No I'm saying there is a huge difference in terms of costs to society with spam and junkmail. With junkmail senders (advertisers) are much more careful because they spend more per pair of eyeballs. That additional spend creates a presumption that you are not being wasteful. With spam the cost was so close to 0 that the spend didn't act as a natural constraint and so artificial costs, i.e. the criminal justice system needed to be introduced.
Your costs associated with junk mail you receive, pale in comparison to costs for senders. That's the point. They have an incentive not to be wasteful.
And of course it is about economic costs. All crimes are about net cost to society.
Look he was a shit. I don't know when you got on the internet but the actual damage was pretty huge. Prior to 1995 we had an internet where everyone trusted one another, machines were mostly open. Protocols like FTP, rsession, telnet... dominated and machines were by today's standards wide open. All sorts of things would be possible if it wasn't for that whole generation of people who violated trust and brought mass crime to the internet.
That being said, things likely got out of control. He didn't think much of public opinion.
Then he gets involved in something really serious and does a few decades. The next time around given he was a criminal innovator the judges are going to be feeling a lot different.
Well there are statutes that allow you to expunge your record. He sounds like a perfect case. Most states now have a multi year split required to avoid this sort of thing.
4 years in prison, like most suffering, can do a lot to change a person's attitude. Its much harder to see evils you profit from than those you suffer from.
Gentoo IMHO is kind of new school. It took the port idea from the BSDs and moved it over to Linux. Its cool but its old school BSD not old school Linux.
Wow I never used the actual floppies for slack. I used the virtual ones from the CDs. You only need to image the 2 floppies to get your kernel far enough that it could read the CDRom drive. I recognize that structure though. You might have beat me by a few months.
I came in when X worked badly. Getting X to work was the big challenge and I do admit to using a commercial X server because I couldn't figure out the details around 95. That being said I did use linuxconf and it did help some.
As for FreeBSD I tried that off and on all through the 1990s and never could get it to work right.
OK I'll grant most of this as opinion. But no way on this one. Unix tools / scripts work across dozens of platforms over decades. I have stuff I wrote in 1988 that works fine today. I doubt any of my 4DOS scripts from the same time period would even run on windows. Unix command line tools are much more mature. And frankly much more powerful.
All of them have tools to compile a kernel. And who cares if it is out of the box? Working through the kernel configs used to take hours each time and several tries I was thrilled when Alan Cox started releasing good quality out of the box kernels.
RMS has poor personal habits, a lousy voice and a tendency to alienate those closest to him. As a result he's been mocked just like you are doing now for the last quarter century.
That being said I suggest you read his essays from 25, 20, 15 years ago. The man changed the world to fit his vision and has won many major battles. I could list 2 dozen huge issues of computer freedom he's been instrumental in winning. But what he really did was give a vision of freedom to a whole generation.
I agree with you. There is one more difference, we are all 15 years older and things changed. But as an aside: IMHO Gentoo is new school. Ports is taking ideas from FreeBSD and porting them over to Linux in an effective way. You can call Gentoo a old school BSD much more than an old school Linux, even with the choice of kernels. And since BSD ports is now the dominant system for OSX which is the dominant desktop Unix (replacing the.apt based system of Fink), I'd argue that Gentoo may have been a major milestone in what will turn out to be the "final winner" in the package wars.
Your comment about Arch was a good one. I love the move back to rolling releases. I love the idea of opt in for daemons. Though with BSD init scripts I'm a bit flummoxed. Linux was always in the Sys V camp. The vision was from '93 on "a mini Solaris". The first Linux users, like me, were people who would have rather had an Ultra at home but couldn't afford it.... And vanilla packages. I guess I'm not sure what is the advantage of Arch over Slackware?
Image Magick still exists, its still part of many distributions and program very much like it for video, ffmpeg is extremely popular.
Distro maintainers, one by one, drop emacs and vi and less and cat and go
I have yet to hear of a distribution without vi or cat. Emacs is pretty darn standard the only reasons its an option are: a) Its big b) Emacs vs. XEmacs and the compatibility issues which never got resolved. Most distributions still have to support both which is the opposite of the indifference you are talking about.
___
As for 2 years to get a Linux working the way you want:
a) Slackware is still around b) Debian doesn't change all that much, it certainly is usable as a server with no X tools at all and the Debian sources have good options. c) Linux from scratch you can just rerun your configurations
Finally I think you might want to take a look at Free BSD. Wow do you sound like someone who would love port vs. apt or rpm.
One of the things the author misses is the early distributions were more different than one another. I think because he started at a point where Mandrake... already existed. When I started Debian, RedHat and Caldera were the leaders taking over from distributions like Slackware, yggdrasil, LST. They were starting to envision Linux as more than just a better Minix and instead have it start to move into the space of commercial Unixes. What sort of system would Linux be? Those were heady days.
I'd say that RedHat more so than they are given credit for since they've done a 180 on this, was a huge proponent of end user Linux. They really were in my opinion the ones that saw Linux as an operating system for the masses. Caldera was excellent at ease of use, but they wanted to be SCO not Windows (be careful what you wish for). Debian really wanted to be BSD with lots of GPL software. Then '98-9: Mandrake, Corel, Lindows, the Linux for end philosophy became key. There was nothing else in the UNIX world like it, a real vision of a desktop UNIX running on cheap hardware for millions of people. RedHat's vision became the universal vision and what was distinctive about Linux.
At the same time Rhapsody which people weren't talking about as much had the same vision.
I suspect I got to Linux a year or two before the original author. In '95-6 getting X running working right was the real challenge. There was a VGA mode which was reliable but if you wanted better graphics that was based on your graphics card chip set. There wasn't quite as much sharing then. The commercial X servers which ran about $100 were a dream in terms of getting stuff working. Some of the distributions like OpenLinux even included a commercial X server, though I tended to use RedHat, 4.1, 4.2 because their documentation was so good on so many other things.
It was a point where XFree86 had an easy target. They could see exactly what the difference was between the free version and something that people liked a lot more.
My first hard drive was 20m and ran about $2k. I'm looking at a personal 4 disk storage unit which is 16t (5x4 - parity) at about the same cost. That's a million fold increase in storage in under 30 years. Pushing that even further. The most common data interchange was a single 128k 5 1/4" inch floppy, that disk would hold most of a person's actives files the way a student might use a large USB key today.
The only reason people don't have an iTunes like player for their television with thousands upon thousands of high def TV shoes and movies is they don't have the storage yet.
I worked in prepress too. We used a lot of Sun and Ultra and specialized Alpha based RIPs. I didn't have to do a lot of high end color it was volume more than quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Changing the risk / reward judgement is the start of conscience. That's how it develops in children.
No I'm saying there is a huge difference in terms of costs to society with spam and junkmail. With junkmail senders (advertisers) are much more careful because they spend more per pair of eyeballs. That additional spend creates a presumption that you are not being wasteful. With spam the cost was so close to 0 that the spend didn't act as a natural constraint and so artificial costs, i.e. the criminal justice system needed to be introduced.
Your costs associated with junk mail you receive, pale in comparison to costs for senders. That's the point. They have an incentive not to be wasteful.
And of course it is about economic costs. All crimes are about net cost to society.
Look he was a shit. I don't know when you got on the internet but the actual damage was pretty huge. Prior to 1995 we had an internet where everyone trusted one another, machines were mostly open. Protocols like FTP, rsession, telnet... dominated and machines were by today's standards wide open. All sorts of things would be possible if it wasn't for that whole generation of people who violated trust and brought mass crime to the internet.
That being said, things likely got out of control. He didn't think much of public opinion.
Then he gets involved in something really serious and does a few decades. The next time around given he was a criminal innovator the judges are going to be feeling a lot different.
With junk mail:
-- you pay for the paper
-- you pay for the printing
-- you pay for the fulfillment
-- you pay for the postage
You as the sender have a strong incentive to not be wasteful. That's not at all the same as spam.
Well there are statutes that allow you to expunge your record. He sounds like a perfect case. Most states now have a multi year split required to avoid this sort of thing.
4 years in prison, like most suffering, can do a lot to change a person's attitude. Its much harder to see evils you profit from than those you suffer from.
Gentoo IMHO is kind of new school. It took the port idea from the BSDs and moved it over to Linux. Its cool but its old school BSD not old school Linux.
Wow I never used the actual floppies for slack. I used the virtual ones from the CDs. You only need to image the 2 floppies to get your kernel far enough that it could read the CDRom drive. I recognize that structure though. You might have beat me by a few months.
I came in when X worked badly. Getting X to work was the big challenge and I do admit to using a commercial X server because I couldn't figure out the details around 95. That being said I did use linuxconf and it did help some.
As for FreeBSD I tried that off and on all through the 1990s and never could get it to work right.
No the expression cutting teeth is a reference to when a baby's teeth first cut their gums and break through.
and more portable across upgrades
OK I'll grant most of this as opinion. But no way on this one. Unix tools / scripts work across dozens of platforms over decades. I have stuff I wrote in 1988 that works fine today. I doubt any of my 4DOS scripts from the same time period would even run on windows. Unix command line tools are much more mature. And frankly much more powerful.
Really? Wow. Were they using a commercial X server or...?
All of them have tools to compile a kernel. And who cares if it is out of the box? Working through the kernel configs used to take hours each time and several tries I was thrilled when Alan Cox started releasing good quality out of the box kernels.
But all the distributions still allow you to do it including your arch villain: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Kernel/Compile
Methinks you might want to look up "satire".
RMS has poor personal habits, a lousy voice and a tendency to alienate those closest to him. As a result he's been mocked just like you are doing now for the last quarter century.
That being said I suggest you read his essays from 25, 20, 15 years ago. The man changed the world to fit his vision and has won many major battles. I could list 2 dozen huge issues of computer freedom he's been instrumental in winning. But what he really did was give a vision of freedom to a whole generation.
LST?
I agree with you. There is one more difference, we are all 15 years older and things changed. But as an aside: IMHO Gentoo is new school. Ports is taking ideas from FreeBSD and porting them over to Linux in an effective way. You can call Gentoo a old school BSD much more than an old school Linux, even with the choice of kernels. And since BSD ports is now the dominant system for OSX which is the dominant desktop Unix (replacing the .apt based system of Fink), I'd argue that Gentoo may have been a major milestone in what will turn out to be the "final winner" in the package wars.
Your comment about Arch was a good one. I love the move back to rolling releases. I love the idea of opt in for daemons. Though with BSD init scripts I'm a bit flummoxed. Linux was always in the Sys V camp. The vision was from '93 on "a mini Solaris". The first Linux users, like me, were people who would have rather had an Ultra at home but couldn't afford it.... And vanilla packages. I guess I'm not sure what is the advantage of Arch over Slackware?
Very well put and I agree. Those training wheels were invaluable. And Linuxconf and webmin were just about the right level for a Unix user to handle.
Good points. A few nit picks:
Image Magick still exists, its still part of many distributions and program very much like it for video, ffmpeg is extremely popular.
Distro maintainers, one by one, drop emacs and vi and less and cat and go
I have yet to hear of a distribution without vi or cat. Emacs is pretty darn standard the only reasons its an option are:
a) Its big
b) Emacs vs. XEmacs and the compatibility issues which never got resolved. Most distributions still have to support both which is the opposite of the indifference you are talking about.
___
As for 2 years to get a Linux working the way you want:
a) Slackware is still around
b) Debian doesn't change all that much, it certainly is usable as a server with no X tools at all and the Debian sources have good options.
c) Linux from scratch you can just rerun your configurations
Finally I think you might want to take a look at Free BSD. Wow do you sound like someone who would love port vs. apt or rpm.
One of the things the author misses is the early distributions were more different than one another. I think because he started at a point where Mandrake... already existed. When I started Debian, RedHat and Caldera were the leaders taking over from distributions like Slackware, yggdrasil, LST. They were starting to envision Linux as more than just a better Minix and instead have it start to move into the space of commercial Unixes. What sort of system would Linux be? Those were heady days.
I'd say that RedHat more so than they are given credit for since they've done a 180 on this, was a huge proponent of end user Linux. They really were in my opinion the ones that saw Linux as an operating system for the masses. Caldera was excellent at ease of use, but they wanted to be SCO not Windows (be careful what you wish for). Debian really wanted to be BSD with lots of GPL software. Then '98-9: Mandrake, Corel, Lindows, the Linux for end philosophy became key. There was nothing else in the UNIX world like it, a real vision of a desktop UNIX running on cheap hardware for millions of people. RedHat's vision became the universal vision and what was distinctive about Linux.
At the same time Rhapsody which people weren't talking about as much had the same vision.
I suspect I got to Linux a year or two before the original author. In '95-6 getting X running working right was the real challenge. There was a VGA mode which was reliable but if you wanted better graphics that was based on your graphics card chip set. There wasn't quite as much sharing then. The commercial X servers which ran about $100 were a dream in terms of getting stuff working. Some of the distributions like OpenLinux even included a commercial X server, though I tended to use RedHat, 4.1, 4.2 because their documentation was so good on so many other things.
It was a point where XFree86 had an easy target. They could see exactly what the difference was between the free version and something that people liked a lot more.
My first hard drive was 20m and ran about $2k. I'm looking at a personal 4 disk storage unit which is 16t (5x4 - parity) at about the same cost. That's a million fold increase in storage in under 30 years. Pushing that even further. The most common data interchange was a single 128k 5 1/4" inch floppy, that disk would hold most of a person's actives files the way a student might use a large USB key today.
The only reason people don't have an iTunes like player for their television with thousands upon thousands of high def TV shoes and movies is they don't have the storage yet.
I worked in prepress too. We used a lot of Sun and Ultra and specialized Alpha based RIPs. I didn't have to do a lot of high end color it was volume more than quality.