One major problem with CDRWs is that you can't just save/delete a file from a disk, you need to go into a PROGRAM to burn stuff.
This brings about the inevitable confusion of having several thousand psych. and english majors needing to learn a new bit of software just to transport term papers back and forth.
While it wasn't stated in the original post, it should go without saying that whatever solution comes up, it should integrate transparently into the system. You should have no problem saving a word document to the media, nor should you have to go through a major hassle to delete or overwrite files.
...or if RMS had decided to cut the guy some slack 'cuz he wasn't a native speaker of English...
In this conversation, RMS comes off as a senile old man, with a limited vocabulary... unable to comprehend what's said to him until the magic words are said. It'd be like talking to a math professor who refused to answer your questions if you used variables from the Roman alphabet instead of the Greek one he preferred.
I could see RMS being the type of guy at a party would argue the definitions of "today" and "tommorrow" at 12.15 AM. In this case it's obvious that Jorrit's software is Free Software since it's under the LGPL.
Isn't it?
And being that the LGPL is a FSF document, one would assume that by using it on code, that code becomes Free Software. Now, if I call it Free Software, free software, Open Source, open source, free source or Severely Brain Damaged, does it really matter? If it's under the LGPL, you're stuck with the explicit terms of that document.
Re:MacOS X sees Linux as direct competition.
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
There's nothing wrong with saying "MacOS rulez, other system's drool", Linux users do it all the time, BSD users, and the MSFT does as well (although evangelistic Windows users are a rare breed). It's like politics in a way... you don't get ahead by saying "the other guy's just as good, but you should give us your votes/money/time"
Well, if we want to talk about his definitons, there's a couple to look at:
System: An assemblage of objects arranged in regular subordination Linux: He never really explains what he means by Linux, is it the kernel, a minimal running setup, or is it a Distro?
From the defn of System, a system is not a single entity, and by saying that MacOS provides everything an OS needs, it can't be a system. =)
OTOH - while the Linux kernel itself doesn't provide his OS requirements, any full-blown distro provides all the components of an OS, and since they're separate components working together, it IS a system...
This sounds a lot like the way the Plan9 fileserver (at least the one at the lab) is done. The file storage node has a multi-tiered system. Local Disk Cache, Server Disk Cache ( I think the thing has 100+MB dedicated to that), Server Active Storage (several GB of hdds), then Permanent storage (a WORM jukebox, IIRC). Each tier trades and order of magnitude of access time for an order of magnitude of storage, dumping data to the next tier incrementally on some period.
How realistic, and practical it is, who knows, but it sure is cool. Say, do you think talking about a Plan9 network is close enough to mentioning a Beowulf?
Not everyone is involved in a technical field. How much can theater and philosophy students bennefit from this? English and history?
The biggest problem here is the instructors, they won't know how to use these laptops effectively. Either the machines will be ignored, or you'll end up having to computerize everything, and your Lit essays' will be graded as much on your HTML skills or ability to use powerpoint as you are on your reasoning and language.
Not to mention that the time the instructors spend figuring out the new technology, and how to apply it will come out of time that should be spent doing things that directly bennefit the students.
Yes, being able to use a computer is an important skill to have and having them arround is immensely useful, but blindly sticking a computer everywhere is not going to make things better until you have a generation of teachers understand what can be done with them. Until the teachers know what to do with technology, at best, it will be little more than a costly distraction.
Hrmm... Maybe some 'concerned citizen' should send this off to to admin at that college who was trying to control the dorm-rats' use of napster and whatnot. He mentioned in a secondary post that his network was something like 90% broadcast crap from various windows boxen..
But with the number of people graduating w/ CS degrees, and getting other certifications rising as fast it is, if there's a lack of workers worth hiring, it's the fault of the educational system. If they can't hire a new CS grad for an entry level job, then maybe they should start saying "Fix the educational system" and not "Let us ship in foreign workers 'cuz Americans are stupid".
I've talked to plenty of MS employees, and if they're turning down 98% of applicants, there must be some really stupid people out there, cuz anybody in my HS CS class was smarter than, and understood computers better than these guys...
The amusing part here is that, to my knowledge, most CS programs don't really pay much attention to system/network administration. They may cover the internals of the kernel, and the guts of network protocols, but nothing that touches upon setting up, maintaining and upgrading a system designed around these theoretical ideas that they learn.
Hell, most CS students never get taught Unix, it's just something they have to pick up along the way. If they're lucky they'll get a brief lecture in some Intro>CS class on how to use an editor, a compiler, and how to do basic file manipulation.
Since they replaced the VAXen 5-6yr ago, my school hasn't had anything other than Windoze machines (aside from a Sun that ran some EE software) until earlier this year when I put Linux in the lab.
During the instalation, I learned quite a few things about networking and administration, however I don't see how you could manage to teach even a small class of 10-15ppl how to administer a system without giving each of them some project of that scale to work on...
Are we to stand by, and continue to see ourselves opressed and treated as second class citizens, even as the Great Movement moves onward? It is time for us to rise up, and take our place as God's chosen, and put an end to the abomination that is GNU Emacs, once and for all!
Is it really that bad? Computer science was either done by math departments or considered a perk of being an engineering student for years.
And if we hop into the way-back machine, think of all the centuries that mathematics was considered philosophy...
Besides, you can't really justify having a nanotech dept to some admin without having some preexisting body of knowledge to study (and "let's make shit really small" isn't going to get you many grants).
How do you find the time to read at that level? At +3, I find that, even just reading a small fraction of articles, I can spend 1-2hr/day just reading slashdot... The only tme I read down at that level is when I've got mod points, and even then, I try to only do it on young posts, with under about 100 posts.
On the other hand, how about Sun Considers Switching Cobalt to Solaris? Of course, Sun not supporting Linux on their hardware would seem to make it more appealing to RH, whose main business is the support end of things, so RH being in bed with IBM seems more plausable...
This number is, for all practical purposes, meaningless. Keep in mind that, when idling, your CPU load (as measured by uptime(1)) is 0.00, so getting some large number of idle kernels is no big deal. I can assure you that the usefullness of this setup would decrease significantly if someone were to login on all those virtual linux boxen and compile hello world...
For Joe sixpack, I would have to say that there is virtually no difference between CPUs. And asside from frame-rate pissing contests with gamers, nobody cares about +/-3fps when playing UT at 1024x768x24b, and you're already surpassing the refresh rate of the human eye.
I was talking to the owner of the local computer store the other day, and he can't sell anything under 5-600MHz in quantities that make them worth stocking, even to ppl who just want to surf the net, and do a bit of word-processing...
Will Joe Sixpack ever notice the difference between his neighbor's 800MHz and his 1.1G?
Doubtful.
Should they stop making them faster?
Anyone who's ever waited 24-hr to find out they misplaced a decimal point doing some number crunching (I hope I'm not the only one) will gladly say:
Bring it on! - I don't care if they sell them by MHz, MIPS, or by the Oz, just as long as it's faster...
Re:I don't think that's what it says...
on
High-Speed Greed
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· Score: 1
I agree.. it's just about the only post that shows any degree of insight into what the vague new report actually means. All the rest of these posts are reactionary, knee-jerk, anti-big-business bullshit that comes from confusing Slashdot's tabloid-esque yellow-journalism for serious reporting...
AT&T may be greedy, but they're not stupid and they have good lawyers. This is the only approach that:
a) wouldn't piss off consumers
b) would be feasable
and
c) (most importantly) wouldn't piss off the government
The Gnutella idea, at first, seems like a good one, unfortunately, there's one catch to it:
as soon as one person connects to a host/client outside of your LAN (remember, the gnutella network does NOT have a central authority), your precious internalization goes down the drain. Firewalling Gnutella ports, would in essence, be just as bad as what you're trying to avoid (firewalling napster).
Perhaps the simplest way around this would be to write some custom 'internal use only' gnutella-ish program. The simplest solution might just be to use a slightly modified gnutella client that uses a dif. range of ports, and filters out IPs not on your subnet.
Hrmm... I have been looking for a project to do for my Software Engineering class, and this would be a great project... if yr. interested, email me (by Sunday night) maybe we can work something out... =)
And where in the GPL does it say that we can't bitch about RH's actions?
RH has put themselves up as the public mouthpiece of Linux, and to a great extent, it has worked. Most non-geeks who even know of the existance think that Red Hat is linux. Hell, I have a (admitedly age'd) Professor that constantly says things to me about "Linux 6.2", in reference to RH6.2.
As a result of the view that the public has of Red Hat, it is in the Linux community's best interests to make sure that Red Hat doesn't seriously fuck things up. Surely, everyone around here knows that if you want a stable system, you shouldn't ever run a x.0 release of any software. Unfortunately, the public at large will assume that a larger number means a newer, more stable release.
Keep in mind that 'you only get one chance to make a first impression'. When J-Random Luser, who knows of Linux because he's heard about it from somebody he works with, or has seen an article in some glossy computer magazine about it, decides to try Linux for the first time, goes down to the local CompUSA, and drops his $30 on the big, glossy, New, Improved, Red Hat Linux 7.0 since it's obviously better than the copy of 6.2 right next to it on the shelf, and installs it, only to unknowingly run software of questionable stability, and decide that Microsoft was right, and Linux is unstable, unreliable, and full of bugs, it contributes to the negative image of Linux as a whole. </runon>
How is this going to affect the portrayal of Linux in the mainstream computer media? Poorly, at best. Taking things to the point of absurdity, something like this has the potential to undo all the work we, as a community, have done to gain mass-acceptance (or at least acknowledgement) of Linux. This could blow up on the scale of the Pentium FDIV bug, or the MSFT ILoveYou thing, but without the big-money PR departments to spin doctor it, and the massive installed base who's locked into the technology.
"Dell is the Mac of the PC-world". Maybe a lot of the components aren't top of the line, but everything is in a nice easy to deal with package.. Easy open cases, snap-in/out drive rails, Motherboards that have those oh-so-difficult to line-up ports (and the cover plate) mounted on them.
Personally, I'd never buy a Dell for my own personal use, but if I was setting up computers for a large installation, knowing I'd have to maintain them, these things would make my life a lot easier...
Well, if you (as the editors appear to be) are under the (grossly mistaken) assuption that the/. readership is intelligent, resourcefull, and does their research before sumbitting an article, this would have been a rather good thread.
While, in the present climate, where HPA is equated with script-kiddies, and being 31337 is akin to being a witch in colonial Salem, few openly admit it, many hackers (!= Cracker) were, during their younger days hackers (== Crackers). I grew up in a house that had an active pirate BBS running in it, and still remember the day I said "Daddy... what's a blue-box?"
With this in mind, had phrack actually, and finally died, this would fairly significant news.
Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, and ppl don't look at search engines, and the editors don't check up on stories, so we're left to sit around and bitch about it.
Which is almost as much fun as reading actual news.
You're right... 'Messiah' is definately not the right term, however it has been the vehicle by which OSS, as well as the The Cult of Unix, have finally reached the masses.
Perhaps it would be more appropriate to equate Linux with one of the more evangelical disciples, having spread The Word far and wide, and is, as a whole entirely responsible for an influx of life, work, interest and money into the whole OSS world.
Maybe, without Linux, we'd all be running *BSD, or The Hurd would be ready for prime time. However, it's equally likely that we'd all be bitching about MSFT without having any real alternatives; with Unix and OSS being left entirely in the realm of accademia, servers, and engineers' workstations.
Wipe thine ass with the GPL, and grin like a ninny at RMS.
Slashdot Mirror
One major problem with CDRWs is that you can't just save/delete a file from a disk, you need to go into a PROGRAM to burn stuff.
This brings about the inevitable confusion of having several thousand psych. and english majors needing to learn a new bit of software just to transport term papers back and forth.
While it wasn't stated in the original post, it should go without saying that whatever solution comes up, it should integrate transparently into the system. You should have no problem saving a word document to the media, nor should you have to go through a major hassle to delete or overwrite files.
...or if RMS had decided to cut the guy some slack 'cuz he wasn't a native speaker of English...
In this conversation, RMS comes off as a senile old man, with a limited vocabulary... unable to comprehend what's said to him until the magic words are said. It'd be like talking to a math professor who refused to answer your questions if you used variables from the Roman alphabet instead of the Greek one he preferred.
I could see RMS being the type of guy at a party would argue the definitions of "today" and "tommorrow" at 12.15 AM. In this case it's obvious that Jorrit's software is Free Software since it's under the LGPL.
Isn't it?
And being that the LGPL is a FSF document, one would assume that by using it on code, that code becomes Free Software. Now, if I call it Free Software, free software, Open Source, open source, free source or Severely Brain Damaged, does it really matter? If it's under the LGPL, you're stuck with the explicit terms of that document.
There's nothing wrong with saying "MacOS rulez, other system's drool", Linux users do it all the time, BSD users, and the MSFT does as well (although evangelistic Windows users are a rare breed). It's like politics in a way... you don't get ahead by saying "the other guy's just as good, but you should give us your votes/money/time"
Well, if we want to talk about his definitons, there's a couple to look at:
System: An assemblage of objects arranged in regular subordination
Linux: He never really explains what he means by Linux, is it the kernel, a minimal running setup, or is it a Distro?
From the defn of System, a system is not a single entity, and by saying that MacOS provides everything an OS needs, it can't be a system. =)
OTOH - while the Linux kernel itself doesn't provide his OS requirements, any full-blown distro provides all the components of an OS, and since they're separate components working together, it IS a system...
And who's to say that there's not a market for a self hosting version of rogue?
This sounds a lot like the way the Plan9 fileserver (at least the one at the lab) is done. The file storage node has a multi-tiered system. Local Disk Cache, Server Disk Cache ( I think the thing has 100+MB dedicated to that), Server Active Storage (several GB of hdds), then Permanent storage (a WORM jukebox, IIRC). Each tier trades and order of magnitude of access time for an order of magnitude of storage, dumping data to the next tier incrementally on some period.
How realistic, and practical it is, who knows, but it sure is cool. Say, do you think talking about a Plan9 network is close enough to mentioning a Beowulf?
Not everyone is involved in a technical field. How much can theater and philosophy students bennefit from this? English and history?
The biggest problem here is the instructors, they won't know how to use these laptops effectively. Either the machines will be ignored, or you'll end up having to computerize everything, and your Lit essays' will be graded as much on your HTML skills or ability to use powerpoint as you are on your reasoning and language.
Not to mention that the time the instructors spend figuring out the new technology, and how to apply it will come out of time that should be spent doing things that directly bennefit the students.
Yes, being able to use a computer is an important skill to have and having them arround is immensely useful, but blindly sticking a computer everywhere is not going to make things better until you have a generation of teachers understand what can be done with them. Until the teachers know what to do with technology, at best, it will be little more than a costly distraction.
Hrmm... Maybe some 'concerned citizen' should send this off to to admin at that college who was trying to control the dorm-rats' use of napster and whatnot. He mentioned in a secondary post that his network was something like 90% broadcast crap from various windows boxen..
Me, I'm going to bed.
But with the number of people graduating w/ CS degrees, and getting other certifications rising as fast it is, if there's a lack of workers worth hiring, it's the fault of the educational system. If they can't hire a new CS grad for an entry level job, then maybe they should start saying "Fix the educational system" and not "Let us ship in foreign workers 'cuz Americans are stupid".
I've talked to plenty of MS employees, and if they're turning down 98% of applicants, there must be some really stupid people out there, cuz anybody in my HS CS class was smarter than, and understood computers better than these guys...
The amusing part here is that, to my knowledge, most CS programs don't really pay much attention to system/network administration. They may cover the internals of the kernel, and the guts of network protocols, but nothing that touches upon setting up, maintaining and upgrading a system designed around these theoretical ideas that they learn.
Hell, most CS students never get taught Unix, it's just something they have to pick up along the way. If they're lucky they'll get a brief lecture in some Intro>CS class on how to use an editor, a compiler, and how to do basic file manipulation.
Since they replaced the VAXen 5-6yr ago, my school hasn't had anything other than Windoze machines (aside from a Sun that ran some EE software) until earlier this year when I put Linux in the lab.
During the instalation, I learned quite a few things about networking and administration, however I don't see how you could manage to teach even a small class of 10-15ppl how to administer a system without giving each of them some project of that scale to work on...
Jews, Mormans, vi-users!
Are we to stand by, and continue to see ourselves opressed and treated as second class citizens, even as the Great Movement moves onward? It is time for us to rise up, and take our place as God's chosen, and put an end to the abomination that is GNU Emacs, once and for all!
Is it really that bad? Computer science was either done by math departments or considered a perk of being an engineering student for years.
And if we hop into the way-back machine, think of all the centuries that mathematics was considered philosophy...
Besides, you can't really justify having a nanotech dept to some admin without having some preexisting body of knowledge to study (and "let's make shit really small" isn't going to get you many grants).
How do you find the time to read at that level? At +3, I find that, even just reading a small fraction of articles, I can spend 1-2hr/day just reading slashdot... The only tme I read down at that level is when I've got mod points, and even then, I try to only do it on young posts, with under about 100 posts.
On the other hand, how about Sun Considers Switching Cobalt to Solaris? Of course, Sun not supporting Linux on their hardware would seem to make it more appealing to RH, whose main business is the support end of things, so RH being in bed with IBM seems more plausable...
This number is, for all practical purposes, meaningless. Keep in mind that, when idling, your CPU load (as measured by uptime(1)) is 0.00, so getting some large number of idle kernels is no big deal. I can assure you that the usefullness of this setup would decrease significantly if someone were to login on all those virtual linux boxen and compile hello world...
For Joe sixpack, I would have to say that there is virtually no difference between CPUs. And asside from frame-rate pissing contests with gamers, nobody cares about +/-3fps when playing UT at 1024x768x24b, and you're already surpassing the refresh rate of the human eye.
I was talking to the owner of the local computer store the other day, and he can't sell anything under 5-600MHz in quantities that make them worth stocking, even to ppl who just want to surf the net, and do a bit of word-processing...
Will Joe Sixpack ever notice the difference between his neighbor's 800MHz and his 1.1G?
Doubtful.
Should they stop making them faster?
Anyone who's ever waited 24-hr to find out they misplaced a decimal point doing some number crunching (I hope I'm not the only one) will gladly say:
Bring it on! - I don't care if they sell them by MHz, MIPS, or by the Oz, just as long as it's faster...
I agree.. it's just about the only post that shows any degree of insight into what the vague new report actually means. All the rest of these posts are reactionary, knee-jerk, anti-big-business bullshit that comes from confusing Slashdot's tabloid-esque yellow-journalism for serious reporting...
AT&T may be greedy, but they're not stupid and they have good lawyers. This is the only approach that:
a) wouldn't piss off consumers
b) would be feasable
and
c) (most importantly) wouldn't piss off the government
Isn't the GPL infectious enough for you?
The Gnutella idea, at first, seems like a good one, unfortunately, there's one catch to it:
as soon as one person connects to a host/client outside of your LAN (remember, the gnutella network does NOT have a central authority), your precious internalization goes down the drain. Firewalling Gnutella ports, would in essence, be just as bad as what you're trying to avoid (firewalling napster).
Perhaps the simplest way around this would be to write some custom 'internal use only' gnutella-ish program. The simplest solution might just be to use a slightly modified gnutella client that uses a dif. range of ports, and filters out IPs not on your subnet.
Hrmm... I have been looking for a project to do for my Software Engineering class, and this would be a great project... if yr. interested, email me (by Sunday night) maybe we can work something out... =)
And where in the GPL does it say that we can't bitch about RH's actions?
RH has put themselves up as the public mouthpiece of Linux, and to a great extent, it has worked. Most non-geeks who even know of the existance think that Red Hat is linux. Hell, I have a (admitedly age'd) Professor that constantly says things to me about "Linux 6.2", in reference to RH6.2.
As a result of the view that the public has of Red Hat, it is in the Linux community's best interests to make sure that Red Hat doesn't seriously fuck things up. Surely, everyone around here knows that if you want a stable system, you shouldn't ever run a x.0 release of any software. Unfortunately, the public at large will assume that a larger number means a newer, more stable release.
Keep in mind that 'you only get one chance to make a first impression'. When J-Random Luser, who knows of Linux because he's heard about it from somebody he works with, or has seen an article in some glossy computer magazine about it, decides to try Linux for the first time, goes down to the local CompUSA, and drops his $30 on the big, glossy, New, Improved, Red Hat Linux 7.0 since it's obviously better than the copy of 6.2 right next to it on the shelf, and installs it, only to unknowingly run software of questionable stability, and decide that Microsoft was right, and Linux is unstable, unreliable, and full of bugs, it contributes to the negative image of Linux as a whole. </runon>
How is this going to affect the portrayal of Linux in the mainstream computer media? Poorly, at best. Taking things to the point of absurdity, something like this has the potential to undo all the work we, as a community, have done to gain mass-acceptance (or at least acknowledgement) of Linux. This could blow up on the scale of the Pentium FDIV bug, or the MSFT ILoveYou thing, but without the big-money PR departments to spin doctor it, and the massive installed base who's locked into the technology.
"Dell is the Mac of the PC-world". Maybe a lot of the components aren't top of the line, but everything is in a nice easy to deal with package.. Easy open cases, snap-in/out drive rails, Motherboards that have those oh-so-difficult to line-up ports (and the cover plate) mounted on them.
Personally, I'd never buy a Dell for my own personal use, but if I was setting up computers for a large installation, knowing I'd have to maintain them, these things would make my life a lot easier...
Since when has an MCSE been considered an expert at anything?
Well, if you (as the editors appear to be) are under the (grossly mistaken) assuption that the /. readership is intelligent, resourcefull, and does their research before sumbitting an article, this would have been a rather good thread.
While, in the present climate, where HPA is equated with script-kiddies, and being 31337 is akin to being a witch in colonial Salem, few openly admit it, many hackers (!= Cracker) were, during their younger days hackers (== Crackers). I grew up in a house that had an active pirate BBS running in it, and still remember the day I said "Daddy... what's a blue-box?"
With this in mind, had phrack actually, and finally died, this would fairly significant news.
Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, and ppl don't look at search engines, and the editors don't check up on stories, so we're left to sit around and bitch about it.
Which is almost as much fun as reading actual news.
You're right... 'Messiah' is definately not the right term, however it has been the vehicle by which OSS, as well as the The Cult of Unix, have finally reached the masses.
Perhaps it would be more appropriate to equate Linux with one of the more evangelical disciples, having spread The Word far and wide, and is, as a whole entirely responsible for an influx of life, work, interest and money into the whole OSS world.
Maybe, without Linux, we'd all be running *BSD, or The Hurd would be ready for prime time. However, it's equally likely that we'd all be bitching about MSFT without having any real alternatives; with Unix and OSS being left entirely in the realm of accademia, servers, and engineers' workstations.
Wipe thine ass with the GPL, and grin like a ninny at RMS.
http://www.thesatorieffect.com
+1 karma whoring