I meant like a little program that would scan that listing (or a listing from an ftp site), then scan your system, then make a doc that lists all the updates which apply to you. Or downloads them. Or whatever.
I wrote a similar script for Red Hat before the advent of up2date and it worked pretty well.
I guess I just see them as a metaphor for the joint between places, or people rather than a dividing line across any single entity. (Frost once again leaves me with a baffled smile).
You're going to start making me think like an optimist before too long. I still feel like "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" could be about an assassin...:-)
Anyway, I don't want to drag this off course for too long. Thanks for the reply. It's been much too long since I've spent time with Robert Frost (let alone talk with someone about a poem).
You bet. Not your usual/. discussion, eh? Good stuff. I'm going to go read from Frost before bed (I haven't read "Mending Wall" in a long time).
Good fences make good neighbors because they bring neighbors together.
Weird. I always read it as making good neighbors because it keeps the boundaries in place. I saw the walls as being borders which exist to let everyone know where he stands, and so nobody can cause offense by inadvertantly trespassing (for example); walls keep everyone polite. In those places where everyone knows where his trees are, and therefore where his land is, no walls are needed. Meaning that without the distinction of the trees, the walls are needed to define the boundary between the neighbors. Put (yet another) way, the walls remove any possibility of doubt as to were "his" property ends and "mine" begins.
Yeah, the walls bring do them together, but only to put the walls back up. The walls must be repaired, must be there; both neighbors have to keep them up. I see it as borders being important.
Yeah, looks that way. I'm plenty happy without ActiveX.
Someone ought to come up with a way to find out what patches/upgrades you need and make an html doc with the software linked to where everything lives on their ftp site. Does MS still keep a huge ftp site?
It's open source. The author can't specifically proscribe any use and it still be open source.
Yeah, I get ya. I should have amended that a bit. I meant unless they put stipulations in the license (which might not necessarily be a 100% software livre license).
If an agreement with the world's largest superpower isn't going to stop them, how is something in the license?
It might not stop them, but it might allow you to wiggle out of any suspected culpability.
Now, there are closer lines to cross. What about accepting translations from the Chinese? In my role as the one-time maintainer of the GNU Unifont, I accepted Farsi glyphs from some Iranians. A paranoid might want to avoid that.
This is closer to what I was wool-gathering about. You would have a hard time defending yourself against being a "collaborator" if a two-way relationship existed (would commit priveledges in a CVS repository count?).
As long as you act as a software maintainer of civilian software, I can't see a solid case against you, even if you accept translations.
Maybe I'm a fatalist. I just can't get it out of my head that it wasn't very long ago that the US government actually rounded up and imprisoned US citizens purely because of their race. And it wasn't long after that we had the US Congress ruining people's careers because someone said the word "commie". I've just got the USA PATRIOT Act in my head, I guess. Ever since I heard an FBI agent talk about the Act, I've been thinking about political sorts of things in the context of over-reaching government authority.
BUT, you would want our troops to be well trained flying a helicopter if the U.S. or an ally were attacked some day, and needed it for defense eh?
Well, I've leaned more towards a Robert Frost-ish attitude with repsect to defense and the military: good fences make good neighbors. This day and age, a good fence is a capable offensive force. Used to be big walls and a moat and protecting a landbridge. Now it's helicopter and tank simulators.
Personally, I'm all for open source being used for military, as long as the author hasn't specifically proscribed such uses.
Where I think it gets more sticky is if a country like Iraq or Libya or N. Korea (or China?) were using stuff from freshmeat to aid their military. Could the developer be tried for treason? If they didn't explicitly say "Everyone but the following countries can use this software..." or "This software not to be used for military purposes", is that an omission of action which can land them in legal trouble? Remember that in the US you can be put to death for treason during wartime, and aiding the enemy is treason. It sounds far-fetched, but it might not be all that "unpossible" (apologies to George W. on that word).
FIine by me, but you are the one bitching, not me:)
Well, I only have one Windows machine, so there's that. It's nice to download updates from a machine other than the one that needs updating. Every time I use IE I feel like I need to take a shower afterwards.
Try going to that link with Opera. Even Opera in Windows. You get a nice message needing to install IE "in order to use Windows Update". Can't view their web page or get a list of updates with any other browser apparently. So much for HTML being the lingua franca of the Internet.
Actually, its the opposite: if (with emphasis on the if) you run a GUI, you'll generally find Windows (most flavors, including NT 4.0) giving a better user experience (i.e. a faster, more responsive GUI) on older hardware.
I don't know about that. My 166 dual boots to Win98 and it seems pretty pokey. Although I've had that partition around for a long time, and it's probably got fairly severe bit rot. I typically use Blackbox, but occasionally fire up KDE. I swear even with KDE it seems faster.
I had a job a couple years ago that came with a Pentium Pro 150 that ran NT4. I somehow wound up with the hardware, tried Linux on it (like Red Hat 5.2 or something) and noticed a pretty striking difference.
I've got Red hat 8 running on an old cash register (no GUI). It's got a jabber server, apache, mysql, etc. Does really well. NT4 took forever to even boot. And it only has 48 MB of RAM, so that may have been the issue. I did wind up building a very pared-down kernel and that may also explain the difference I see.
It's all pretty subjective. Being able to tweak the kernel and drivers is nice, though. And like you say, with Linux you get the option to not have a GUI running, so that may help older servers.
Having said all that, I must say that old Sun hardware has IA-32 hardware beat cold. I know of a lot of Ultra1s still chugging along. I've even seen Sparc20s here and there. My old Ultra10 still has enough bang for the buck to be usable, even with a GUI. Although CDE always seemed to run as fast on a Sparc5 as on an Ultra80...:-)
Yeah, it does load slow. But I don't deal with many Word docs or Excel sheets. When I know that will need to, I just leave OO running. It should also be noted that I have a lot of RAM in that machine.
Abiword works great too. But my point was that he might be able to get by for a couple more years if he uses Linux instead of Windows on those old machines.
You seen Open Office? Works swell (except for macros). I've got Linux on a P166 laptop and it's not bad at all. I carry iut arouynd more than my Thinkpad A2M. It doesn't get nearly as warm.:-)
If you need to to have those aging PCs there, you might give them a new lease on life with Linux. Just a thought...
When I was in high school we programmed on MS-DOS (both ways in the snow!)
Well, when I was in school, we didn't even have computers. Either way, even without snow. I had a VIC-20 at home, which impressed the chess club and not much of anybody else.
When I went to college, I took with me an Amstrad 8088. w00t. I once wrote a term paper using 'copy con lpt1'. My Hercules monochrome monitor broke.
Some command-line adventures would be good for kids these days.
Agreed. The hot summers in Phoenix plus a new cassette drive for the VIC-20 gave me the wherewithal to write an asteroids-ish game in BASIC at age 14. Many months of hunched over typey typey made me what I am today: a 75 WPM hunt-and-peck typist with strange notions about programming. Kids these days should be so lucky.
I don't get it: Why not pick some existing project and get that off the ground? Why start from scratch when there are lots of Linux games that could use the help getting done (and probably getting wider notice by being "published" in a more formal sense)? I'd personally like to see Parsec get finished.
Having said that, this sounds like it might be a complete turn-off, purely because of the way they are going about it. LGP kinda sounds like they want to make money without making much effort. "You work for free, we'll make money" doesn't come across well, and is an easy forst thought.
I'm all for Linux games as much as the next guy (probably more so; I bought every title Loki put out), but I don't think turning people off to the OSS dev model is how to go about it.
Sorry to say it, but the drivers for my Win2K box and my Linux boxes make it easy to exchange hardware down the road -- or to dual boot now. I know the NVidia drivers aren't "open", but they work for me and have been very stable so far on both operating systems. The NVidia drivers also come out on a fairly timely basis. If I get 20 FPS less on a GeForce than I would with an ATI card which requires endless XFree86 twiddling, I'll keep my GeForce-series card. Maybe even if a Radeon requires no fiddling... I'll still keep my GeForce.
I had an interesting couple years dealing with Linux gaming and 3Dfx cards. I got a little gun shy, and learned to hate compiling X and/or waiting for drivers.
Can any opera users confirm if the style sheets are still messed up ? If they are they I might start subscribing to the conspiracy theory, but really his smacks of a childish attempt to grab attention
I started Opera 6, Opera 7 and IE 5.5 in Windows and grabbed all the stylesheets from http://www.msn.com. Here is what I get:
Opera 7: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site-win-ie6.css"/>
Opera 6: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site.css"/>
MS is still trying to bork Opera users, even though they claim they aren't. And it's not a typo: the stylesheets are very different. If they'd just give all Opera users the same sheet, then everything would be fine. I'd think again about defending MS on this one.
I personally think that there should be more pie fights and fewer lawyers. It's incredible that Opera has the balls to release the bork version. It's one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time and I'm all for it. I'm even paying for Opera 7, even though there isn't a Linux version yet (which I'll also pay for).
Lawrence Livermore's new Linux-based cluter is currently the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world. I can't speak to your experiences, but 11.2 Teraflops,
4.6 TB of memory and 138.2 TB of storage sounds pretty "super" to me. There are many more lesser Linux-based high-end computers as well. Google should give you a nice list.
Trouble is, you haven't seen/worked/heard about everything, so blanket statements like yours are typically what turns out to be blatantly false. Get some facts, and try to stay away from sweeping judgements.
As a certain AC so eloquently phrased it [slashdot.org], it did appear to be a rather cheeky way of posting a tech support request, but hey, if you can get away with it, then go for it. Personally, I think you should have been modded +5 Crafty-SOB:)
Crafty or not, my post really wasn't a thinly veiled tech support plea. I'd been up and down and back and even mapped that road. I pretty much considered my problem unsolvable since there appeared to be a million ways to solve it. I never figured I'd get any kind of answer here I hadn't gotten elsewhere the few dozen times I'd been looking. I'd googled, went through newsgroups, asked on mailing lists, asked friends that do lots of RAID stuff at work, asked folks at a LUG, asked around at school, and -- back to my point -- looked through more than a couple books. I got pretty much different answers every time, like I said, and none of them worked. So you can see where I'd rate my chances of getting an answer on Slashdot to be fairly slim. Besides, I could sneak in a tech suport question much better than that.:-)
Looking back, I could see how you came to think I was trying to get cheap tech support. The trouble is, that I tend to err on the side of giving too much information. It's easy to start making something like that into a bug report. But my post was more of a "Yeah, well, if that tiny book is so great, does anyone know if it can explain this apparently unexplainable mystery? If so, I'm buyin' it..." I bought the book, BTW.
Anyway, the horse has been well beaten by now.
Thankfully, whoever moderated my comment as 'Funny' had the insight to interpret my response in the spirit in which it was intended.
Heh... I get you. I just don't like accusations, and saw your reply as such. Maybe I saw it as questioning my intent (another pet peeve). I dunno. It's really no big deal; it's just a Slashdot post after all.
This does, however, prompt an interesting question. Maybe/. could have a section devoted to technical queries?
That's a good idea, but it might be hard to set up. You'd have to vet the people that did the answering, maybe like Google does it. The whole thing would hinge on the quality and speed of the answers. You might be able to have the people who ask pay a small fee (two bucks? 5? 10?) and then the people that answer get a small kickback, or a Slashdot subscription or discontinued Thinkgeek stuff or karma or something. They could make answering questions like tossing rings onto bottles at the fair: the more you get, the higher up the shelves you get to pick your prize from. Those that wanted to get way into it could, those that pitched in here and there would get a small bennie.
I think it'd work. There are probably lots of folks who see the Slashdot membership as more clueful than most (I'm taking the Fifth on that issue). In any case, it's normally good to have a lot of eyes look at a problem and there are lots of eyes here if nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote a similar script for Red Hat before the advent of up2date and it worked pretty well.
-B
You're going to start making me think like an optimist before too long. I still feel like "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" could be about an assassin... :-)
Anyway, I don't want to drag this off course for too long. Thanks for the reply. It's been much too long since I've spent time with Robert Frost (let alone talk with someone about a poem).
You bet. Not your usual /. discussion, eh? Good stuff. I'm going to go read from Frost before bed (I haven't read "Mending Wall" in a long time).
-B
Weird. I always read it as making good neighbors because it keeps the boundaries in place. I saw the walls as being borders which exist to let everyone know where he stands, and so nobody can cause offense by inadvertantly trespassing (for example); walls keep everyone polite. In those places where everyone knows where his trees are, and therefore where his land is, no walls are needed. Meaning that without the distinction of the trees, the walls are needed to define the boundary between the neighbors. Put (yet another) way, the walls remove any possibility of doubt as to were "his" property ends and "mine" begins.
Yeah, the walls bring do them together, but only to put the walls back up. The walls must be repaired, must be there; both neighbors have to keep them up. I see it as borders being important.
I could be misinterpreting it. But that's art.
-B
Someone ought to come up with a way to find out what patches/upgrades you need and make an html doc with the software linked to where everything lives on their ftp site. Does MS still keep a huge ftp site?
-B
Yeah, I get ya. I should have amended that a bit. I meant unless they put stipulations in the license (which might not necessarily be a 100% software livre license).
If an agreement with the world's largest superpower isn't going to stop them, how is something in the license?
It might not stop them, but it might allow you to wiggle out of any suspected culpability.
Now, there are closer lines to cross. What about accepting translations from the Chinese? In my role as the one-time maintainer of the GNU Unifont, I accepted Farsi glyphs from some Iranians. A paranoid might want to avoid that.
This is closer to what I was wool-gathering about. You would have a hard time defending yourself against being a "collaborator" if a two-way relationship existed (would commit priveledges in a CVS repository count?).
As long as you act as a software maintainer of civilian software, I can't see a solid case against you, even if you accept translations.
Maybe I'm a fatalist. I just can't get it out of my head that it wasn't very long ago that the US government actually rounded up and imprisoned US citizens purely because of their race. And it wasn't long after that we had the US Congress ruining people's careers because someone said the word "commie". I've just got the USA PATRIOT Act in my head, I guess. Ever since I heard an FBI agent talk about the Act, I've been thinking about political sorts of things in the context of over-reaching government authority.
-B
Just a shot in the dark, could be wrong...
-B
Well, I've leaned more towards a Robert Frost-ish attitude with repsect to defense and the military: good fences make good neighbors. This day and age, a good fence is a capable offensive force. Used to be big walls and a moat and protecting a landbridge. Now it's helicopter and tank simulators.
Personally, I'm all for open source being used for military, as long as the author hasn't specifically proscribed such uses.
Where I think it gets more sticky is if a country like Iraq or Libya or N. Korea (or China?) were using stuff from freshmeat to aid their military. Could the developer be tried for treason? If they didn't explicitly say "Everyone but the following countries can use this software..." or "This software not to be used for military purposes", is that an omission of action which can land them in legal trouble? Remember that in the US you can be put to death for treason during wartime, and aiding the enemy is treason. It sounds far-fetched, but it might not be all that "unpossible" (apologies to George W. on that word).
-B
If a developer doesn't like war, then he better put that in the license. Short of that, he has nothing to complain about.
-B
Well, I only have one Windows machine, so there's that. It's nice to download updates from a machine other than the one that needs updating. Every time I use IE I feel like I need to take a shower afterwards.
-B
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.aspx?dis playlang=en
-B
Life's far too short to use IE.
-B
I don't know about that. My 166 dual boots to Win98 and it seems pretty pokey. Although I've had that partition around for a long time, and it's probably got fairly severe bit rot. I typically use Blackbox, but occasionally fire up KDE. I swear even with KDE it seems faster.
I had a job a couple years ago that came with a Pentium Pro 150 that ran NT4. I somehow wound up with the hardware, tried Linux on it (like Red Hat 5.2 or something) and noticed a pretty striking difference.
I've got Red hat 8 running on an old cash register (no GUI). It's got a jabber server, apache, mysql, etc. Does really well. NT4 took forever to even boot. And it only has 48 MB of RAM, so that may have been the issue. I did wind up building a very pared-down kernel and that may also explain the difference I see.
It's all pretty subjective. Being able to tweak the kernel and drivers is nice, though. And like you say, with Linux you get the option to not have a GUI running, so that may help older servers.
Having said all that, I must say that old Sun hardware has IA-32 hardware beat cold. I know of a lot of Ultra1s still chugging along. I've even seen Sparc20s here and there. My old Ultra10 still has enough bang for the buck to be usable, even with a GUI. Although CDE always seemed to run as fast on a Sparc5 as on an Ultra80... :-)
-B
Abiword works great too. But my point was that he might be able to get by for a couple more years if he uses Linux instead of Windows on those old machines.
-B
If you need to to have those aging PCs there, you might give them a new lease on life with Linux. Just a thought...
-B
Well, when I was in school, we didn't even have computers. Either way, even without snow. I had a VIC-20 at home, which impressed the chess club and not much of anybody else.
When I went to college, I took with me an Amstrad 8088. w00t. I once wrote a term paper using 'copy con lpt1'. My Hercules monochrome monitor broke.
Some command-line adventures would be good for kids these days.
Agreed. The hot summers in Phoenix plus a new cassette drive for the VIC-20 gave me the wherewithal to write an asteroids-ish game in BASIC at age 14. Many months of hunched over typey typey made me what I am today: a 75 WPM hunt-and-peck typist with strange notions about programming. Kids these days should be so lucky.
-B
Having said that, this sounds like it might be a complete turn-off, purely because of the way they are going about it. LGP kinda sounds like they want to make money without making much effort. "You work for free, we'll make money" doesn't come across well, and is an easy forst thought.
I'm all for Linux games as much as the next guy (probably more so; I bought every title Loki put out), but I don't think turning people off to the OSS dev model is how to go about it.
-B
-B
-B
-B
I had an interesting couple years dealing with Linux gaming and 3Dfx cards. I got a little gun shy, and learned to hate compiling X and/or waiting for drivers.
-B
-B
I started Opera 6, Opera 7 and IE 5.5 in Windows and grabbed all the stylesheets from http://www.msn.com. Here is what I get:
- Opera 7: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site-win-ie6.css"
/>
- Opera 6: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site.css"
/>
- IE 5: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site-win-ie5.css"
/>
Here's what I get using Opera 6 for Linux:<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site.css" />
For grins, I decided to see what they "normally" give out:
[wee@hostname wee]$ lynx -source 'http://www.msn.com' | grep stylesheet />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://i.msn.com/m/8/c/site.css"
MS is still trying to bork Opera users, even though they claim they aren't. And it's not a typo: the stylesheets are very different. If they'd just give all Opera users the same sheet, then everything would be fine. I'd think again about defending MS on this one.
I personally think that there should be more pie fights and fewer lawyers. It's incredible that Opera has the balls to release the bork version. It's one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time and I'm all for it. I'm even paying for Opera 7, even though there isn't a Linux version yet (which I'll also pay for).
-B
Lawrence Livermore's new Linux-based cluter is currently the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world. I can't speak to your experiences, but 11.2 Teraflops, 4.6 TB of memory and 138.2 TB of storage sounds pretty "super" to me. There are many more lesser Linux-based high-end computers as well. Google should give you a nice list.
Trouble is, you haven't seen/worked/heard about everything, so blanket statements like yours are typically what turns out to be blatantly false. Get some facts, and try to stay away from sweeping judgements.
-B
Crafty or not, my post really wasn't a thinly veiled tech support plea. I'd been up and down and back and even mapped that road. I pretty much considered my problem unsolvable since there appeared to be a million ways to solve it. I never figured I'd get any kind of answer here I hadn't gotten elsewhere the few dozen times I'd been looking. I'd googled, went through newsgroups, asked on mailing lists, asked friends that do lots of RAID stuff at work, asked folks at a LUG, asked around at school, and -- back to my point -- looked through more than a couple books. I got pretty much different answers every time, like I said, and none of them worked. So you can see where I'd rate my chances of getting an answer on Slashdot to be fairly slim. Besides, I could sneak in a tech suport question much better than that. :-)
Looking back, I could see how you came to think I was trying to get cheap tech support. The trouble is, that I tend to err on the side of giving too much information. It's easy to start making something like that into a bug report. But my post was more of a "Yeah, well, if that tiny book is so great, does anyone know if it can explain this apparently unexplainable mystery? If so, I'm buyin' it..." I bought the book, BTW.
Anyway, the horse has been well beaten by now.
Thankfully, whoever moderated my comment as 'Funny' had the insight to interpret my response in the spirit in which it was intended.
Heh... I get you. I just don't like accusations, and saw your reply as such. Maybe I saw it as questioning my intent (another pet peeve). I dunno. It's really no big deal; it's just a Slashdot post after all.
This does, however, prompt an interesting question. Maybe /. could have a section devoted to technical queries?
That's a good idea, but it might be hard to set up. You'd have to vet the people that did the answering, maybe like Google does it. The whole thing would hinge on the quality and speed of the answers. You might be able to have the people who ask pay a small fee (two bucks? 5? 10?) and then the people that answer get a small kickback, or a Slashdot subscription or discontinued Thinkgeek stuff or karma or something. They could make answering questions like tossing rings onto bottles at the fair: the more you get, the higher up the shelves you get to pick your prize from. Those that wanted to get way into it could, those that pitched in here and there would get a small bennie.
I think it'd work. There are probably lots of folks who see the Slashdot membership as more clueful than most (I'm taking the Fifth on that issue). In any case, it's normally good to have a lot of eyes look at a problem and there are lots of eyes here if nothing else.
-B
Done.
-B