UX, OpenBSD, and Solaris. Using only tools that I can be almost sure will be on any one of those systems is very important to me and something that I really think should be important to others.
Also I see a trend towards frontends as a slippery slope to a binary only registery. Which means that at 0300 hrs dialed in on a slow modem to a remote machine I'm not going to be able to vim up a config file and hack knowing that there is almost no chance of fucking up something else. I just can't get that kind of a warm fuzzy from some registery like frontend.
I was talking about a "real" firewall. I thought the parent was also. Must have missed something. Yeah if you were calling "personal firewalls" stupid I have to agree.
It would seem I was OT.
And IMO GConf is evil evil evil. I would not be caught dead using it on any of machines.
Thanks for making my point.